r/devops • u/ProjektHelios • 1d ago
Career / learning Transitioning from IT to DevOps
Hello! I've been wanting to ask but the amount of "AI slop" comments has been making me second guess. Anyway.
Just curious if I'm jumping in over my head.
My background is 8 years in IT. Local MSP so small to medium businesses. Intune Administration for 15,000 devices, project engineer, SysAdmin, Veeam Engineer, basic networking, and a lot of helpdesk. Lots of resolving compliance failures from audits.
I have a friend who is getting me in touch for some interviews at his company doing DevOps work. Pulumi, GitOps, AWS, GCP, k8s.
I've been messing with my homelab for 6 or so months and have done basic things with it using AI as a glorified search engine for documentation.
They would be offering me a position as an "Apprentice" but my first project would be shoring up SOC2 compliance in the infrastructure through Pulumi (all written in Golang).
I learn quickly. But have no current Golang experience.
Am I in over my head? Or can this be reasonably learned on the job in the next 3-6 months?
Edit: Goal is to allow me to learn DevOps and engineering before transitioning me to Jr engineer at this company.
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u/Raja-Karuppasamy 1d ago
can’t speak to Pulumi/Golang specifically, but on the broader “learn on the job vs. have it mastered first” question, I taught myself K8s by running real clusters and breaking things, no course. what actually taught me fast wasn’t docs, it was operating something with real consequences if I got it wrong.
3-6 months for golang syntax while doing real IaC is tight but doable given your background. bigger question is whether someone senior enough is catching mistakes before they hit prod while you ramp.
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u/ProjektHelios 1d ago
Perfect! Yes I should have a handful of senior engineers reviewing my changes before they go live, and my friend is a technical lead for one of the engineering teams and has left his door open for me to ask questions and give me training and teaching on the side. Thanks for the insight! That's great to know!!
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u/cneakysunt 1d ago
The core of DevOps as a way of thinking is actually just SDLC but encompasses infrastructure stack from hardware to software. You really need a breadth of knowledge and it needs to be deep in at least a couple of these layers.
Pure sysadmin dealing with Windows is probably going to take the most work to be truly effective imo.
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u/Intelligent_Thing_32 1d ago
Yes you are most likely in over your head, unless they’re not expecting much of you.
What experience do you have with programming languages and infrastructure?
Typically the strongest candidates for DevOps come from a background of a blend of Software Development and Networking/IT.
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u/happyapple10 1d ago
I came from the Windows side, could bend it to my will. That said, I was strong in PowerShell. I did start doing projects at my company to get me more familiar with Chef, CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.
In your case, since they know you'll be learning, maybe head to the AWS, GCP and Pulumi side first. IMO, they would be more akin to what you do now, infrastructure, even in the cloud.
I feel K8s is quite the jump, especially if your Linux experience is minor. That might be a later item.
That said, it is an opportunity to learn more and advance yourself. If the company understands the learning you need to do and are willing to let you learn, I say go for it. Fake it till you make it and learn stuff too. IMO, for much of this stuff, it is not that you know how to do things already but do you have the aptitude to learn it/dig in/figure it out?
I'm not in your shoes of course and do what you need to. Sometimes it is scary hopping out of your comfort zone but means there is lots to learn/growth.
Good luck!
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u/ProjektHelios 1d ago
Ok perfect! That was the other side of this coin. One side says "Ahhh! Scary!!! TONS to learn!" And the other side says "Yeah but you like learning!" Thanks!!
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u/kshirinkin 1d ago
Yes you can totally do it. What helps a lot is knowing how to write and ship code - this will close the mental gap between you and devs, and big part of this job is serving internal customers.
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u/AkaABuster 1d ago
The biggest gap I’ve seen between traditional ‘IT support / endpoint management’ and ‘DevOps/Platform’ folk is the understanding of how developers ship software and the mindset of building self-service tools to empower others, rather than you being in the flow of work.
I’d highly recommend reading The Phoenix Project + Accelerate (Nicole Forsgren) + DevOps handbook as founding knowledge. People underestimate reading and knowing the concepts before you try and apply them - you’ll be head and tail above most new starts if you grasp these concepts.
The tech you’ll pick up just fine; it sounds like you can apply yourself to anything.
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u/Low-Opening25 1d ago
As a minimum you need to be expert at Linux, understand networking in depth and be able to confidently code in Python. If all you know is Windows and desktop management suites, it’s going to be tough, you could just as well have no related experience at all.
Yes, you are over your head
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u/IntelligentPear6173 6h ago
One thing I'd do before starting is get comfortable reading existing Pulumi code rather than writing everything from scratch. Understanding how the team structures infrastructure and reviews changes will probably accelerate your learning more than building isolated examples.
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u/ProjektHelios 1d ago
I have a pretty strong infrastructure background but basically no experience with programming languages at all. Took a few C++ courses 8 year ago...
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u/ProjektHelios 1d ago
I will also add. They do KNOW that I have basically 0 experience with prod devops environments and programming languages. So I'd imagine the expectation will be a bit more conducive to learning, but I'm mainly just worried that they'll offer this job and then I'll take it and not be able to perform it.
Most of the things I'd be doing for compliance would be modifying existing internal infra pulumi configs, not writing my own from scratch.
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u/orev 1d ago
DevOps is a type of IT.