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Comment by finaard | Hacker News Reader

Most of my money comes from companies unable to handle even simple setups - and having trouble to find the right people, so I somewhat agree too. But it's mainly an education problem - it's pretty much impossible to find good people with that skillset, but it is possible to find people straight out of University willing to learn.

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I fully agree with you: it is mostly an education problem and you can find people willing to learn right out of univ. Indeed, that is exactly my experience: I successfully onboarded several (carefully selected) junior people into the ops skillset over the years and I have seen them do wonders with customer systems, while enjoying their "ops life", without having fires every day.

The connection of this to the replies above it: I am not sure if this kind of junior people would be easy to retain in a large corporate environment. We certainly can do that in niche consulting.

We're a tiny company doing ops as services for large corporations - with one customer now coming close to a decade. That solves the retaining problem as we have limited exposure to all that big corporation nonsense, and have the option for individuals to go on a vacation in other projects without losing their knowledge in the organisation.

I had the exact same business for 18 years :-) and yes, without corporate nonsense it is easy to retain intelligent people. Cheers

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