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‘DevOps Engineer’ Title Lands in Top 5 of Dice Salary Survey

The position of DevOps Engineer is gaining some serious respect, and with that comes cash.

In Dice’s recently released “2019 Tech Salary Report,” DevOps Engineer now ranks in the Top 5 of all tech salaries, with an average of $111,683. The survey is based on the responses of 10,780 technology professionals conducted between Oct. 22 and Dec. 13, 2018.

It’s the first time that the title of DevOps Engineer has appeared in the Top 5, according to Dice. The one caveat is that the position might not be as popular as the annual salary suggests; rather, more professionals now identify with this position.

What it does mean is that the DevOps Engineer title is now ranked with more established tech titles, including senior leadership positions CEO, CIO, Vice President and Director, with an average salary of $142,063; System Architect, at $129,952; Tech Management, including Strategist and Architect, at $127,121; and Product Manager, at $114,174.

Overall, the average salary for tech workers remained relatively flat year over year. In 2018, the average salary totaled $93,244, a less than 1 percent increase from 2017, when the average salary stood at $92,712, according to Dice.

In an email, Dice CTO Klavs Miller noted that the increasing use and adoption of various cloud-based technologies is pushing enterprises to invest more in DevOps engineers to take advantage of that compute power to develop new apps.

“Many DevOps Engineer job requirements include a heavy focus on the creation of infrastructure as code, essentially transforming operations into the management of codebases that create infrastructure (in cloud services or native cloud infrastructure rather than servers and hardware),” Miller wrote. “We are also seeing and experiencing first-hand that more and more organizations are moving toward having combined development and operations teams around a domain, rather than splitting along traditional functional lines.”

In his email, Miller noted that while there might be few tech pros that use the “DevOps Engineer” title, it doesn’t mean that there’s an actual lack of engineers with the skills to help enterprises with their DevOps projects.

Instead, it’s a matter of looking for talent that might already be there.

“There is probably a shortage of talent that label themselves as ‘DevOps Engineers,’ but employers should look at the skills required by those roles instead,” Miller noted.

“There’s a growing demand for a skill that is still evolving with market trends,” he added. “As an example, DevOps is not nearly as common as its more common sibling, software engineers, but it has become more popular each year according to our salary survey and among employers who are sourcing Dice for these positions.”

The types of enterprises looking for DevOps talent are varied. Right now, insurance company Geico and hardware store giant Lowe’s are each looking for specific DevOps titles, according to Dice.

If private business isn’t your area, the Louisiana Economic Development agency is currently advertising for an entry-level DevOps position.

In addition to specific tech titles, the Dice report shows that several types of programming languages that are now associated with the DevOps discipline are commanding significant salaries in the market.

For instance, those with expertise in Google’s Golang programming language can command salaries of up to $132,827, according to the Dice survey.

A little further down the line, and keeping with Miller’s emphasis on cloud-based technologies driving much of the DevOps conversation, those with knowledge of Amazon’s DynamoDB and Redshift can command salaries of more than $125,000 on average, the study found.

Additionally, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) skills can net a developer an annual salary of more than $122,000.

In his email, Miller noted that it’s difficult to draw a direct line between needs for certain programming languages and the growing popularity of DevOps. The growing reliance on cloud and the types of digital transformation projects enterprises are engaged with now show how the market has shifted.

“There are some assumptions that we can’t confirm, but DevOps shares programming languages with other roles that are also in demand, as employers adopt cloud-based technology and open source becomes more pervasive in companies’ tech stacks,” Miller added.

— Scott Ferguson

February 8, 2019
The Value of ‘DevOps Engineer’ as a Title
Now that DevOps is proliferating in the enterprise (many companies including Disney, Nike and Walmart, for example, are all on the adoption train) the term is starting to creep up more and more in job titles. This is challenging organizations to consider the significance of DevOps Engineer as a role and the value of having someone with “DevOps” in their title on their team. There are steps you can take to ensure that DevOps candidates are the right fit for your company.

When you are looking for someone with “DevOps Engineer” as their title, you are seeking someone who not only has the skills you need to complete technical work but also embodies the DevOps values and mindset. Part of the interview process needs to get at the DevOps culture you are seeking to create. You should ensure that you ask questions such as:
1. What’s the most important business outcome for a DevOps team to deliver?
2. Have you been able to achieve continuous delivery on the projects that you’ve worked on? What were the keys to ensuring that you could deliver that value to the business?
3. What’s the most important character trait for DevOps engineers to have to make sure that the team is successful?
4. How do you ensure that the DevOps team communicates effectively across team boundaries?
5. What’s the most important operational requirements to ensure that you understand early in the process?
The goal of these and other questions is to dig into a candidate’s ability to work across teams, communicate effectively and understand of the full spectrum of DevOps capabilities. Communication skills are core to what we do as a consulting and digital software engineering services firm, so we may have an easier time and more background assessing the communication skills of engineers. But, we’ve seen clients also be successful by combining their typical technical interview process with some additional behavior-based communication questions.

It is also important to understand that being a true DevOps Engineer entails technical capabilities and there are specific tools that need to be mastered if someone claims to be an experienced DevOps Engineer. So, in addition to soft skills and values, it’s important to understand the technology and deployment environment specifics to effectively assess a candidate for such a position. There are big differences in technologies depending on what development technology (Java, Node.js, C#, React, or some combination of all those things) and what deployment environment (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.) you are working with. These differences are critical and must be understood. You should look for candidates who have experience with the tools your organization uses.

It also can be helpful to look for someone who has skills that matches your clients’ needs or the needs of a particular project. In some cases, you may be looking for a pure AWS DevOps Engineer who will work completely in the cloud deploying Node.js applications. In other cases, you may be looking for an engineer who might be skilled with Microsoft technologies for a hybrid deployment (on some cloud, some on-prem) of a .Net core application.

While progress is being made to try and abstract the platform differences, those technologies still require DevOps engineers have a good understanding of the underlying tools and infrastructure that will support the software.

Bottom line: Candidates who seek DevOps positions and self-identify as DevOps Engineers are good candidates for the general set of skills you are looking for, but be sure you have solid technical evaluation in place to ensure that your hard skill requirements are also met.

— Jonathan Fries
December 12, 2018
DevOps Consultant vs. DevOps Engineer: What’s the Difference?
Understanding the roles of a DevOps consultant and a DevOps engineer

Every now and then, every business reaches a tipping point — the point at which it makes more sense to kick off the transformation of any sorts, rather than resist it.

Let’s imagine a situation:

You own a company that has released a groundbreaking application. Marketers and sales did their job, and downloads grow at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, your developers and operations aren’t keeping up with the scale; they cannot upgrade the app and release new features in time. You are afraid customers will lose interest because bugs are too many, and the performance leaves much to be desired.

What can you, a business owner, do to remedy the situation and save your company?

Well, actually you could do many things … (Say, hire more developers and testers to plug the gaps.)

But, after scanning a few articles about DevOps, you determine that’s what can help you:
- Increase application quality.
- Enhance user experience and customer satisfaction rates.
- Improve operational efficiency.
- Step up employee productivity and their KPIs.
- Reduce IT-related costs.
You should quickly hire someone who knows a thing or two about DevOps. But who should you hire? Do you need to reach out to a DevOps consultancy, or should you get a DevOps engineer on your staff?

These may be trite questions if you have been working in IT your entire life. However, for a casual business owner, they are definitely not.

In this article, I will dive into the world of business and will do my best to clarify the difference between DevOps engineers and DevOps consultants.

Who Are DevOps Consultants and DevOps Engineers?

As a starting point, let’s define who DevOps consultants and DevOps engineers are. Are they actually that different?

A DevOps consultant is a certified DevOps professional who is usually hired to resolve a specific issue or to educate employees to use DevOps tools, and who works according to the principles of DevOps.

A DevOps engineer is an in-house tech person trained to implement DevOps practices into IT organizations in a cost-efficient manner and who usually acts according to the design created by a DevOps architect (or provided by a DevOps consultancy).

Basically, the first provides guidance and shares insights about the ways of resolving problems at hand, while the latter is primarily focused on making a specific design work according to the established procedures.

Note: Given that there is a lot of controversy surrounding DevOps and the DevOps transformation process, the roles of participants and the terminology may differ. On top of that, some argue that a separate DevOps role can create a third silo that worsens the silos between Dev and Ops teams.

Who Should a Business Owner Hire?

DevOps is no longer for unicorns only. Tech startups and even small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that want to manage their IT organizations more efficiently can opt for a DevOps transformation.

Businesses that have a specific problem to solve (e.g., achieve faster and higher-quality app updates) are better off hiring a DevOps consultant. That person will assess the situation and provide concrete tips and next steps. Then, the business owner may or may not choose to collaborate with the consultant to implement the required changes.

In the meantime, the necessity to completely overhaul the company’s technology-related processes and practices may encourage the business to establish a separate DevOps role in their IT-organization—a DevOps engineer.

(Some might even consider hiring a DevOps architect to create a design for their organization, and a DevOps evangelist to oversee the cultural transformation.)

Unfortunately, DevOps engineers are hard to find. Not only is a DevOps engineer the second hottest job in the United States right now, but also the controversy about the profession results in ambiguity about what DevOps engineers should and should not do.

While some DevOps engineers can oversee the DevOps transformation from A to Z, including the cultural aspect, others can realistically manage only specific stages of the DevOps life cycle or work with specific tools such as Jenkins, Maven and and Ant.

Bear in mind that most DevOps engineers previously were either developer or system administrators, and that plays a considerable role in their competencies as well.

Therefore, companies must be very specific about what DevOps engineers must be able to do. Otherwise, they risk hiring someone who will not be able to carry it through.

In other words, even if the business owner may be adamant about hiring a DevOps engineer to assist the company’s Dev and Ops teams, they also may end up paying a third-party DevOps consultancy to create a road map for their DevOps engineer to follow.

Bias Against DevOps Consultants

While hiring a DevOps consulting company may be more viable and cost-efficient for most businesses (specifically, small and medium companies), CEOs, CTOs and CIOs are usually biased against DevOps consultants.

They are afraid that:
- DevOps consultants will only burn time off the clock and will not do their best to resolve a company’s issues ASAP.
- They will pay consultants too much, while an in-house employee could do the same job for less.
- DevOps consultants will get access to classified and business-sensitive data and then take advantage of it.
- Consultants will never finish their job and will literally abandon the ship in the middle of a DevOps transformation.
Truth be told, sometimes all of these things really happen. However, it should not dissuade anyone from hiring a DevOps consultant to help their companies do better technology-wise.

Just consider a few factors here:
- Not everybody has the skill to become a consultant. (Do not confuse a consultant with a regular contractor.)
- Consultants’ expertise allows them to provide expert advice with no or little supervision. However, they need time to familiarize themselves with the client’s processes. Only then will they start to add value.
- It is unlikely that DevOps consultants and DevOps engineers do the same work. Consultants are hired to analyze, provide insight and teach. Engineers are there to implement a validated strategy.
- And finally, everybody makes mistakes. Any business should be able to reach out to legal folks to settle things down should any issues arise.
Conclusion

Experienced DevOps consultants and seasoned DevOps engineers are a scarce commodity, and it is entirely up to a business owner to decide who to hire to benefit their enterprise.

For sure, they might not have any technical background. So here a few things they should bear in mind:

Consultants can provide a bird’s eye view of a business. They check what’s right and what’s wrong, provide guidance and teach employees. Oftentimes, they help companies to align their Dev and Ops teams and streamline processes and practices across these teams.

In the meantime, DevOps engineers are all about doing the job properly in a cost-efficient manner. Basically, they establish and support a healthy DevOps environment according to the company’s strategy.

What are your thoughts about DevOps consultants vs. DevOps engineers controversy? Who would you hire if you were a business owner?

— Eugene Duma
October 19, 2018
Does the DevOps Engineer Exist? How Beliefs Can Influence Hiring

Does a DevOps engineer actually exist? That’s a risky subject to broach for a person who specializes in DevOps hiring. To the untrained eye, the easy answer is, Yes. However, to all the so-called DevOps engineers out there, the answer isn’t so cut and dry.

While valid stances around this vary, here are some things to consider when hiring a DevOps engineer and the effects your mindset will have on determining who you choose.

DevOps is not merely a set of tools but a philosophy that brings people together (cue two verses of “Kumbaya”) and structures a set of thinking that promotes personal ownership. This starts by bringing awareness to the consequences of individuals’ actions leading to a shared sense of responsibility toward creating successful products.

Therefore, just hiring one or multiple DevOps engineers is seldom enough. When thinking of these hire(s) as a cure to your lack of DevOps, you are inadvertently hiring for the exact opposite of what DevOps aims to achieve. DevOps is a mindset rather than a set of linear workflows.

It’s a methodology that must flow through cross-functional teams. It starts with your DevOps engineers, that’s for sure, but it does not end there, since the goal is for multiple teams to collaborate effectively toward the same end goal. By keeping your DevOps engineer(s) siloed in a “DevOps Department,” you’re solidifying the silo effect that DevOps was created to eliminate in the first place.

What Exact Change Can We Expect?

So now that you’ve hired a DevOps engineer through your trusty DevOps recruiter, what’s next? We know that just hiring someone with some DevOps skills won’t do the trick and neither will more hiring. The goal is not hire for experience with flashy tools but for technical expertise and enough interpersonal skills to spread a collaborative attitude. You’re looking for help restructuring how your teams collaborate, where everyone is now responsible for the finished product.

When a group of people share this responsibility, a culture of healthy pushback and questioning is formed. Sure, everyone still concentrates on their specialties; however, restructuring everyone’s priorities toward continuous improvement brings a newly shared goal that is usually new to almost all parties involved who have not experienced this before.

Whether you’re a Dev, Admin, QA or even a manager, this healthy questioning helps teams better understand the value everyone contributes. People begin analyzing their own work through a more critical lens and later do so when analyzing their colleague’s work (not always to everyone’s immediate delight). What were once separate departments can now gain a true understanding of what each group contributes.

People begin questioning less on how much weight their colleagues are pulling and more about how their own actions affect the shared end goal which seldom exists before a DevOps mindset is introduced.

Interviewing for the Right Fit

So, can you really categorize this hire as simply a DevOps engineer while they are championing your company’s new work philosophy?

A DevOps hire brings value that is not always tangible but helps mold companies and move colleagues’ priorities in the same direction. It begins with thinking about processes and aggregating everyone toward the greater good.

Technical expertise is much easier to hire. The greater challenge is getting everyone on board with this whole idea of DevOps. Sure, maybe C-level management is bought in, but how do you get your lifelong employees to embrace such a seemingly radical change? This is where an effective interview process can make all the difference in finding the right DevOps engineer.

Considering how communicative a DevOps engineer needs be to bring this change to tech and non-technical groups, a role-play method could help, in which your candidate explains DevOps to a nontechnical team member. It’s not enough to simply grill someone on technical acumen when you can more effectively see how they can make the idea of DevOps tangible to everyone in your company.

If they can only communicate with fellow technical experts, they probably are not the right hire. However, if they can put the effects of DevOps in layman’s terms for other employees, it’s a safe bet they’re right for the job. There’s nothing quite like a real-world situation that could realistically be one of their first orders of business once on the job anyway.

So, What’s Next?

Again, this is not just about a toolset and whether someone has leveraged Kubernetes or AWS. This is about hiring someone who can restructure teams and implement philosophies. There is no such thing as buying DevOps or hiring someone to handle your “DevOpsing”—from setting mutually targeted goals and creating a dynamic of collective responsibility, a DevOps engineer will impact far beyond leveraging Jenkins, especially if this is your company’s first time around the DevOps block.

So, after role-play and trusting your gut feeling on a person, can you genuinely call this an engineering hire? Some may still argue yes; however, this person is doing far more than just bringing technical knowledge. They have seen and helped companies digitally transform and can do the same for you. The best way to start is knowing what you are looking for far beyond a glossy skills matrix on a resume.

— Michael Race

July 5, 2018
DevOps Predictions for the Future
Among the few powerful trends we had experienced in the recent times, one is undoubtedly the adoption of DevOps practices. As we are move closer to 2018, it is becoming more obvious that DevOps is becoming mainstream, with many large organizations getting on board with DevOps.

DevOps Within Enterprises

DevOps is becoming the standard way of working for businesses. Adoption of DevOps within the organization is rising on a broader scale, and businesses are trending toward it.

Enterprises of today are well-aware of the trending technology services in modernizing environments. DevOps is growing its recognition due to changes in complexities of today’s software that lies more in the diverse set of operation systems and platforms. It is less about doing things a particular way and more about moving the business forward and turning technology into a strategic advantage.

DevOps builds upon best practices to help drive enterprise performance in the modern digital economy. It offers organizations a new way to deliver value to their customers quickly. An increasing number of businesses are recognizing the power that DevOps can bring for operational efficiency and overall performance.

DevOps Key Trends

As businesses are trending toward DevOps adoption, let’s look at the changing landscape and key trends in DevOps, along with its trajectory.

Some of the DevOps trends include:
- Many organizations will challenge agile and recognize DevOps as the new ALM methodology.
- Many DevOps automation tools are going to roll up.
- Automation and testing would gain their prominence.
- DevOps Engineers are highest paid IT practitioners today.
- Testing and deployment are done more frequently as Ops people are getting their DevOps knowledge in production for testing and automation operations.
DevOps Predictions

Based on the market so far, here are my predictions for the future of DevOps.

Adoption of Microservices and Containers

Several software enterprises are pushing toward microservices infrastructure. Microservices architect an enterprise solution, independently, over a set of services.

Microservices are best-suited for DevOps due to its features including:
- Isolated nature
- Improvised cycle times
- Well-defined interfaces
- Aligned architecture
Containerization also is growing in popularity. Containers are designed to run one process at a time with minimal deployment, serving as an ideal deployment model. According to one study, 50 percent of enterprises are expected to run containers in production by the end of 2018.

If an enterprise has decided to leverage microservices and containers, it is highly essential to incorporate solutions that support microservices and containers along with traditional application model.

Culture, the Top Prerequisite

Culture is the key differentiator for DevOps. Culture and process are the principal paths for the successful DevOps journey. Culture breaks down the organizational silos and encourages integration across all the groups that need to work together to achieve a great business outcome. Implementing DevOps culture makes an organization achieve success easier. It even enables continuous learning environment that will see bigger benefits.

Notion of Shifting Left

DevOps tools and solutions always prefer to shift left. DevOps orchestration tools automate from end to end, making traceability easier. Activities that are performed traditionally, at the later stages of development and release process, are making a shift to the left of the pipeline. The ultimate goal of it is to recognize issues earlier, along with performance and disaster recovery testing.

Downtime

Adopting DevOps holds a lot of benefits. For one, it enables enterprises to ensure uptime and enhance cadence and quality. High-performing IT organizations employing DevOps practices deploy 200 times more frequently than the low-performing enterprises. Similarly, they also enjoy faster recovery from failure and minimize downtime.

Collaboration of Big Data and DevOps

Big Data and DevOps are together taking a step forward toward the design of predictive analytics. DevOps has now become an expert in automating the process and automating configuration.

Consolidation is Critical

Large and complex organizations are focusing on consolidation and standardization of DevOps processes so as to scale DevOps within the enterprise. A shared and self-service DevOps automation enables end-to-end pipelines. Eventually, consolidation allows reusability, visibility, auditability and security.

Supporting Hybrid

“Hybrid-everything” makes DevOps solutions future-ready to support any tool, application and process in the hyper-hybrid state. “Hybrid” state of existence is achieved for infrastructure, architecture, release pipelines and more.

DevOps Monitoring

Until now, the focus has been on pre-production provisioning. However, more attention is being given to the post-deploy feedback loop. With the application of new architectures including microservices, new monitoring technologies and pricing models are effectively introduced.

Expansion of DevOps Across IT

DevOps is maturing in other areas such as database management, security and testing, all with the goal of application release.

Business-centric Agile

The development methodology approach is becoming more critical to the continuous integration and continuous delivery process.

DevOps Skills

People with DevOps skills are in demand in the industry and expected to proliferate as businesses are witnessing great results from DevOps. Organizations incorporating DevOps training practices are extremely high-functioning. If you aim to build your career in DevOps, below are certain notable skills.

Most common DevOps positions include:
- Site reliability engineer
- DevOps engineer
The core skills of DevOps are:
- Coding skills
- Knowledge of automation tools
- Communication skills
Roles of a DevOps Engineer

Many DevOps developers find interest in deployment and network operations. A core set of DevOps skills includes:
- Ability to code and script using various technologies and tools.
- Close relation with Systems and IT operations.
- Strong base of automation tools and its skills.
- Incremental code testing and deployment.
- Strong focus on data management skills and business outcomes.
Final Words…

DevOps skills will only continue to grow and DevOps is here to stay. Dev and Ops teams are increasingly moving to rapid development and reliable, high-performance services delivery.

DevOps is being adopted by more and more companies, particularly smaller enterprises. Many industries today are keen on incorporating DevOps and its key points into their respective departments. It will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future, by incorporating executives and other business units into it. Companies that utilize DevOps effectively will experience higher innovation and quality and easier adoption to other changing conditions.

Adoption of DevOps enables applications and technology solutions. It power businesses with faster and better quality. Investing in DevOps helps organizations better develop and release software.

About the Author / Sirisha Paladhi

Sirisha Paladhi is a content writer at TekSlate. During her career, she has written many articles on technology innovations.

LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paladhi-sirisha-74987881/
September 25, 2017
DevOps Job Titles Emerging in Enterprise IT Organizations

IT job functions and, by extension, individual titles inside the classic enterprise have been relatively constant. Various hierarchies of developers labored separately alongside IT operations teams that focused mainly on infrastructure. However, the emphasis on continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) within the context of a modern DevOps environment is starting to blur the lines separating who does what inside these organizations. In fact, Phil Guido, general manager of IBM Global Technology Solutions in North America, says new titles such as DevOps engineer and Scrum Master, which better reflect new roles many IT professionals taking on, now are emerging.

At the crux of this shift is the rise of programmable infrastructure coupled with a need for IT organizations to be more agile. Instead of rolling out a few applications and associated updates a year, IT organizations today are being urged by business leaders to roll out more applications and updates at a pace associated more often with web-scale companies than the classic enterprise. Much of that demand emanates from shareholders and Wall Street to accelerate investment in digital business initiatives that generate higher-margin revenue.

To achieve those goals, enterprise IT organizations are trying to emulate as many of the DevOps processes employed by web-scale companies. For example, web-scale companies make extensive use of CI/CD technologies and processes to roll out as many new applications as fast as they possibly can. Overseeing those processes are developers who now are accountable for not just writing but also maintaining the application. The theory is that if developers are held accountable for the quality of the application, they will focus more on making sure that application attains a level of quality. The trick is to empower those developers to own everything from the code itself to the programmatic infrastructure it runs on. Because of that requirement, many of those developers adopted a “cloud first” mentality because deploying applications on a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) eliminated the need for those developers to engage with IT infrastructure professionals altogether.

However, most traditional enterprise IT organizations have a much smaller number of application developers. Every minute those developers are not writing code reduces the number of applications an enterprise can roll out. Because of that issue, many enterprises have been trying to find a way for existing IT operations teams and developers to work together hand in glove.

That requirement, Guido says, is creating a lot of demand for advice from IBM about how to manage DevOps. IBM advises organizations to go slow to ensure they have a few quick successes under their belts before propagating DevOps across the entire organization, he notes. If an organization tries to do too much or move too fast, there’s a good chance that employee resistance to change will only increase. Above all, Guido says, organizations should avoid being too prescriptive in how they define DevOps.

Of course, not everyone agrees that changing job titles is always the best way to go about fostering change. But human nature being what it is within large organizations, some job titles will have to be reclassified to bring about permanent change.

— Mike Vizard

February 8, 2017
What DevOps Skills are Organizations Looking for?
DevOps is a cultural, philosophical and organic approach toward automating workflow and getting products to market more efficiently and effectively.

DevOps engineers are in top demand right now. According to studies by Gartner, 25 percent of top global 2000 organizations will have adopted DevOps as a mainstream strategy by the end of 2016.

DevOps is both a cultural movement and a philosophy … which can make it difficult to define the specific skill set you need a DevOps team to possess in order to function successfully.

Of course, an excellent way to show fluency in DevOps is by earning a DevOps Institute certificate—for example, DevOps Foundation^®.

That being said, there are some “mission-critical” DevOps skills that organizations are searching for pretty universally right now.

1. Experience with infrastructure automation tools and fluency in web languages

Experience with tools such as Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, Docker, Chef and Windows PowerShell DSC as well as fluency in languages including Ruby, Python, Java and PHP are must-have skills for DevOps pros.

Organizations are searching for DevOps candidates who are highly proficient in many of these tools and languages and open to increasing their competencies further when given the opportunity to do so.

2. Expertise in “soft skills”

DevOps evolved as a way to enhance collaboration across project life cycles and connect front-end and back-end professionals on either side of the software development and operations spectrum.

When software developers and operations staff (system engineers, systems admins, DBAs, etc.) collaborate effectively, communicate honestly and work as a cohesive team, the software development life cycle (SDLC) is streamlined, risk factors are mitigated, and projects are completed and deployed with a minimum of bugs, quality defects and glitches.

In addition, it can be useful for organizations to have DevOps specialists on their team who are comfortable in the role of client consultant, able to interact effectively and build positive business relationships with customers while addressing their needs and wants.

Organizations look for DevOps candidates who are skilled in interpersonal communication, with an arsenal of listening, negotiation, problem-solving and team-building skills at the ready.

3. Familiarity with CI (continuous integration) tools

Continuous integration is a DevOps methodology that continually merges source code updates from all developers on a specific software build, notifying the team of any failures in the process.

This offers a real-time window into the developing software system, allowing immediate and constant engagement of all team members throughout the project lifecycle.

CI tools DevOps candidates should be familiar with include CruiseControl, CruiseControl.NET, Jenkins, Bamboo, Hudson, ThoughtWorks’ Go, Urbancode’s Anthill Pro, Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Jetbrains’ Team City.

4. Bonus Skills

Other skills hiring managers are on the lookout for in the DevOps space include:
- Extensive knowledge of software build cycles
- Experience deploying code
- Experience in software architecture
- Familiarity with application programming
- Database management
- System design
Useful experience and certifications include:
- Project Management
- Risk Management
- Scrum Master
The good news is that the industry’s need for DevOps team members with diverse and evolving skill sets is in sync with what DevOps candidates want from their workplace. According to the 2014 State of DevOps Report from Puppet Labs, an atmosphere conducive to learning is a primary component of job satisfaction among DevOps engineers.

About the Author / Robin Borough

Robin Borough is President of Omnikron Systems, Inc., which offers IT and management training and IT staffing services. As an advisor to technology professionals and executives for over 25 years, Robin has built a world-class reputation as a “go to” career strategist in the IT industry, one who’s capable of successfully guiding executives and specialists, at any level, through transition.
August 16, 2016
An Inconvenient Truth about DevOps
In a company’s early stage, the focus is on producing features for the customer. When the focus is tangible value, it’s natural for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup to fill its ranks solely with application developers. But when should a company invest in development operations, and at what level? If it has enough capital to hire four developers, should one of those four be DevOps?

Over the last few years we’ve continued to wrestle with this question. The value from an app engineer was so tangible, but DevOps was something else. Though no visible product was created, DevOps produced many accelerants. Incorporating development operations promised to make the other engineers faster, more effective and happier, but we always feared a sacrifice in features. The decision was similar to setting up robust automation testing—the value accrues, but the upfront cost is a hard pill to swallow.

We did it too late, and learned some interesting things along the way.

The Benefits/Advantages of DevOps

The benefits to incorporating development operations early on are many. As an immediate ROI, DevOps will add a lot of agility to your team by allowing your other engineers (and your quality control team) to focus on what they do best: create your product.

What is interesting is that the role always exists implicitly within your development team, but is more effective when explicit. If added early, this position can accelerate your team. If not added in time, each developer will play the role in part. The biggest difference between the traditional engineering role and DevOps is the context required: It is possible for a DevOps person to not really know the business rules of your system and still add tremendous value. This means anyone skilled in the craft can be put to work, which allows for quicker onboarding.

To better illustrate this, let me start by explaining deeper the importance of DevOps in a startup (and in companies of all sizes, actually). By implementing DevOps practices you will enable quicker product iterations. This is vital for a startup, as much of the success of a new venture depends on meeting release dates and getting new versions of the product in the hands of your users as quick as possible. Also, configuration management (CM) tools provide an inventory of all your software and configurations as a living documentation. Your infrastructure setup will be more predictable, you’ll have a better understanding of your stack. Centralized logging solutions and performance monitoring tools will enhance your monitoring and alerting. In short, investing in DevOps in the beginning yields valued dividends over time as you scale.

How DevOps Has Impacted Our Business

Establishing DevOps deeply improved our release process. We used to release new versions of our product much less frequently, taking 30 to 40 hours per month of a developer’s time. Now we are able to release much more often—at least three times a week. In the past we would barely release three times in the same month! Now it takes just a few seconds of a developer’s time, only requiring the push of a button in our continuous integration/continuous deployment tool (CI/CD) Atlassian Bamboo. Builds are run and the application is deployed continuously to our test environments over the course of a few days. After successful rounds of testing performed by our quality control team, we are then ready to push our new release to the production environment by hitting the little icon named “Deploy.” It is enabling.

This successful implementation of a CI/CD strategy also added much more transparency to our pipeline. Now everyone can see in a central place all the metadata about a release, including what product version is deployed to which environment, what is being deployed and by whom.

Another result we achieved directly with DevOps was agility in setting up our cloud infrastructure. In the old days we would have to log in to our cloud provider control panel and manually spin up new instances, waiting long minutes for them to start only so we could then secure shell (SSH) into them and make all the necessary installations and apply the required settings. Now, we can simply a run a script in Ansible (our CM tool) that sets up an entire environment for us. And since it is much cheaper now to provision and configure new infrastructure, we are now able to create an entire new process for testing new epics completely segregated from our main infrastructure. This has greatly improved our development processes, allowing for more flexibility, speed and control when developing and testing new product epics.

DevOps Excellence

During the past year, we have come across different DevOps professionals and learned a lot about the good, the bad and the ugly DevOps engineer. More importantly, we’ve learned what makes a great one. Topping the list of attributes is extreme attention to detail. Managing an entire infrastructure isn’t easy; it has a lot of moving parts. Being able to not get lost in the details is essential.

A great DevOps engineer also possesses strong process orientation and a passion for automation. To be supportive to the engineering team, he or she needs to understand deeply the current engineering processes and think of ways to streamline and automate them. The questions the DevOps engineer should ask include:
- What is our build process?
- When do we deploy to QA?
- How do we notify the Quality Control team that a new version is ready to be tested?
You need someone who can challenge the enterprise status quo and help to define best practices for developing and deploying systems.

Finally, as happens with the definition of the word, there is no definitive answer on where a DevOps team or individual fit in the engineering organization of a startup. At our company, the DevOps engineers report to the Enterprise Architect, who reports to the CTO. In other organizations we have seen DevOps engineers report to the Head of Infrastructure (who reports to the CTO), or report to the Head of Infrastructure (who in turn reports to the VP of Engineering).

It really doesn’t matter where it fits in your company architecture. First, define your company and vision, then define your org chart. Just remember to include a box for your DevOps engineer from the beginning!

About the Author

Rafael Neves, head of Enterprise Architecture at ALICE, has more than 8 years of experience with technology, having worked in the financial industry both in the sell-side and the buy-side for most of his career. Prior to joining ALICE, he served as head of Engineering at investment advisory startup Monetar. Before that, he was the head of IT Quality & Process of Brasil Plural, engaging in prominent projects such as the technological structuring of the bank’s Broker Dealer in New York. In 2010 he became the head of Algorithmic Trading in the first electronic trading desk in Brazil at Agora CTVM, the leading brokerage house in the Brazilian Exchange which he joined in 2008. Rafael earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.
February 11, 2016
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