Reskilling to become a devops dude could net you $105k+

"If you see a bandwagon,

it's too late."

- James Goldsmith

What about those working in a consulting capacity that is neither development or operations?

how come?

I'm a developer and were it not for reading el Reg, I would not have even heard of DevOps. Is it a real thing?

As for salary embiggenment, that doesn't sound very likely to me. When I was looking for my first job as a programmer, several millenia ago, countless employment agencies tried to persuade me to take lowly paid operations roles as a "way in". How spending all day changing tape reels would help was never explained.

-A.

We need a sign on El Reg

A bit like those "xx days without accidents" signs on building sites, El Reg needs a sign with "xx days without a DevOps article".

Don't bother with more than one digit..

"I .. see a siiiiiign ..." .. <blat>

Sorry, some Scientology chap sneaked in. Dealt with.

It is a big shift for many IT folks

Think about the traditional split between development and systems work. Both have their share of very deep specialist knowledge and siloing, but it usually breaks down like this:

- Developers write code on their own machine or VM, package it up and send it to the systems guys to implement, not knowing or caring how the code operates on real (virtual) production hardware.

- Ops guys are typically developers of automation tools, and that's pretty much it. They focus on keeping the tower of messy stuff developers write functioning.

Now that traditional hardware is being abstracted away, it seems to me that these groups need to meet somewhere in the middle. There's going to be either less work for hardware or data center experts, or it will move to service providers who will squeeze salaries to make their margins work. Similarly, developers will have to learn a little bit about the systems their stuff has to run on to remain useful in the world of offshoring and H-1B replacements of staff. The salary squeeze is definitely happening at both ends, and cloud seems to be the driver. Developers aren't commanding massive salaries anymore for knowledge of a small set of web frameworks (except in startup-land) but developers with a broad base of knowledge will always do well. Similarly, the "EMC guy" or "Cisco guy" or "Windows Server guy" is seeing less of a premium for extremely narrow sets of skills.

I definitely see less of a role for deep specialists on the systems side with software-defined everything coming down the line for most environments. The thing that has to calm down is the hype around DevOps. There are so many tools, frameworks, orchestration layers, ALM products, etc, and so much breathless chatter about it that the core message sometimes gets lost.

DevOooops!!

DevOooops!! Has been around since Babbage's day when his test data did not include the scenario which led to a divide by zero.

You can do it all in your bedroom at home

Just remember to close the curtains.

The cost

Of course, to acquire that increase in salary, you'll have to become comfortable using terms like "reskilling."

In other words, at the cost of your immortal soul.

Reskilling

After exhaustively researching into what DevOps actually is I have reached the conclusion that it's the square root of bugger all. So this article proposes reskilling to get paid a packet for doing bugger all. Sounds like great advice .... to become a consultant.

Monorail...monorail...monorail...

That is all.

> [from the article] breadth of understanding is key

So... the fad has become so big that they're chasing the few people who love broad rather than deep knowledge.

Problem is, these people are born not made. You have to have a whole-system perspective to fit the model... which is why the traditional dev->ops split increases the pool of people who can make a worthwhile contribution in IT.

...Reskilling to become a devops dude...

Sorry, Dudettes. No salary increase for you.

Not for me too -- I'm too old to even consider being called "dude".

$105k means nothing

Unless you put it in context as to what market that pay is in.

$105k could practically be considered minimum wage living in the SF bay area anyway (having just left there on Monday).

Also helps to say what someone in IT that doesn't have "devops" might make in the same market.

I couldn't live off $105k today no way.

Not like that in the Netherlands

Interesting article but sounds out of touch with reality ..... Here in the Netherlands you are lucky to get a job of 45K Euros as developer/devops/etc. Unless you're 175 yours old with 300 years of Cobol and Perl experience. But then you're probably claiming benefits as there are more than 7000 IT professionals unemployed here with half of them older than 50....

You Try It

If Operations is so easy, why is it that it is still a highly paid field of work? My guess would be that it isn't quite as easy as some thing. No, wait, it isn't a guess. It IS difficult. That is why there are specialists who do it. Just like Dev.

dear El Reg

You forgot the whole "up to" $105k +,

and you also forgot the "but wait, you ALSO get... lines".

If you're going to let the US office start acting like a bunch of TV infomercial fuckwits at least get it RIGHT!

Reskilling?

Not necessary. Anybody who has used continuous integration/deployment and some level of automation or configuration management in the past is vastly overqualified for the majority of DevOps positions already. Middle management loves this new buzzword (along with the tearing down of silos [shrinking head count to you and me], becoming agile [sc(r)um!] and doing everything on demand [sold on the idea that cloud is cheaper - though it very rarely is]), but they don't see that there's absolutely nothing new to it, and can't conclusively explain what DevOps means to them anyway. It is even worse than "Cloud" ever was, as far as clear definitions go.

The only reskilling required is brushing up on bullshit bingo and developing a thick enough skin to carry on with business as usual until this hype is replaced by the next big buzzword.

I'm working for a rather large player at the moment, who fell for DevOps and Cloud approx 3 years ago (because cheaper, on demand, blah blah).

Until then, they had infrastructure in a proper data centre, no single points of failure, excellent performance, and most importantly total control over every bit of it.

The the C-level gang demanded a "lift & shift" to the cloud, asap, ignoring all advice that nothing can be put there as is and expected to work the same way. So what's the situation now?

* automated deployment is only semi-automated and regularly fails, because developers are out of their depth doing "infrastructure as code"

* nothing scales, because none of the applications are designed for it

* hardly anything even fails over gracefully

* monitoring is barely good enough to work out retrospectively what might have happened; usually after customers started shouting

* single points of failure all around because they decided they could do without system and infrastucture guys during the transition from in-house to cloud... because that's what the cloud does in some sort of magic way, right?

* sites regularly topple over, because nobody has thought of testing and benchmarking playing a major role in a disaster-free automated deployment process

* team is approximately double the size than it used to be

* it's vastly more expensive than before

* security was not even an afterthought... and now suddenly becomes a big issue and a rather interesting retrofit; infrastructure guys and sysadmins could have sorted out most of it before the migration, but they weren't needed, because "infrastructure as code". Thing is, if you don't understand infrastructure, you cannot code it. And security begins with properly designed infrastructure.

Bottom line: Developers shouldn't (and usually don't want to) do Ops stuff. Ops guys shouldn't (and usually don't want to) do Dev stuff. And management shouldn't try to "streamline" and "synergise" shit and try to "remove silos" where there used to be excellent communication between teams *before* management started waving the DevOps flag and confusing the hell out of most people, especially those who have been working in either development or ops for more than a handful of years and therefore struggle to see the novelty.

Oh, it's not an advert

You too could learn X in your spare time and earn X more money!

So this is a genuine article and not an advert? Please excuse my jaded response, I've been hearing this bullshit for decades.

interesting

I have a keen interesting...

Shortage in made up term shock horror!

Since the whole DevOps thing was only made up by recruitment 'consultants' about 6 months ago it's hardly surprising that there's a supposed skills shortage.

I can say 'cloud' a lot - so far as I can make out that makes me a DevOps ninja. 105K please.

This is recruitment agency marketing tripe masquerading as content; I thought The Register was better than that.

Dev on a budget

That's what this is really about. When you're Ops that also does Dev I'm prepared to bet that 95% of the time it's because whoever you work for is too cheap to employ proper devs. I reckon that I'm "DevOps" which is to say my title is "Systems Administrator", which sounds like Ops to me, but when it comes to what I actually _do_ here, that doesn't mean a damn thing.

I'm responsible for researching things, buying them, installing them, configuring them (which all seems like Ops) but then, when inevitably someone goes "Oh, can it also do this? AndbythewayweneeditbyFriday" hacking together some code to patch in whatever awful thing we've been asked for without spending any money because we haven't got any.

Eh what? - no idea what it is but from above comments I can file under gibberish

And what's Docker, Jenkins and Puppet ?

New names for the UK political parties or kinky sex moves?