Few Perks Of Choosing A DevOps Career

Vinay Agrawal
6 min readMar 5, 2020

Career. That’s a huge word. Isn’t it?

Since your childhood, your mom and dad have been asking you to focus on it. After your boards, you must have been told to make a decision about your career seriously, because your entire life will depend on it. When you graduate from college and finally join an organization, then you get to know there are thousands of career options within your field which you are yet to explore.

Now, this part is a little confusing. Which career option should you choose among them? We can easily suggest you choose DevOps. But again, why DevOps? What are the perks of a DevOps career?

In this blog, we are going to clear all the confusion you have in mind regarding the DevOps career. But first, let us make you aware of what is going on in the field of DevOps currently.

As we know, DevOps is a new culture that many organizations are adopting nowadays in order to accelerate the delivery process. From our blog “See these 3 DevOps Trends 2020 In Action”, you are aware of the fact that DevOps is growing a continued interest in cloud computing, AI and Data Science. But since DevOps is not just a technical shift but a complete cultural shift, going DevOps in one night is something that can never happen. Jonathan Feldman, Chief Investigation Officer of Asheville stated in an article: “Deciding to go to DevOps tomorrow is Big Bang IT, and it just can’t work. You’re introducing way too much way too fast. And if you’re trying to do DevOps for everything, you’ll have people revolt. It’s the right approach for many things, but not everything.” Which is why many organizations are still a bit hesitant about going DevOps.

So, when the situation is such, how can you rely on a DevOps career? Let us look into all the aspects of it once.

Is DevOps a good career choice?

Before starting with this point, we should mention that DevOps is not for everyone. It is not just a skill or technology that you put on your CV, it’s much more to that. Once you decide to take up a DevOps career, you practically become a bridge between the development and the operations team. To do that, you have to be aware of everybody’s activity around you in detail so that you need to contribute to that when it’s required. Also, you need to be a skilled communicator and a skilled listener when you are the connector of two different teams. Also, you need to keep this thing in mind that being a part of a cultural shift, you must be able to confront traditional habits and rivalries in your organization with a positive mindset. If you are not someone who can do all of these, maybe DevOps is not your game!

But, if you have everything that is mentioned above in you, you should definitely give it a try. A DevOps career roams around the development, testing and system administration. And that provides you with a wide range of career options. You can easily get started with your DevOps career as a developer, SysAdmin, QA or a practitioner as long as you are willing to take up new culture shift challenges and learn about new technologies. In a nutshell, you need to be flexible to fit in any bowl.

What are the advantages of a DevOps Career?

A valid question. Before choosing a career path, you will definitely want to know where does it lead you. Is it just good pay? Or there is much more to it?

Well, when it comes to a DevOps career, there is much more than you can imagine. Wonder what they might be? Let’s check out!

  • Continuously evolving practices:

As we know, DevOps is still an infant culture. That’s why it is yet to be exposed to improvements on the basis of technology and new tools. The DevOps trends and predictions speak about the inclination towards automation, microservice architecture and serverless technologies. The future stride of DevSecOps also aims towards a collaboration of IT and security. As the DevOps practices keep evolving, you get to learn new things as well!

  • Ability to create a business impact:

DevOps tends to break down the organizational barriers including product, engineering, development, quality assurance, security, and operations. Hence, it allows you to have an undivided business focus and helps in the continuous delivery of applications and services. In a nutshell, this job role may seem critical but it will let you analyze how exactly your actions have impacted the entire process.

  • Functioning as a weed remover:

We all have seen organizational weeds. Isn’t it? The ones who are not good at their job and don’t have any soft skills either. Only one thing they are good at, to slow down the entire process. Deep down you know that the organization is better off without them, but you can’t do anything about it.

When you are a part of a DevOps team, you can identify them quickly because DevOps culture exposes them. And the best part? After they are exposed, you won’t have to sit around and see them slowing the process down. You will have the authority to take action against them as well!

  • Becoming the best communicator:

As we said earlier, DevOps culture is about creating a bridge between departments. And communication is an obvious key to it. At the production stage, problems like blockage or delay on progression may happen. Many teams get involved from the production to delivery cycle and to make a smooth collaboration between them DevOps team should be functioning enough. Not only this will help you to run the process smoothly, but you will gain the ability to explain critical stuff in an easy way and will turn into the best communicator in most of the rooms!

Does DevOps pay well?

Now, let us come to the main part. The part that interests everyone. Nowadays no one chooses a career path just for knowledge, until or unless it provides you enough to chill with luxury or take a trip at least once in a year. How does a DevOps career take care of that?

In the UK, the salary for DevOps professionals is 20% higher than the rest of the professions of any IT sector. The salary for a DevOps Engineer can range from £55k right up to £130k based on the location and the organization.

Source: itjobswatch.co.uk

A statistic of payscale.com says, in the US a DevOps engineer earns $93,062 per year on average. Check out how these well-known organizations are literally showering dollars on their DevOps engineers:

Skills you must have to be a DevOps Engineer:

You have a brief idea about this one by now we assume. Also, we have mentioned about it in our blog “5 skills to be pinned in your DevOps engineering journal” in detail. In case you haven’t read that, we are mentioning them below once more:

  • Flexibility
  • Security Skills
  • Collaboration
  • Infrastructure knowledge
  • Soft skills

You must have been thinking till now, “Is DevOps job stressful?” Well, if you have these skills already, then it will seem like a cakewalk for you.

Key Takeaways:

If you search the open job positions for DevOps engineers right now, you’ll see a total of 2314 positions open Naukri.com right now. If this is not a good career option, what else is? You are not only choosing a career path here, but you are also being the charge of a cultural shift and responsible to make it work for your organization.

Exactly, take training, pass the certification, and start your DevOps journey with a bash! here is some certification that you can consider for the journey.

But of course, like every other career, this one too has a DevOps career roadmap. You know what we are talking about right?

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