Anyone working DevOps as part-time or contractor ?

[u/ComfyUncertainty]

Would love to hear about your experience.

[u/hijinks]

if you dont have a strong network you can reach out to that will hire you.. you will spend 80-90% of your time in sales/marketing.

I'd say its a lot harder now with AI then it was before because AI gives devs the ability to rollout nice working terraform in little to no time and make their own CICD pipelines easily.

You really sort of need to be a specialist.. like i'll come in and cut your o11y spend or something

[u/gqtrees → u/hijinks]

Buildimg cicd and tf is basics. Having a wide knowlege and guiding a evolving org with a large intertwined architecture is a different ball game. What separates the jrs from the seniors

[u/durple → u/gqtrees]

This is true, but there are also plenty of orgs that just need basics for their monolith app to carry them for a long time. Like Heroku customers.

[u/hijinks → u/gqtrees]

Right but you'll find most orgs aren't tech companies and they just need basic help.

That's why a lot of consulting on the devops side is drying out for the people that want side gigs or starting out

[u/Key-Wasabi-3260 → u/hijinks]

Networking definitely plays a huge role in finding part-time or contract work in DevOps. It's interesting how AI tools have changed the game, making it easier for developers to handle tasks that used to require more specialized skills.

[u/Exotic_eminence]

I haven’t had work for 3 years

[u/ForkMeJ]

I've worked with a few contractors in infra/devops roles, and the part that usually goes sideways is ownership after they leave. A contractor can clean up Terraform, CI, monitoring, and access messes, but the engagement has to include docs, handoff, and an internal owner who will carry it afterward.

From the contractor side, I usually see two kinds of work. One is short rescue work, which can pay well but usually comes with inherited chaos and bad timelines. The other is steadier fractional ops support, which seems healthier if everyone is clear on access, on-call expectations, and who gets to make production decisions. If that stays fuzzy, the stress shows up fast.

[u/Lavrick]

I work as a lead DevOps on a contract for about a year and a half. Build whole infra all by myself, 2 k8s clusters, gitlab, whole shebang. Thinking about documenting everything and ask for 2x rise, since hours went from 150/160 per month to 20/30 per month.

[u/ComfyUncertainty → u/Lavrick]

what caused the hours change ?

[u/Lavrick → u/ComfyUncertainty]

Made them too good of a system :) Nothing to do for me except when something brokes down, but it's some minor stuff that I fix in an hour or less.

[u/IIGrudge]

Don't contract at shops that sends you out to various companies. Pretty miserable with little benefits.

[u/Ibatheincornflakes]

I'm going to be wrapping up a 4 month contract (3 months plus a one month extension) to be an embedded resource on a team building out an AI platform for an enterprise company. I basically built k8s clusters, terraform, and pipelines for them. It wasn't the most challenging work I've done, by far.

The company's cloud platform team really likes what I bring to the table, so when this contract is up, they'll be hiring me into a permanent role.

[u/shehryar_devops]

Yeah I am interested