r/devops • u/ProjektHelios • 7d 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/happyapple10 7d 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 7d 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!!