Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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Forgive the linkedin link:

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/junior-devops-engineer-jobs/?c...

No programming experience required (only some minor scripting in shell languages & a reference to education), in fact this job ad reads identically to a sysadmin job from 2014; in the middle of the "sysadmins can't code" zeitgeist, when all developing sysadmins had moved to become devops engineers or whatever.

Copied from the ad:

----8<---- Your tasks:

* Containerization and orchestration of our products for development, testing and production environments designed for cloud and on-premise solutions

* Produce reference architectures and standardize solutions to streamline efficiencies within the business

* Mitigate against Cybersecurity threats by ensuring systems are safe, secure and compliant to best practice recommendations (e.g. CIS Benchmarks, Vulnerability scans and Penetration tests)

Your profile:

* Finished studies in Computer Science or software engineering (Bachelor, Master)

* Proficient understanding of virtualization, containerization and orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Podman)

* Experience working with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins

* Experience of Infrastructure as Code tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Helm

* Scripting knowledge including bash, PowerShell

* English fluently, German is an advantage;

* Improvement-driven, structured and proactive team player, high sense for quality, open minded

* Working in an agile environment (Scrum, Safe)

---->8----

Requiring a Computer Science/Software Engineering degree for a non programming job is a little weird.

The point is coding skills are not required to do the job. Sure it would be nice but if somebody ticks all the other boxes then being good at programming isn't important.

Assuming these are the tools and processes that build and deploy your main product, I don't understand this comment.

Sure, maybe some of the work isn't writing software. But some of it is, and it shouldn't be written by amateurs. Also, they are building these things for people who do write software. It would be hard to produce something that works for them without understanding what they do.

As somebody who does a job like this almost none of it involves writing software. 90% of what you write will be terraform and ansible. The remaining will be 20-50 line bash/python scripts.

Reading code, understanding building and deployment are all useful and required to some extent (especially the latter). But specific programming skills are not required any more than that would be for say a technical writer or network engineer.

I believe you, but I think this experience/job varies pretty wildly. That is, there are organizations where your job does involve writing software that's more than short scripts. If a company chooses "best of breed" for their pipelines, for example, there's quite a lot of integration between SCM, build tools, security tools, deployment tools, and so on. Doing that in a way that serves the end users well isn't always trivial.

Those education requirements almost always go out the window or can be ticked by passing Cisco certifications or something else vocational. (speaking from experience)

What I'm trying to drive home here is that you do need programming experience to be a good sysadmin/devops/platform; back when devops as a job title was becoming "a thing"(tm) I was told over and over again that sysadmins couldn't code and thus we need devops.

Now it seems devops don't need to be able to code (which you seem to think as well). So we will come up with a new term to cover programmers who understand systems.

You kidding? A German university CS M.Sc. degree is very different from a Cisco certification.

I guarantee I can get that job with no degree.

Those "degree" sections are universally optional, they're always listed by I have never seen them honoured.

I'd put $20,000 down on the wager that I could get that job with only a Cisco certification (or even nothing at all).

You probably can.

But the criticism was that the job ad was not requiring knowledge of how to write code, and I was pointing out that the degree requirement (strict or not) indicates that that's not true.

If you don't have the required degree but can demonstrate equivalent skills, then that's fine. Kudos to the company about being flexible on the formalities side.

I think you misunderstand.

There is a line that is universally ignored in job ads. This is that line.

if I showed no ability to write a for loop or a linkedlist. I could still get that job.

I see it time and time again, it's like we must add that line to job descriptions, but it's never checked, never verified and ultimately it serves no purpose. There will be no difference between someone with a BSc in CompSci, an MSc in CompSci or no degree at all.

The thing that will get you that job, likely, is discussing how http works, how tcp works and perhaps something to do with exit codes.

My experience with sw eng job interviews is very different and I've been interrogated quite intensely about data structures, design patterns, computer architecture internals, and have done the same on the other side of the table many times. It brings a good perspective on whether the candidate knows their way around the box and has a deep understand of what happens inside it. And I also appreciate if my colleagues know how an L2 cache works, what an RB tree is and what's good and bad about microservices. Whether that's been acquired through a university degree or through self-learning or experience on the job, I don't care though.

Might not be true for this particular posting.

If I'm interviewing person A and person B, all things being equal, I'll go for the one that has a degree on CompSci (or equivalent). That's it. It's not that difficult. Obviously if person A doesn't have a degree but knows much more (based on the tech interview) than person B who has one, I'll go for person A.

Be aware that this is a german job listing.

The only european country that takes titles even more serious is Austria. So without a M.Sc. in CS or a similar M.Sc. your chances may be quite low to even get an interview. Especially since university is basically free here so many people have a B.Sc. or M.Sc. in germany.

Sure, I work for a German company though.

No BSc or MSc here.

I have a computer science degree and barely mention it in my resume because it’s just one of those “checkbox” things that doesn’t actually matter. At my current job I’m not sure anyone even knows that I have one from a decent school. it’s just credentialism. you don’t need a CS degree to be a good systems engineer. It can help you solve weird problems, and IMHO it allows me to think about certain things from a very particular lens a lot better than others, but you absolutely do not need one.

> The point is coding skills are not required to do the job.

I’m sure this is the case in some places. This can’t be farther from the truth in many others. At every organization I’ve been a part of, the best “DevOps” on the team was usually the person who was the best at coding, or at least understood it the best - and coding is one of those things that you can’t really understand well if you don’t do a lot of it.

Any by the same token the best developers have a good understanding of Ops. Often these will be the Senior ones and in some cases they built the platform before Ops people were hired.

But plenty of developers only have a vague picture of what production looks like especially in a complex environment. However they are perfectly able to do their job okay and produce working code.

In my experience they also don't want to have the computer make a api call and wake them up at 3am.. but are happy to let the DevOps guys take that sword.

Being great at DevOps means lots of Production experience. The level of experience required to go from thinking about working software (code) to running software (Production) is immense. That's why it is so hard to level up DevOps talent in the current dichotomy. In a silo DevOps engineers won't run enough software to understand their customers (the engineers in your org).

Yeah, a lot of JD reads like that, but hey why would anyone be proficient in these skills without dev exp? Or they are already a devops anyway.

Proficient understanding of virtualization, containerization and orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Podman) Experience working with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins

> Finished studies in Computer Science or software engineering (Bachelor, Master)

That typically entails programming experience, especially in Germany.

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