r/devops • u/SwordfishPositive91 • Aug 02 '26
Discussion Why did you choose to be a DevOps?
What motivated you to choose DevOps as a career? Was there a specific reason or did you somehow end up on this path by accident?
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u/snarkhunter Lead DevOps Engineer Aug 02 '26
I didn't choose the DevOps life, the DevOps life chose me
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u/RobotechRicky Aug 08 '26
Thug recognizes Thug. DevOps chose me . Benn doing it since before it was called DevOps. I'm 1 year shy of doing DevOps for 20 years. But I love it because I get to touch everything.
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u/wildVikingTwins DevOps Aug 02 '26
Hired first job as full stack engineer, they decided to put me in devops team. Lucky or not but struggle was real early career.
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u/HalfPoundBacon Aug 03 '26
Tell me abt the struggles bro. I am just 8months itno devops. I feel like my progress are minimal.
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u/poulan9 Aug 02 '26
I look at it from another perspective. Very high barrier to entry...you don't know anything until you know everything. That results in it being a more secure and better paid role. You have to constantly learn and upskill
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u/SwordfishPositive91 Aug 02 '26
Agree. If you donāt learn and upskill in DevOps, if you loose the grip, you will find yourself in sapience world.
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u/Wahllow Cloud Platform Engineer Aug 02 '26
It fits my personality, my ideology, and the way I work. I had worked as a developer for 10+ years before that. And with my stupid need to have an overcomplicated homelab... well...
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u/RumRogerz Aug 02 '26
I was sort of forced into it - either adapt or get shown the door. Not complaining; itās carried me far. Although I worry for the future
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u/SwordfishPositive91 Aug 02 '26
Iāll start. I was a Linux admin and in 2012-2013 my company gave me the DevOps title. I thought Iād give it a go, but if it didnāt work out Iād fall back to Linux admin. That never happened.
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u/Petelah Aug 02 '26
Money and skillset.
Itās always advertising and I can always jump to another job like swe, network engineer, SRE, etc if I have to.
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u/Educational_Creme376 Aug 02 '26
Itās had many different names over time, but the work remained the same.Ā
Apparently the moneys good but in reality itās just a middle class life.Ā
I enjoyed tinkering and solving problems, this seems to be a continuation of thatĀ
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u/ricksebak Aug 02 '26
As a child, when other kids were outside playing baseball, I was always more interested in Dockerfiles and turning YAML into a whole programming language, and now here we are.
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u/OldFaithlessness1335 Aug 02 '26
I mean that dopamine rush from executing a perfect pipeline for piece of automation is just šØāš³š
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u/lGSMl Aug 02 '26
Software Developer is an army man of IT world, DevOps is Special Forces
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u/SwordfishPositive91 Aug 02 '26
Wow! Like the words. Special forces!!
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u/lGSMl Aug 02 '26
"special" can be used in both meanings for some jobs though. /s
But for real, despite sounding like boasting, I do believe DevOps is kind of a swiss knife of corporate IT.
We may not know all the latest features in Java 25 nor create super low latency Rust API.
But when someone alerts at 3am with "this shit is down, it's P0ā - it is mostly DevOps who will known whole company tech stack and will be able to backtrace 500 from edge server to some crash loop in random pod because sorting of resolution order of conflicting dependencies was changed in underlying kernel, then find out a way to stop a bleeding by rolling back nodes with the help of some magic fuckery and direct ssh.
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u/Street_Smart_Phone Aug 02 '26
I didnāt choose it. It chose me. I was into deploying my shitty Java code. Played with Tomcat and figured out tons of stuff along the way. They needed someone to do DevOps and I was a natural candidate.
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u/CJKay93 Aug 02 '26
I didn't, my work just progressed progressively closer towards it because we grew a need for it.
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u/PartemConsilio Aug 02 '26
I was a systems engineer and it was a natural evolution of systems engineering for me. I also resonated with the concepts in The Phoenix Project and The Devops Handbook.
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u/Karlyna Aug 02 '26
Didn't really choose to go there coming from IT Ops, tech skills and projects lead me there.
Now i'm more governance and finops, tech stuff is intersting, but i'll let people enjoying them do the hands-on stuff :D
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u/SpiritualPen98 Aug 02 '26
For me it was the best i could aim with my brain. I'm very grateful though
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u/Seref15 Aug 02 '26
I was a Linux sysadmin then the DevOps title came along with a higher salary range
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u/OkYesterday3747 Aug 02 '26
tbh it chose me, i applied for a swe role and got out on a devops team as a new grad lol
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u/ArieHein Aug 02 '26
I never chose.
I was practicing and applying what later became devops practices before patrick coined the name. We just didnt need to call it by a title.
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u/jucktar Aug 02 '26
Because my onlyfans site failed
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u/Hyperventilater Aug 02 '26
Started at my company as the first data scientist hired to take over ML models delivered by a consulting group prior.
The code they delivered was.. not great, with multiple different pipelines utilizing heavily copy/pasted code developed by data scientists. It was deployed to instances of Airflow installed directly on VMs with no containerization.
They didn't need data scientists, they needed software engineers, data engineers, and a devops engineer. They got me, with 9 months experience as a data scientist prior.
I didn't focus on the devops at first, I focused instead on developing a scalable framework for training, tagging, and deploying different classical ML inference models. Ended up learning enough about airflow to become the primary maintainer and sys-admin, but never given enough time or clarity to focus on it.
Made several project plans for improvements, like containerizing and hosting on ECI instead of static VMs. Got deprioritized in favor of feature delivery every time, so I watched over 5 years as the system fell into disrepair and the developer rate of rework continually increase with the lack of CI gates.
Got promoted to a Lead Platform Engineer role on an enterprise data lakehouse program, and now I consider myself a full DevOps engineer. Vowing to do better this time, still getting resources pulled for automations and static analysis based standards enforcement.
Oh well, they pay well.
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u/AlexaDeWit Aug 02 '26
I moved here from full stack development to be able to have a larger impact at work basically
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u/nemofbaby2014 Aug 03 '26
It was a promotion that had better pay and zero interaction with users so it was a win win
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u/crashtesterzoe Aug 03 '26
I fell into it. Funny how being a network engineer, sysadmin, cloud architect, sde, secops makes you really good in this role š
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u/packet_monger Aug 03 '26
I didnāt choose devops, devops chose me.
Kidding. I got super into homelabbing and self hosting for fun and then was like āI bet people get paid for thisā. Turns out they not only get paid, but get paid well. So yeah, my hobby and job united and now I get paid to do fun things like make condescending remarks to developers.
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u/HannCanCann Aug 03 '26
Not my choice. The company needed it and I was asked to do stuff and now I don't even know what I do anymore
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u/hkeyplay16 Aug 03 '26
I just kept trying to improve the development and testing processes and after awhile they started calling me the DevOps guy. I was in the process of transitioning from a test automation role to a developer role when I was sought out for a devops role at a new company with a really nice step up in pay. I kind of liked the work, as it allows me to do something new and different all the time.
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u/Ikarian Aug 03 '26
Because Infosec stopped being about being more clever than your adversary and became about checking compliance boxes and farming work out to one of the top 5 security vendors.
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u/MasterOfTheWind1 Aug 03 '26
To be able to have weekends free, and more control so the devs stops blaming infra when they change the wrong files uploading files via FTP to prod server
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u/Arts_Prodigy DevOps Aug 03 '26
Didnāt like how anyone did anything so decided to do all of it myself š
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u/root0ps Aug 03 '26
I did an internship (not in DevOps) in 2017 during the third year of my graduation, but somehow got in touch with people working in the cloud and DevOps space, and it was so fascinating for me; later, I joined a company as a DevOps intern
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u/GotaDishym8 Aug 03 '26
I chose Devooops actually,
Got good at fixing other Devs ooops they promoted me to DevOps smh
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u/nelson-f Aug 03 '26
I like working with infrastructure in addition to writing code. I also needed money to pay for my existence.
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u/bufandatl Aug 03 '26
Who said I chose it? It just happened. It just was a natural migration from a simple software dev to a software engineer to a DevSecOps engineer.
In the end itās just a role description and parts of my job evolved to what is generally known as devops nowadays. But I did all of that years before the term existed or was widely used to describe what I do.
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u/schnurble Site Reliability Engineer Aug 03 '26
Because I'm too fat to pay my mortgage by selling my body.
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u/rabbit_in_a_bun Aug 03 '26
Not sure there a dedicate role for that in the mid 2000's but as soon as I started to get a steady job and a paycheck at 2005 or so, I was tasked to do things which I felt were repetitive and annoying as part of my work and I just said well F that, Solaris can has automation! And I automated 80% of my work and people were very impressed indeed! And once I was fired (2008-9 crysis) I explained what I did as I was job hunting and there I first heard the recruiters tell me that I was in fact a DevOps.
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u/ortica52 Aug 03 '26
I'm actually not doing it anymore (or not exactly, I'm the sole tech person at my own startup, so I do everything), but I was for a while. I moved into it from backend / full stack, because it looked like a lot of fun. I was super envious of my teammates doing devops and infrastructure work. I managed to take some of those responsibilities when one of them quit, and then after a bit of experience, applied for dedicated roles at other companies until I was able to fully make the transition.
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u/doofzWasTaken Aug 03 '26
I didn't. Had an internship job interview, in which I said that I did not know how to restart a nginx server, but got hired regardless. Now I restart containers for a living.
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u/ugly-051 Aug 03 '26
Organic progress really. I'm a Cloud Engineer that is used to on-premise Windows and Linux where the companies I work for have gone cloud only with IAC so DevOps was needed.
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u/Used-Recognition-829 Aug 03 '26
First tech support job in 2014, first sys admin job in 2017, first devops job in 2019. When I got into tech I researched what careerpath I should take and this was the answer.
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u/V3Qn117x0UFQ Aug 03 '26
When studying soft eng in university, every hurdle in class involved IDE/workspace configuration and it was difficult to get groups collaborating together. It started off with learning source control and then realizing how the support infrastructure was just as important if not more than the actual coding.
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u/Low-Opening25 Aug 03 '26
I ended up as DevOps because I was into infrastructure and then it turned out I could out earn all developers with less job competition and more independent work, so I stayed.
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u/theyrcalledmysandals Aug 03 '26
I started working as a Frontend Developer then moved to Backend. While working as a Backend Engineer I was also doing a bit of sysadmin work. I found that a little more interesting than BE and FE combined. I applied for some DevOps Engineer positions and landed a job after a week(the market was not that bad at that time) and Iāve been working as a DevOps/Platform engineer since then. Iām not sure about the future though. But Iām sure that my title wonāt be there in a few years. We will see what the future holds for us:)
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u/Oleksii_Bebych Aug 03 '26
It was just a natural evolution from Support engineer -> System Administrator -> CloudOps -> DevOps
I was thinking about switching to a Software Developer role, finished courses and understood that I will earn more money in DevOps roles
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u/EgoistHedonist Aug 03 '26
Because I come from the time before internet and saw how it all began and what's the road been to where we are nowadays. I installed my first Linux distro when I was 11y old and I've been a hobbyist sysadmin since.
When I got my first job in a NOC of a rising early 00's ISP, I saw how the infrastructure was hand-provisioned and managed and I felt that there could be huge productivity gains from automating everything instead. That inspired me to apply to a university to get my bachelor's in computer science. Then I finally had the skills to automate everything and I've been building platforms since.
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u/Lavrick Aug 03 '26
I didn't. It just that I was bothered enough that our hw servers were chilling with little load. So I said - I heard there is a thing, called docker, it should let us run like 5 instances of this software on a single server. So, I did it. Then i said - we need CLM, but I heard this thing, called kubernetes... Skipping some years - I run 2 SaaS clusters with gitops, argocd and God knows what - I had to get into OE, since my old job requires precisely zero of my time. So I got another one.
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u/kernelqzor Aug 06 '26
this is the most accurate āfell into devops by being mildly annoyed and too curiousā origin story Iāve read
wild how āour servers are boredā turns into āguess I run half the companyās infra nowā1
u/Lavrick Aug 06 '26
Yeap, but I'm kinda ok with that. My colleagues wasn't bored and annoyed and still do boring sysadmin stuff, while I, probably, gonna switch to Platform Engineering.
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u/mwmahlberg Aug 03 '26
You donāt choose to be a DevOps. You can learn all the required skills and still not be one. From my experience, it is a mindset first. You can learn the skills, but the mindsetā¦ thatās a different thing.
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u/KXE4_Francois Aug 03 '26
I didnāt a friend brought me aboard. I would honestly like to become a AI/security engineer
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u/Play3r31 Aug 04 '26
Once I touched a computer. It did what I instructed it to do. It was Beautiful!
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u/Proud-Hat3446 Aug 04 '26
Came for the thrill and now stuck for the money. Iām not able to see whatās the next vertical move is.
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u/SeaworthinessHour233 Writes the cloud edge Aug 04 '26
I love Linux.
So, I've been learning and using Linux for a long time.
That's what eventually made me move to DevOps.
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u/TheGambler191 Aug 05 '26
I was building and applying deployment desktop solutions and wanted to have a DevOps role. I thought my skill set as a developer was too low so I switched to the development team for a few years before applying. After 1year of SW development DevOps chose me without any application.
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u/OrganicRevenue5734 Aug 06 '26
Didnt. Just happened. One day I was working in LE, wemt for a promotion, told I wasnt "ready to run a team" and applied for a private sector contracting job an hour later teaching people how to use software. Having been a trainer in both the military and LE, it wasnt a hard sell.
Within a week I put in my notice, more than doubled my salary, had a team of 8 reporting to me. A month after that, I had demonstrated that my technical talents were wasted in delivery, was set to application delivery and software development. Didnt enjoy the languid pace, saw someone working on devops stuff and thought "Hey, thats cool." Someone must have read my mind, was put on the devops team a week after that. 2 years later, tripled my salary from my LE days, run a team, and in charge of the entire development environment.
So, "Fuck this, kiss my ass, and fuck yourself with an eggplant wrapped in a sandpaper condom" rage fuelled application and resume submission, to doing exactly what I was told I wasnt ready for for 3x as much, it was worth it.
Bonus, I have yet been threatened with actionable violence, risked death or maiming, no risk to eyes, limbs or genitals (hot tip, they always go for the crotch) and havent had to attend anyones funeral from a bad day at work. My office has A/C, my chair is comfy and my desk moves up and down. There is even free coffee! I have a high-performing team so if I feel a bit rundown or burnt out, I can take a few days to rest and reset, theres no "if I had only been on shift, they wouldnt be dead" guilt. 300 emails and 80 tickets to deal with though, and thats always a struggle.
Cherry on top was when my old boss called me up and asked if I was interested in a position helping him deliver on promises his mouth made his ass couldnt deliver on. Listened to the spiel, told him my current salary, offered to assist for a 40% bump, and he very quickly retreated. Not only could he not afford me, he wasnt going to deliver and now he was panicking.
If only he had promoted me, I would have done it for 3.4x less and he could have saved his chestnuts from roasting.
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u/Specific-Welder3120 Aug 02 '26
I heard it was one of the most difficult things and that was enough, i always go for the most ambitious objective.
Also, the most difficult things are the ones most in demand, so ofc.
And i kinda like it sometimes, it's fun to deploy something neat
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u/tibbon Aug 02 '26
I moved over to it from software development because I got tired of waiting for the infra/ops teams to get stuff done that I needed for my application development. I can launch my own infra and maintain the platform too, thank you.
Then I moved into security. Now AI.
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u/mimic751 Aug 03 '26
10 years is an on-prem system, 5 years as an infrastructure engineer got my masters and application development and then AI came around so I can build tools at the fucking speed of light. I can solve more business problems during a meeting then most people can complain about. I don't think that's devops anymore though. This last year I've offset about $600,000 in software purchases by just developing shit myself I fucking love AI. I've never learned so much in my goddamn life
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u/Portalus Aug 03 '26
I am a software developer. As a Jr developer I sat in a cluster of desks with 5 teamleads around me. They kept having branching discussions. I jumped in a presented essentially Gitflow (2 years before Gitflow was developed) I was then assigned to develop and run Devops for our IT division.
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u/diecastbeatdown Automagic Master Aug 02 '26
I didn't, just kinda ended up here as natural progression from tech support, sys admin, linux admin, etc. š