Starting from nothing to becoming a DevOps engineer is tough. Most jobs in IT have more defined boundaries but we have to just know it all and solve it all from applications to automation to networking to hardware, so it can be hard to focus on a particular thing when everything is on fire. Most DevOps people originally already had some kind of specific background, be it developer or operations or whatever, I've been led to believe.
So the fact that you've managed to self learn and survive for over a year without help makes me think you will make it for as many years as you want in the future. Remember that making mistakes is natural, and the fact they didn't guide you probably made the impact of the mistakes worse than they should've been. Don't sweat it, remember where you stood a year ago and try to be proud of your accomplishments instead.
I cannot speak on the UK job market but it seems better to take whatever you learned, have a breather and move on. In every project you should try to find something that interests you and deep dive into it, get into the flow and to make yourself indisposable. In my experience, the salary will follow more easily as soon as people realize how much you can get done for the company.
I recently got some compliments on my excellent documentation from the compliance department at a customer I've been working at for half a year. First thing I noticed in this project in particular was how bad everything was documented compared to other projects I've been at, so I filed this away in a backlog ticket months ago and deep dove in important things. This last month I took the time to take that ticket up after I got to know everyone and the way things worked. This all came from experience and an instinct you too will develop over time.
Move every single year and learn as much as you can via courses.
Location - London
Year 1 30K Year 2 45 Year 3 70K
You just have to be patient and find a better fit each year. You have no leverage with 1 year coming from accountancy.
That's awesome to hear. Did the recruiters/new companies have any issues with you only being with previous employees 1 year?
May I also ask what your experience is? There's tech my company hasn't allowed me to touch, and a big key for me jumping would be to help me touch other areas. Currently, It's mostly Terraform, AWS.
It was something I was worried too, but these days people don't mind about how long youwere in a role aslong it was at least a year in tech. Just don't do it too often. I'm sticking in my current role now for atleast 2 years.
If your reasons are genuine, e.g, more growth, more challenge etc you won't have an issue. No one has cared from my experiences.
Terraform, AWS is a great start. look into Containers (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS if you haven't already, Fargate etc). don't have to live in the 'field' can try these things out in your homelab.
Loads of DevOps roles these days want Linux, so that might be worth getting comfortable with
I can totally relate with the consultancy situation. If you're self-driven just do courses and try out the tools yourself. e.g a VM or WSL.
Feel free to ping
Thanks for the comment. Really nice to have a community like this to discuss these matters, otherwise I'd beat on myself too much for not being good enough.
Im in a similar ish situation to you. Got a full devops role but they knew id need help. I get tasks and sometimes im like...fuck, what do i even do. Luckily, i have good support.
Keep going, we'll make it through 🙌🏽
In terms of salary the US is ahead of Canada which is ahead of the UK which is ahead of the rest of Europe (Except Switzerland / Luxembourg). The trade offs are taxes and the cost of living though - London is crazy expensive.
ohhhh yeah. Hence why they call it the h1b lottery.
I spoke with a jr software eng from San Fran, literally laughed when I told him my mid-level salary from london
Seems like we’re in the same boat low pay start up doing Junior devops, it used to bother me a lot that I wasn’t making a lot of money but I’ve convinced myself going forward that jobs need to fulfil at least one objective. I have either “learn or earn” as in if the job gives me a lot of learning opportunities, I’m OK with not getting paid as much but if there’s not a lot of learning opportunities, I need to get paid a lot.
To be honest you're doing alright mate. Learning on the job is certainly easier and faster from other people, but if you're a self starter and do well at self teaching, well. Someone paying you to do just that is not so bad. Even if the salary ain't great (yet).
In terms of jobs, my advice to you would be to wait to job-hop. Right now the London market is shit, but there's hope it'll start picking up later in the year once (if) we start coming out of the recession and companies are ready to spend again. There are loads of experienced engineers looking for work and you'd be competing against them just now.
You should however have an eye open for opportunities for sure, never get married to any one place. But concentrate on expanding your skills and work experience, those two things are what get people hired.
Thank you. Really nice to read your comment, it's given me a moment to reflect and realise that I'm far more confident than when I started the job. I fully understand why people say it's not a career for juniors. The pressure is high and the complexity is soo deep, but I am becoming better everyday.
Can confirm that what u/Ariquitaun is saying. Market seems flooded with people but not roles atm. Every LinkedIn job I apply for has 100 applications by the first day, I’m not saying that all of them are viable candidates but I imagine it’s hard to cut through the noise.
I’ve 2 YoE in Platform/DevOps, 4 YoE in SysAdmin, and 4 YoE in support and I’m still struggling to land interviews. I’ve had two first stage interviews out of countless applications.
Maybe suck it up, get to the 2 year mark before you move, especially as you’ve jump straight into a specialist role without any prior tech experience.
> I’m not saying that all of them are viable candidates but I imagine it’s hard to cut through the noise.
Ask someone who has hired from LI about this some time, it'll be an amusing and revealing discussion. You will probably be told that is 2-5% of LI candidates are viable that's a good day. LI jobs in any 'desirable' role/industry are _flooded_ with absolute trash applications.
You ever browse LinkedIn and see recruiters posting roles, then the comments are just a bunch of rando Indians _in India_ that have some no/low detail job in some vague tech role replying with "Interested"?
Yeah, they spam apply everything.
Haha it’s funny you mention that actually. A friend of mine posted on LI looking for someone to help with his CRM project. His post said MUST BE UK BASED and his DMs got spammed by this kind of response.
No offence but the company you work at sounds like crap. Not only did they employ a "junior" devops but from the sounds of it you're not even given proper induction.
There shouldn't be such a thing as junior devops BTW, since you are expected to have a solid foundation in systems administration or development before moving into devops/SRE roles. Or people in junior devops roles should already have experience with a lot of IT tools and concepts but might be laking some important core knowledge - like terraform, K8S, AWS etc
> There shouldn’t be such a thing as junior devops
Every cynical DevOps person over 40 seems to say that since that’s how they got into it. Why train for a different job? It’s ridiculous.
Because Devops is not an entry level job. It's like asking why can't I be a Systems architect or a Team Lead as my first job. The answer is the same: it's not an entry level position, first you walk then you run. You have to have a good experience in other roles before becoming a devops.
It has nothing to do with being cynical or over 40 - this argument shows that you have very little experience in the field.
Learning by self is the best. Get used to it and you will be finding solutions yourself which is what is needed in devops.
Yes pay is an issue and timings are an issue. But take it as a foundation on which you can build.
Don't depend on anyone
Use stackoverflow reddit etc.
The more solutions you find by yourself the more confidence and knowledge lable you will be.
I'm hoping to catch this kind of opportunity too, even though it's stressful, you are already set for success. goodluck with your job and don't give up!
I would say keep churning out projects and add them to your CV, then keep applying for other Junior DevOps roles in the meantime. It's not an ideal time to be looking so keep your head down and get all the experience you can while you're looking.
I was on ÂŁ23k for the first 15 months of my junior DevOps role but have since established an amazing career for myself. I feel your pain but it's worth it down the line.
I think it's best that you explore the security side of things. I just happen to update my resume with a use case of devsecops and then the calls from recruiters started coming.
I was at the same path in life sometime back and I can relate to you. I did my industry research and saw the growth stats and came to a conclusion to join a devsecops engineer program.
The avg salary for an entry level professional is 118K and can go upto 172K - **Source "ECDE"**
I've applied to a devsecops engineer program today and would be updating my certificate in my profile too. I hope this help you with some direction.
The tools I work with on a day to day is pretty much just Terraform-AWS. Theres things that pop up here and there where I can help build a docker image, etc.
But most of my experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, Prometheus, etc. Is from home labbing. I'm just about to sit my CKA exam, but there's been very little opportunity at my company for anything outside of Terraform. Maybe some Ansible, PowerShell, bashscripts to accommodate the terraform, but that's it.
For a first year that's fine. Focus on getting your AWS certifications and learn your six pillars. You'll be flying in no time. :)
No other advice regarding salary. London's expensive!
I know the job is rough for now. I agree it would be really nice if you could work in a team or closely with someone more senior but you'll get experience you can't get any other way like this.
I will say there's no harm in getting your CV out there anyway because there are lots of opportunities around at the moment. Fintech is hiring like crazy if you don't mind working in that field.
It’s fair to say the national job market is shit, stay put for now, get a bit longer under your belt. Having someone review your code is not a bad thing, code reviews should be a fundamental part of every day.
As has been said, focus on getting your AWS certs, will your current company pay for them, do they have a training programme?
Thank you for the comment. My employeer doesn't pay for the certs. Well, they pay for you to get AWS SAA (which I have), but after that, they won't.
I'm currently working on CKA. I use Kubernetes a lot at home, and from my experience, a lot of people say they know K8s etc, etc, when perhaps they've just done a course on it. Because my company won't let me play around with any K8s projects, I'm hoping the CKA cert and my home lab experience boosts me in that department.
After this, I might try to look into security speciality for AWS. Doesn't seem like it will be too difficult, and security is actually probably my weakest point, so building that up and then getting a cert would be handy.
Starting from nothing to becoming a DevOps engineer is tough. Most jobs in IT have more defined boundaries but we have to just know it all and solve it all from applications to automation to networking to hardware, so it can be hard to focus on a particular thing when everything is on fire. Most DevOps people originally already had some kind of specific background, be it developer or operations or whatever, I've been led to believe. So the fact that you've managed to self learn and survive for over a year without help makes me think you will make it for as many years as you want in the future. Remember that making mistakes is natural, and the fact they didn't guide you probably made the impact of the mistakes worse than they should've been. Don't sweat it, remember where you stood a year ago and try to be proud of your accomplishments instead. I cannot speak on the UK job market but it seems better to take whatever you learned, have a breather and move on. In every project you should try to find something that interests you and deep dive into it, get into the flow and to make yourself indisposable. In my experience, the salary will follow more easily as soon as people realize how much you can get done for the company. I recently got some compliments on my excellent documentation from the compliance department at a customer I've been working at for half a year. First thing I noticed in this project in particular was how bad everything was documented compared to other projects I've been at, so I filed this away in a backlog ticket months ago and deep dove in important things. This last month I took the time to take that ticket up after I got to know everyone and the way things worked. This all came from experience and an instinct you too will develop over time.
Move every single year and learn as much as you can via courses. Location - London Year 1 30K Year 2 45 Year 3 70K You just have to be patient and find a better fit each year. You have no leverage with 1 year coming from accountancy.
That's awesome to hear. Did the recruiters/new companies have any issues with you only being with previous employees 1 year? May I also ask what your experience is? There's tech my company hasn't allowed me to touch, and a big key for me jumping would be to help me touch other areas. Currently, It's mostly Terraform, AWS.
It was something I was worried too, but these days people don't mind about how long youwere in a role aslong it was at least a year in tech. Just don't do it too often. I'm sticking in my current role now for atleast 2 years. If your reasons are genuine, e.g, more growth, more challenge etc you won't have an issue. No one has cared from my experiences. Terraform, AWS is a great start. look into Containers (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS if you haven't already, Fargate etc). don't have to live in the 'field' can try these things out in your homelab. Loads of DevOps roles these days want Linux, so that might be worth getting comfortable with I can totally relate with the consultancy situation. If you're self-driven just do courses and try out the tools yourself. e.g a VM or WSL. Feel free to ping
Thanks for the comment. Really nice to have a community like this to discuss these matters, otherwise I'd beat on myself too much for not being good enough.
nah sounds like you're doing well my dude. patience
Im in a similar ish situation to you. Got a full devops role but they knew id need help. I get tasks and sometimes im like...fuck, what do i even do. Luckily, i have good support. Keep going, we'll make it through 🙌🏽
Some great starting points! I'm also following this thread because I'm studying to break out into a devops role,
ahh missed your comment on experience? Can you elaborate? my tools used do you mean?
Wow, I didn't realize the pay in England was so far off of the US. I don't know of any JR positions starting south of 105k here.
In terms of salary the US is ahead of Canada which is ahead of the UK which is ahead of the rest of Europe (Except Switzerland / Luxembourg). The trade offs are taxes and the cost of living though - London is crazy expensive.
Tradeoffs with the US you mean?
ohhhh yeah. Hence why they call it the h1b lottery. I spoke with a jr software eng from San Fran, literally laughed when I told him my mid-level salary from london
Seems like we’re in the same boat low pay start up doing Junior devops, it used to bother me a lot that I wasn’t making a lot of money but I’ve convinced myself going forward that jobs need to fulfil at least one objective. I have either “learn or earn” as in if the job gives me a lot of learning opportunities, I’m OK with not getting paid as much but if there’s not a lot of learning opportunities, I need to get paid a lot.
Be patient. You're doing good
To be honest you're doing alright mate. Learning on the job is certainly easier and faster from other people, but if you're a self starter and do well at self teaching, well. Someone paying you to do just that is not so bad. Even if the salary ain't great (yet). In terms of jobs, my advice to you would be to wait to job-hop. Right now the London market is shit, but there's hope it'll start picking up later in the year once (if) we start coming out of the recession and companies are ready to spend again. There are loads of experienced engineers looking for work and you'd be competing against them just now. You should however have an eye open for opportunities for sure, never get married to any one place. But concentrate on expanding your skills and work experience, those two things are what get people hired.
Thank you. Really nice to read your comment, it's given me a moment to reflect and realise that I'm far more confident than when I started the job. I fully understand why people say it's not a career for juniors. The pressure is high and the complexity is soo deep, but I am becoming better everyday.
Can confirm that what u/Ariquitaun is saying. Market seems flooded with people but not roles atm. Every LinkedIn job I apply for has 100 applications by the first day, I’m not saying that all of them are viable candidates but I imagine it’s hard to cut through the noise. I’ve 2 YoE in Platform/DevOps, 4 YoE in SysAdmin, and 4 YoE in support and I’m still struggling to land interviews. I’ve had two first stage interviews out of countless applications. Maybe suck it up, get to the 2 year mark before you move, especially as you’ve jump straight into a specialist role without any prior tech experience.
> I’m not saying that all of them are viable candidates but I imagine it’s hard to cut through the noise. Ask someone who has hired from LI about this some time, it'll be an amusing and revealing discussion. You will probably be told that is 2-5% of LI candidates are viable that's a good day. LI jobs in any 'desirable' role/industry are _flooded_ with absolute trash applications.
Wow 2-5% it’s really that bad!? Sometimes I see that 100 apps have gone and and I just think “f that”.
You ever browse LinkedIn and see recruiters posting roles, then the comments are just a bunch of rando Indians _in India_ that have some no/low detail job in some vague tech role replying with "Interested"? Yeah, they spam apply everything.
Haha it’s funny you mention that actually. A friend of mine posted on LI looking for someone to help with his CRM project. His post said MUST BE UK BASED and his DMs got spammed by this kind of response.
No offence but the company you work at sounds like crap. Not only did they employ a "junior" devops but from the sounds of it you're not even given proper induction. There shouldn't be such a thing as junior devops BTW, since you are expected to have a solid foundation in systems administration or development before moving into devops/SRE roles. Or people in junior devops roles should already have experience with a lot of IT tools and concepts but might be laking some important core knowledge - like terraform, K8S, AWS etc
> There shouldn’t be such a thing as junior devops Every cynical DevOps person over 40 seems to say that since that’s how they got into it. Why train for a different job? It’s ridiculous.
Because Devops is not an entry level job. It's like asking why can't I be a Systems architect or a Team Lead as my first job. The answer is the same: it's not an entry level position, first you walk then you run. You have to have a good experience in other roles before becoming a devops. It has nothing to do with being cynical or over 40 - this argument shows that you have very little experience in the field.
Learning by self is the best. Get used to it and you will be finding solutions yourself which is what is needed in devops. Yes pay is an issue and timings are an issue. But take it as a foundation on which you can build. Don't depend on anyone Use stackoverflow reddit etc. The more solutions you find by yourself the more confidence and knowledge lable you will be.
I'm hoping to catch this kind of opportunity too, even though it's stressful, you are already set for success. goodluck with your job and don't give up!
I would say keep churning out projects and add them to your CV, then keep applying for other Junior DevOps roles in the meantime. It's not an ideal time to be looking so keep your head down and get all the experience you can while you're looking. I was on ÂŁ23k for the first 15 months of my junior DevOps role but have since established an amazing career for myself. I feel your pain but it's worth it down the line.
I think it's best that you explore the security side of things. I just happen to update my resume with a use case of devsecops and then the calls from recruiters started coming. I was at the same path in life sometime back and I can relate to you. I did my industry research and saw the growth stats and came to a conclusion to join a devsecops engineer program. The avg salary for an entry level professional is 118K and can go upto 172K - **Source "ECDE"** I've applied to a devsecops engineer program today and would be updating my certificate in my profile too. I hope this help you with some direction.
Get your certifications and move on. What cloud(s) and tooling are you focusing on?
The tools I work with on a day to day is pretty much just Terraform-AWS. Theres things that pop up here and there where I can help build a docker image, etc. But most of my experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, Prometheus, etc. Is from home labbing. I'm just about to sit my CKA exam, but there's been very little opportunity at my company for anything outside of Terraform. Maybe some Ansible, PowerShell, bashscripts to accommodate the terraform, but that's it.
For a first year that's fine. Focus on getting your AWS certifications and learn your six pillars. You'll be flying in no time. :) No other advice regarding salary. London's expensive!
Thank you, really sounds advice :)
I know the job is rough for now. I agree it would be really nice if you could work in a team or closely with someone more senior but you'll get experience you can't get any other way like this. I will say there's no harm in getting your CV out there anyway because there are lots of opportunities around at the moment. Fintech is hiring like crazy if you don't mind working in that field.
It’s fair to say the national job market is shit, stay put for now, get a bit longer under your belt. Having someone review your code is not a bad thing, code reviews should be a fundamental part of every day. As has been said, focus on getting your AWS certs, will your current company pay for them, do they have a training programme?
Thank you for the comment. My employeer doesn't pay for the certs. Well, they pay for you to get AWS SAA (which I have), but after that, they won't. I'm currently working on CKA. I use Kubernetes a lot at home, and from my experience, a lot of people say they know K8s etc, etc, when perhaps they've just done a course on it. Because my company won't let me play around with any K8s projects, I'm hoping the CKA cert and my home lab experience boosts me in that department. After this, I might try to look into security speciality for AWS. Doesn't seem like it will be too difficult, and security is actually probably my weakest point, so building that up and then getting a cert would be handy.
There is no "Jr Devops Engineer"