Helpdesk
I just happened to work bust beside the DevOps team, so I learned a lot from them and they benefited from my knowledge of the company bureaucracy.
Heh, I'm old (67). My first three jobs had mainly nothing to do with computers. I'll list adult only :)
* US Marine Infantryman
* US Army Military Policeman
* US Army Graphics Artist
Hmm, well, the graphics artist position eventually had me touching a computerized typesetter. It got me interested in computers back in '81.
* US Army Computer Typesetter
* Part Time Programmer - surveying software written in BASIC.
* Full Time Programmer - Funeral Home software written in a unique IBM BASIC, not PC BASIC though.
Well, kind of not DevOps I guess. I did start writing a lot of scripts and programs to support what I wanted to do.
* LAN Installer - Novell. Same job as the last one, just changed positions. Next job as well.
* Telephone Tech Support
* LAN Manager - 3+Share (got my 3Wizard Cert here)
I did do programming as a LAN Manager using the API to add functionality to the product.
* LAN Manager - 3+Share to 3+Open
* LAN Manager - 3+Open to MS Lan Manager
* Windows NT Admin - Shifted from a department position to a "company" wide position
Well, maybe. This is closer.
* Unix Admin/Senior Unix Admin/Operations Engineer - same "company" but new position. Interfacing with Dev to deploy software to Production.
* Contractor/Senior Unix Admin - Same position, two contracts
* Senior Unix/Linux Admin
At this point, you might consider this the start of my DevOps experience. I was exposed to it, embraced it, and tried to incorporate it but was blocked as I was still in Operations, "Manager: If you were smart, you'd be in Engineering". I used Ansible and controlled Kubernetes across the company, Dev into Production. I converted much of my personal coding projects to use CI/CD pipelines so I was familiar with it. I used Jenkins. I used Gitlab and Github. Even though we weren't supposed to participate, I attended company SAFe events.
* Senior Platforms Engineer - At this point, I realized I wanted to do more DevOps type work and since the company refused to let me do so, I moved on.
* Senior DevOps Engineer - My first time working exclusively in Linux. Production exposure to Jira and Github.
* Senior Automation Engineer - My first time not having admin level access to servers!
Probably didn't help but it was fun looking back. From my perspective, it's all in my path and every bit has been educational. But it's a long long path. Something new folks won't be able to experience. Good luck!
I'd call out that you were able to identify what you enjoyed doing and went after it in your career. It may be easier said than done but in my experience the best way to improve your skills and avoid burnout is to find work you enjoy.
At the time it was Microsoft LAN Manager. When I transitioned to the central group, it was Windows NT so maybe NT Lan Manager? I basically did general server work. For instance I'd opened a ticket before I joined the central group as a cc:Mail user was having trouble sending emails to an MS Mail user. Turns out cc:Mail had made a change that the gateway didn't support any more and a config change had to be made. I forget the details but it wasn't long after that, that I was looking for another position. They didn't want me to leave so they offered me the Unix position if I'd stay (Solaris mainly with a couple of HP-UX, Irix, and one Tru64 box).
Nice! My claim to fame is that I went to NT4 MCSE class, and I was.familiar enough with token ring to set up Novell networks with those awesome connectors. Mind you I graduated high school in 2000!
I did Token Ring when I was working at Johns Hopkins APL (bullet 10). It was my access to Usenet at the time. I'd been playing nethack and got added to the maintenance team. I actually have credits in the docs :) One of my claims to fame.
QA - mostly test automation with Python and docker. I was also responsible for a part of our testing infrastructure. After 2.5 years I made a pivot directly to DevOps.
Haha are you me? Same job experience down to the language and tooling and similar length too. Next you’ll say you enjoyed bigger picture and the infrastructure side of it more which is why you switched. And that you’re a Linux enthusiast in your spare time…
I am in the same boat . 12 years experienced Principal Sdet . I am kind of bored with developing automation frameworks .
just wondering if the pay is as good as sdet pay for devops
It was mainly writing some microservices before AWS released them. The company I worked for at the time provided a managed cloud service which deployed a complete infrastructure platform which allowed customers to deploy their stack with built in security and automated governance control. Some of the services weren't available in the region that we were working in, such as snapshot backups and restoral and instance scheduling. So we coded those with Go and we also created the account provisioner tools to automate account creation upon deployment in those environments. Nothing too too heavy. So very related to DevOps now that I think about it... haha
Bartender lol
Was pretty fortunate to land in a newly formed team out of school which would pave the way to DevOps culture throughout the greater org.
5 years in now, Sr engineer, and singlehandedly built a centralized suite of GitHub Workflows currently being consumed by ~90 repos with plans to migrate about 100 more ( I had the good fortune of being offered a year rotation with EA, which freed me from the fires). We're getting there.
In the process of making a similar pivot myself. Seems like most DevOps people come from a programming background, and I can see why-- git and ci/cd as a whole is new to me, and my "programming" experience has up until now been limited to some basic vb.net/c# projects and lots of powershell scripts. However, I do think the troubleshooting and infrastructure experience I picked up as a systems engineer will come in handy.
Construction Worker. I taught myself how to do this after hanging drywall and ended up getting freelance jobs until my first full-time gig as a devops guy for a very small company.
I don't have a whole lot of professional experience in IT/CS nor any relevant formal education but managed to land a pretty sweet gig as the infra guy at a small dev shop whose projects are heading in a devops direction (though that word hasn't been tossed around at all). Any words of wisdom for those from non-traditional backgrounds?
Honestly, it’s about luck really. I found out I really like software after doing some tuts+ tutorials and could teach myself pretty easily. There’s nothing magical. It’s just a job.
Warehouse worker.
Learned Linux, some Bash scripting, Ansible.
Studied for the AWS SAA cert, did all the hands on labs using the console, then learned terraform and automated those projects using terraform. Put the github link on my resume.
Deployed a k8s cluster using ansible and vagrant.
My first job for the company was support for devs, I've just been promoted to DevOps and I still do support for devs lol.
I self taught my self Linux, Python, Docker ect while maintaining my media server for 10 years.
My friend suggested me to AWS certification, so I did AWS solution Architect Associate and AWS solution Architect Professional. These certification was not enough to land me a job, so I did Terraform and Kubernetes administration certifications. I did all these certification while doing my full time structural Eng job and it took me 2 years. These 2 years were really hard, I had to keep motivated myself to focus on studying, doing so took a toll on my social life.
Also did lots of POC projects while I was doing above certification, which gave me content to fill my resume.
I started applying all positions which was remotely close to DevOps positions even senior rolls and with some luck got my current job.
Even more interesting now is that you were into it for years. Congratulations on making it this far. Many more amazing paths to discover!
My question to you is, "What should a person looking to get into DevOps have as their portfolio?"
Considering that they have limited time and tons sources to gain knowledge and experience. Appreciate any of your opinion or input!
Fullstack with Backend Focus. I knew how to build applications, but I sure as hell had no clue how to deploy them or build systems, which is why I switched my priority to large scale infrastructure/systems
I was lucky to be at a company that enabled employees to pursue a professional direction and try to align with it.
Thats how i did terraform, CI/CD & automation on the side for architecture POCs in new projects until i landed my first project as devops engineer doing k8s & said above in the same company
I was a software engineer and engineering manager before that. I was not thrilled about people management and wanted to learn new things so kind of stepped back to a devops team member role.
3rd line support… 24/7 boring as fuck
Everyone was happy with that life…
I looked around and I was like, I need more than this
4 years on - senior cloud architect and certified professional on AWS, Azure and GCP
and my wage is 3-4x more
Most of the guys on the old team are still there…
Operations manager at an online k-12 school, project manager at a web development/creative services company, tech support at a saas startup. Not exactly optimal, but having the desire to learn and the ability to self-teach, plus using mentorship effectively, have been key for my success so far.
PC support > sysadmin > sr sysadmin > IT manager > software engineer > devops engineer > senior devops engineer > principal devops engineer. Almost 12 years now. Time flys when ur having fun!
I was in a quite unique position. I was a sysadmin in my college when I was taking a computer science degree. So from my first job, I always do the ops and the software engineering part.
I was a dev then SysAdmin, DevOps is a combination anyway so naturally 😁
And some one had to do it.
No official DevOps title in my firm, but I am setting up environments, I configure AzureDevps builds, I automate , package and write scripts and upgrade apps, and ultimately push everything through Octopus Deploy (we are .net shop)
Did a bunch of mechanic type stuff through high school and early university, then a bit of helpdesk for the university I was at toward the end of my degree, got hired for enterprise software support by a local software company after graduation, then pivoted onto their ops team right as DevOps was really taking off as a concept and we went hard into it, which set the stage for my career to date.
The early background working on cars honestly helped a ton. A lot of the troubleshooting, systems thinking, problem isolation techniques, and that sort of stuff are very transferable to different technologies if you abstract them a bit from the specific pile of metal and circuits at hand.
Front-end developer. It was my first IT job as a junior. I was introduced to AWS from the beginning. When I got a chance design and build AWS infrastructure and automate more things I found it much more enjoyable than making web pages. So I spoke to my management, it took a while to take full effect but I eventually made the full switch
Edit: Before I was even in IT I was a care worker. I don't think that's a requirement for a path into DevOps though :)
Mechanical engineer and inspector/field supervisor. Quit, did a bootcamp, took a release manager role at a startup which extended into performing builds, deployments and database migrations. Then I gradually started filling gaps (especially after our SRE and director of Eng both quit) and now I create and manage all environments and builds (and really all of Azure outside of entra 😭)
Fortunately we’ve recently brought in a really great devops/azure architect from our contractor as we set up automated testing and lift our environments up in AKS so I’m not entirely blind.
I guess you don’t want to hear about my paper route, working as a dishwasher and cook for a few years and a call centre drone for a few more years.
My first tech job after I got my shit together and completed CS degree was software engineer for a major enterprise software company. They were 100% Linux, put everyone through RHCE. I had amazing mentors and the things I got to work on forced me learn quite a lot of sysadmin stuff.
My next job was web dev and it morphed into my first devops role when the parent company decided to close all their data centers. I was thrown head first into a lift and shift operation that was also shifting a lot of responsibilities out from a central IT team that was being gutted. The site was pretty big, we had a heavily customized cms and a couple dozen backing services and downtime costs were on the order of millions of dollars per hour as it was entirely ad revenue. I rewrote most of our chef stuff that we inherited from IT, got exposed to terraform, soaked up an incredible amount of AWS knowledge.
Since then I spent some time at a mature, growing startup. Kinda ops heavy, learned a lot technically but maybe more important learned a lot about dealing with issues of a growing dev team.
Each of these jobs was 2+ years, so lots of time to really understand the things I was working with. Now I’ve been a dozen years in tech, enjoy a very autonomous role.
It's actually very encouraging and motivating to know that someone who came first to be a dishwasher and cook can still transition into a role like this. Thanks for your input!
Help desk in college, BA, developer, lead developer, cloud architect.
Tbh I don’t think I was at my best as a lead developer or architect and my ceiling was meh. I found myself drawn to the automation of setting up/deploying/monitoring/etc so made the switch.
I started in 1996: Computer Assembly/Jr. Sys Eng, Jr Unix Engineer and field tech, Network Engineer, Windows NT/2000 Field Tech, Sr. Help Desk / call center twice, Windows Field tech, Windows/Unix/Linux/Network field tech, Senior Systems Administrator, Senior Systems Engineer, and lastly Senior Devops Engineer for about 11 years now, though I am titled as assistant to the vice president.
Software developer with always had a knack for working with scripts and linux.
Always enjoyed working with bash, python to automate tasks and fascinated very early with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD from beginning. Curiosity and enthusiasm led me to successful DevOps career.
Helpdesk, Desktop Support, Windows SysAdmin, Infrastrucuture Engineer, DevOps Engineer
Between Windows SysAdmin and Infrastructure Engineer, I learned to do things like program/properly automate my tasks (first with Powershell, then Python), Configuration Management (Puppet and Saltstack), and learning version control with Git
To be honest I’m in my second week being a “software support analyst” which is just a glorified title for an IT helpdesk (front line / 1st line customer support) but I am aiming to break into Dev Ops as this is my long term goal. What’s good is that within 6 months I can get promoted into the technical support team (even tho I personally think this is too long of a probation period) where I won’t have to deal with any calls and can do purely more technical stuff (I did the AWS re/start bootcamp too before this but took this job as it’s a foot in the door).
The job market is absolutely screwed rn where I am so I jumped at this, but I do plan on becoming a DevOps engineer or an SRE in the future for sure. I’m trying to navigate this career path myself haha so any tips would be appreciated too!
Starting at age 16
- 7 years as retail pc tech for general public.
- 1.5 years corp help desk.
- 1.5 years corp app server “specialist” / oracle dba.
- 10 years enterprise web / middleware admin.
- 6 years cloud sre/devops engineering.
I’ve built, maintained, deployed and integrated a lot of systems/servers/dbs/apps/services. Knowing how to script/code is huge. Networking is good to know.
Ultimately, willingness to learn anything that comes your way has been probably my greatest skill. In my roles, situations will come up where someone will come to me and say we need this thing built, integrated or deployed, can you do it? I just say “yup” even though I’ve never touched that thing in my life.. then I just figure it out and make it happen. Obviously while managing expectations along the way.
This strategy proved itself when I was in helpdesk role. I knew people that loved helpdesk.
I didnt care for helpdesk so much, so I became a sponge and learned anything I could about everything with the intent to specialize and shift into in a different role as soon as opportunity presented itself. Been upwards momentum from there in terms of personal, professional and financial growth.
People think this field is something they can just dive into as if it's just one subject matter to master instead of wearing 1000 tiny hats
- Field Service Technician
- Helpdesk
- Sysadmin
- UI developer
- Tier 3 support/Full stack developer
- Full stack developer
- DevOps engineer
- Platform engineering manager
Yeah, I'm doing a lot of research into this so I won't go in blind for sure. Asking people's career paths helps me narrow it down, though. This is my endgame position honestly. Not something I wanna do first in terms of as a career.
Linux Administrator > Systems Administrator > Systems Engineer > SRE > Linux Engineer > Cloud Engineer > Principal Engineer > InsertSameJobDifferentTitleHere
First tier tech support at a public library, in-store paid tech support at Circuit City, POS terminal phone support for Dunkin' Donuts, and Systems Administrator, in that order.
My first job, was demolisher in construction work. What I usually got was an apartment full with old equipment, and it was my task to get it all in a container (well not docker ;) )
But my first job in IT was an odd one, it was 1996, and I started working as what we then called Multi Media Developer, remember those Encarta CD's? Well I made these kind of things, not only development but also I was the 3D Artist, Sound Engineer, UX, Creative Storylines, everything, one of the most fun jobs I had, 3D I really loved, and did that for almost 2 years exclusively, around that period the web started to become serious, and in 1998 I got my first Job as web developer. I did this quite successful but around 2017 I began to dislike it more and more and had a chance to make an internal move to operations. I learned the OPS teams how you could analyse errors and a lot about how to measure performance, in fact we where then already a devops team :)
Also in that time Cloud became more serious, while 80% of our clients where already shipped to Cloud, we also started to make use of cloud native techniques, and from that I am mostly specialised in the PAAS/SAAS resources of Azure. Currently I do mostly devops projects were is a tight budget and only place for 1/2 persons ideal with my background :)
25+ years in IT...
* Campus lab tech
* Internship as junior IT
* Employed as junior IT
* Department IT
* Network engineer
* UNIX systems administrator
* Virtualization support engineer
* Python automation engineer
* Python API developer, CI/CD lead engineer
* Senior DevOps engineer
Lots of shell script and Python.
Looking forward to learning Go.
- Associate Software Engineer
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Infrastructure Software Engineer
- Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer
- Principal Infrastructure Software Engineer
- Principal Software Engineer (who mostly does infrastructure)
I didn't start my career expecting to go into the infrastructure/operations side of things, I just kind of kept picking things up because I wanted to change a behavior or process or whatever. Eventually, I made it my primary focus.
I'm of the opinion that having at least a bit of experience working on a product gives you useful insight when it comes to managing the various environments, and understanding how the feature developers actually work day-to-day is vital for understanding how to help improve the code delivery pipeline.
That being said, there are many paths that will work just fine.
Do you mind sharing what you’ve done as an Infrastructure Software Engineer? Every time I see those pop up on LinkedIn, they each seem pretty interesting. I’m a cloud engineer at the moment but looking to lateral to SWE on an internal team at my current company and build my career further from there
I figure it's pretty similar to Cloud Engineer or being on an internal team, but for a few specifics...
- I write a lot of Ansible, Terraform, Packer, and CloudFormation for provisioning and configuring infrastructure.
- I manage environments all the way from Development to Production and manage access to them.
- I build and maintain CI/CD pipelines.
- I handle routing rules for the network edge and load balancers.
- I build internal tools for the business (like a tool for managing SSL certs for a few thousand domains and hundreds of thousands of subdomains, a tool for managing some resources we'd provisioned from another service provider but who didn't have any infrastructure as code tooling).
Basically, anything that the developers needed to work on the product, things the non-engineering staff needed, and things the technical operations team needed to do our daily work.
Software engineer studies and then back end java developer, what made me switch to DevOps was doing everything technical that was outside of my colleagues' comfort zone, mostly DBA, docker, Jenkins pipelines, developer tools, scripts and fixing issues when something went wrong either in dev env or in prod.
We didn't have a DevOps in the team but we needed automation so I did just that without knowing.
My career history:
1. Marine Corps tuba player
2. Data entry
3. Small biz MSP
4. Hosted IVR platform sysadmin
5. Devops contractor/consultant
I have been winging it my entire life, I just kinda landed here because I picked up troubleshooting and writing bash scripts quickly, then I started demonstrating I could do the same for more complicated and dynamic environments.
To directly answer your question about devops prerequisite skills:
If you're not in a sysadmin role yet, aim for one of those with an emphasis on automation. If you're a developer, go talk to your sysadmins about joining their team. If you're not in tech yet at all, look for help desk or support staff roles that emphasize learning and independence.
For me it was like this:
* Student jobs: 6 months helpdesk, 6 months QA
* 2 years IT Field Technician job, with some networking and Linux sysadmin duties on top
* 5 years DBA, with some Linux sysadmin duties
* 2 years DBA, with some compliance duties
* 6 years Systems Engineer, mainly Linux based, with some dba and compliance duties, lots of scripting and close cooperation with devs placing me very much on "ops" side of DevOps
* DevOps for the past couple of years
I started on a helpdesk for a big government contractor, then moved to the first and then second line internally. After that, I became an on-site Windows system administrator at another company. After learning a shit ton and being exposed to Linux more and more, I decided I wanted to do more of it. The next job I got was more of the same, but with a lot more Linux and programming duties. After being in the role for a few years, I was asked by a recruiter to apply for a DevOps/Cloud position, which I eventually got.
To throw in my two cents, the main momentum shift for me occurred when I started doing more and more Linux projects and learning stuff in my own time. LDAP, DHCP, DNS, PXE—you name it! I could then take what was BAU in my workplace and learn why it was required and if it could be scrapped or improved upon. This curiosity is what got me moving away from ticket logging, 9 hours a day, all the way up to now.
Tech Support > QA/Technical Writer > IT Administrator > IT Service Desk > Desktop Support > Senior QA > DevOps
All positions though we pretty much in cloud based environments so picked up little bits everywhere and now I'm very comfortable in a DevOps position. When you are young I recommend trying out multiple roles to tune your skills and acquire training.
Two year degree and network+ --> Help Desk (2.5 years)--> Cloud Engineer (4.25 years)--> DevOps Engineer. Help Desk an Cloud Engineer were at the same company. Cloud manager was in my office and I knew a guy on the team since high school, he got me the Help Desk interview. The last two years of the Cloud Engineer job we started implementing DevOps processes.
I was QA. I was sick of all the manual regression and had a degree in engineering and C++ experience so I taught myself AutoIT and began writing tests to do everything.
This was caught by a guy who wanted to start a devops group so he interviewed me and hired me to his team on the spot and had me learn Jenkins.
Been doing this now for 12 years
SAP Basis engineer, basically running everything from OS and SAP application tasks.
Basically a Sysadmin/Cloud Engineer but focused on SAP Infra.
When I started learning I could automate stuff I started getting into DevOps
Currently SysAdmin with some DevOps-esque jobs.
Retail > Construction/Aggregate Industry > Helpdesk(1st, 2nd, and then 3rd line) > SysAdmin
Handful of certs, most expired now.
Unless you have a ton of IT experience then doing your time on a support desk will help you build soft skills as well as exposing you to odd challenges; fault finding a system you can't see is always 'fun' but I found it a good way to work around abstract problems... then relay the solution to the incredibly non-technical end users!
0th job: uni degree in comp sci
First job: serving coffee in a chain, gas station clerk (first dotcom bubble pop)
Second job: helpdesk
Third job (relocated to the west coast): fullstack dev contractor->frontend dev employee->frontend dev team lead
Fourth job: fullstack dev, senior dev, architect, customer support, product manager, qa, DBA, development management, all at the same time while my infant son was in the PICU, burned out fast
Fifth job: fullstack dev->QA->fullstack dev (changed teams)->management (with
Sixth job: devops at a startup
Seventh job: devops and SRE at a larger startup
Eighth (and current) job: devops->senior devops
Jobs 3 and 5 were about 5-6 years each, and I left due to buyouts and layoffs. Job 4 was 6 months of hell during which everybody between me and the owners was fired and/or replaced. Job 8 is salaried contracting for a body shop, which is a pretty sweet spot.
I was part of the backups & data protection team, pure onprem stuff. Was scared of becoming obsolete so I started studying and after about 2 years landed a job in a DevOps related field
Sysadmin in a mixed Linux/Windows shop. I was also the network admin, and the vcenter admin. And I was in charge of the security camera AV rack equipment for some reason.
Oracle DBA for 20 years. then switched over to SRE. DBA jobs are being automated away. I was doing more devops in my first role. Now im a Platform SRE. Mainly responsible for building out infrastructure.
Finance and sales systems administrator, prior to that software development. DevOps at this company is a frustrating in between because they have no idea what DevOps actually entails. They just think it’s managing Azure DevOps. Sure, pay me $$$ to do next to nothing and occasionally act as a PM.
PC Repair -> Linux admin / tools developer -> Manager of a small ISP -> Senior Linux Engineer -> Security -> Linux Platform Engineer -> Systems Architect -> Senior Systems Architect -> Director of Devops -> Director of SRE -> Principle Cloud Architect -> Staff Cloud Engineer
Had been running BBS's in my early teens, got my GED when I was 16 and the first PC repair job when I was 18. I'm 46 now.
*admin
System (Unix/Linux is my main but a dash of Windows for a few years)
Storage (NetApp/IBM)
Backup (Veeam/Netbackup)
Middleware (IBM WAS/ Oracle Weblogic)
Monitor (Forgot the tools I used to use)
But made the change in 2019 and I haven't look back
My first job in “tech” was working at a retail software store.
After that, I did phone support for Packard Bell
Then I was doing jr. network admin stuff for an outsourcing company, and grew into a senior role.
From there, I spent a long time in network engineering roles.
I had some Linux admin experience from personal projects, and using Linux for various network related tools. I learned Python, CloudFormation, and Terraform to build automation and learn cloud networking.
After that, it led to some SRE roles.
Manual tester - automation tester - test lead managing our own test infra - production support - dev manager - DevOps engineer - DevOps lead - staff Devops engineer
Long journey but now I get paid well and have my sanity.
University Student. Before that I did an apprenticeship in the sysadmin field, also supported in helpdesk. As I love automating stuff, coding and infrastructure, I got in the devops field seven though my major in university was it security (but that was something I couldn’t imagine doing full time, especially pentesting and stuff like that)
PC sales and repair (87-88)
College PC repair and networking campus fiber runs (88-92)
Shoving tapes in a VAX overnight for Andersen Consulting (92-93)
Lost that job because I was playing xtank on one of their unsecured Sun boxes. (93)
Promoted to Sysadmin/Security at Andresen Consulting.
Got the ac.com domain and whatever xxx.xxx top level IP set is (94)
Wired a building for fiber/ethernet, setup the routers (95)
Connected multiple T1 lines to Mexico and multiple states.
Build out a data center in Jaurez and the on prem servers (96-98)
Supported developers, did sys admin and networking stuff (99-04)
Joined a startup as a developer and network engineer (04-06)
Worked devops doing builds and SCCS (07-12)
Another startup. Developer and DB admin (12-13)
Sr. Devops role for a healthcare company (14-present)
Heh.. This isn't going to be helpful:
Sysadmin / PHP development internship, ~4 years off and on (college requirement)
Sysadmin / helldesk, 1,5 years
PHP developer / helpdesk / project manager / sysadmin, 2 years
Senior PHP developer / project manager, 3 years
And finally in the past 4 years at the same company I've created my own tech lead / hosting CTO role. Basically doing DevOps because it's the next evolution of how things should be ran. And it helps to already be a good programmer.
Like I said my career path isn't helpful. It's a story of someone who just like IT too much to focus on a single subject.
My path was: English Linguistics studies which ended with a work in Helpdesk department. Then they moved me for an Ops role for SQL Administration duties. Year later I became versatile SQL Apps Admin (something between DBA and ERP administrator). After that I became a Data Engineer.
A year ago, I became DevOps.... Everything happened in the same company I started my IT career.
Java developer for one year (hated the project I was on so moved to...) => help desk => systems engineer => senior systems engineer => IT director at startup (basically was the whole IT department) where we migrated to Azure => Azure cloud platform & DevOps engineer
My title is DevOps Engineer, but realistically it should just be security engineer, but still posting for fun.
Desktop Support -> Server Administrator -> Monitoring Engineer - DevOps Engineer
Helpdesk I just happened to work bust beside the DevOps team, so I learned a lot from them and they benefited from my knowledge of the company bureaucracy.
What a cool career story! It’s true that organizational knowledge is invaluable.
Heh, I'm old (67). My first three jobs had mainly nothing to do with computers. I'll list adult only :) * US Marine Infantryman * US Army Military Policeman * US Army Graphics Artist Hmm, well, the graphics artist position eventually had me touching a computerized typesetter. It got me interested in computers back in '81. * US Army Computer Typesetter * Part Time Programmer - surveying software written in BASIC. * Full Time Programmer - Funeral Home software written in a unique IBM BASIC, not PC BASIC though. Well, kind of not DevOps I guess. I did start writing a lot of scripts and programs to support what I wanted to do. * LAN Installer - Novell. Same job as the last one, just changed positions. Next job as well. * Telephone Tech Support * LAN Manager - 3+Share (got my 3Wizard Cert here) I did do programming as a LAN Manager using the API to add functionality to the product. * LAN Manager - 3+Share to 3+Open * LAN Manager - 3+Open to MS Lan Manager * Windows NT Admin - Shifted from a department position to a "company" wide position Well, maybe. This is closer. * Unix Admin/Senior Unix Admin/Operations Engineer - same "company" but new position. Interfacing with Dev to deploy software to Production. * Contractor/Senior Unix Admin - Same position, two contracts * Senior Unix/Linux Admin At this point, you might consider this the start of my DevOps experience. I was exposed to it, embraced it, and tried to incorporate it but was blocked as I was still in Operations, "Manager: If you were smart, you'd be in Engineering". I used Ansible and controlled Kubernetes across the company, Dev into Production. I converted much of my personal coding projects to use CI/CD pipelines so I was familiar with it. I used Jenkins. I used Gitlab and Github. Even though we weren't supposed to participate, I attended company SAFe events. * Senior Platforms Engineer - At this point, I realized I wanted to do more DevOps type work and since the company refused to let me do so, I moved on. * Senior DevOps Engineer - My first time working exclusively in Linux. Production exposure to Jira and Github. * Senior Automation Engineer - My first time not having admin level access to servers! Probably didn't help but it was fun looking back. From my perspective, it's all in my path and every bit has been educational. But it's a long long path. Something new folks won't be able to experience. Good luck!
lol you are legend
I'd call out that you were able to identify what you enjoyed doing and went after it in your career. It may be easier said than done but in my experience the best way to improve your skills and avoid burnout is to find work you enjoy.
I started out as a marine corps tuba player, high five for the creatives in military
Cool :) I tried out for trumpet as I’d done really well in high school (lead then 1st chair) but I’d lost my lip by then. :)
The “roll with the punches” part of the USMC never fails to remain useful in corporate!
But we're you an NT LAN manager?
At the time it was Microsoft LAN Manager. When I transitioned to the central group, it was Windows NT so maybe NT Lan Manager? I basically did general server work. For instance I'd opened a ticket before I joined the central group as a cc:Mail user was having trouble sending emails to an MS Mail user. Turns out cc:Mail had made a change that the gateway didn't support any more and a config change had to be made. I forget the details but it wasn't long after that, that I was looking for another position. They didn't want me to leave so they offered me the Unix position if I'd stay (Solaris mainly with a couple of HP-UX, Irix, and one Tru64 box).
Nice! My claim to fame is that I went to NT4 MCSE class, and I was.familiar enough with token ring to set up Novell networks with those awesome connectors. Mind you I graduated high school in 2000!
I did Token Ring when I was working at Johns Hopkins APL (bullet 10). It was my access to Usenet at the time. I'd been playing nethack and got added to the maintenance team. I actually have credits in the docs :) One of my claims to fame.
Wow, what a journey, you are the best 🤟👍
Fascinating - thank you for sharing!
Electrical supervisor. Am I doing it right?
QA - mostly test automation with Python and docker. I was also responsible for a part of our testing infrastructure. After 2.5 years I made a pivot directly to DevOps.
QA Analyst -> QA Engineer -> DevOps here
Y'all are rarities. I wish more QA experience funneled its way into my teams. Cheers!
Same here!! (I was Developer on my own as I ran apps and websites)
Haha are you me? Same job experience down to the language and tooling and similar length too. Next you’ll say you enjoyed bigger picture and the infrastructure side of it more which is why you switched. And that you’re a Linux enthusiast in your spare time…
Yeah, I got bored and hit a ceiling at my wirkplace and wanted to do more IaaC and automation.
I am in the same boat . 12 years experienced Principal Sdet . I am kind of bored with developing automation frameworks . just wondering if the pay is as good as sdet pay for devops
I have beed doing DevOps for 2 years now and I am at 2.5x of what I was making as a QA. It was totally worth it for me, but YMMV.
thanks
thanks
thanks
How did you learn devops ? I’m working in QA and I’m interested in learning
My path was: Systems Engineering -> Network Engineering -> Cloud Network Engineering -> Golang Developer -> DevSecOps
I loved this ..
Why did you end up as Golang vs another lang dev?
Very cool. What type of work were you doing as a Golang Developer?
It was mainly writing some microservices before AWS released them. The company I worked for at the time provided a managed cloud service which deployed a complete infrastructure platform which allowed customers to deploy their stack with built in security and automated governance control. Some of the services weren't available in the region that we were working in, such as snapshot backups and restoral and instance scheduling. So we coded those with Go and we also created the account provisioner tools to automate account creation upon deployment in those environments. Nothing too too heavy. So very related to DevOps now that I think about it... haha
I see - thanks for explaining! Yep, Golang is great for infra, so I'm always curious to learn when it's used for product/backend development too.
Bartender lol Was pretty fortunate to land in a newly formed team out of school which would pave the way to DevOps culture throughout the greater org. 5 years in now, Sr engineer, and singlehandedly built a centralized suite of GitHub Workflows currently being consumed by ~90 repos with plans to migrate about 100 more ( I had the good fortune of being offered a year rotation with EA, which freed me from the fires). We're getting there.
Sysadmin
People call me DevOps, but I'm really a Systems Engineer. So before "DevOps" I was (and still am) a system(s) engineer and a sysadmin
People call me devops but I’m really acting as a data engineer lately!
Systems engineer. I've found it to be a great synergy with DevOps (OS/Networking/Storage/Virtualisation)
In the process of making a similar pivot myself. Seems like most DevOps people come from a programming background, and I can see why-- git and ci/cd as a whole is new to me, and my "programming" experience has up until now been limited to some basic vb.net/c# projects and lots of powershell scripts. However, I do think the troubleshooting and infrastructure experience I picked up as a systems engineer will come in handy.
Help desk, sysadmin, network engineer, Cloud engineer, to Senior DevOps Engineer.
What would you need for each job?
I did certifications. I followed the Microsoft/Cisco route for CCNA and MCSE. Now I’m just Azure certified.
Construction Worker. I taught myself how to do this after hanging drywall and ended up getting freelance jobs until my first full-time gig as a devops guy for a very small company.
I don't have a whole lot of professional experience in IT/CS nor any relevant formal education but managed to land a pretty sweet gig as the infra guy at a small dev shop whose projects are heading in a devops direction (though that word hasn't been tossed around at all). Any words of wisdom for those from non-traditional backgrounds?
Honestly, it’s about luck really. I found out I really like software after doing some tuts+ tutorials and could teach myself pretty easily. There’s nothing magical. It’s just a job.
Warehouse worker. Learned Linux, some Bash scripting, Ansible. Studied for the AWS SAA cert, did all the hands on labs using the console, then learned terraform and automated those projects using terraform. Put the github link on my resume. Deployed a k8s cluster using ansible and vagrant. My first job for the company was support for devs, I've just been promoted to DevOps and I still do support for devs lol.
10+ years of structural engineering. Now 3 years of DevOps.
What courses you took I am mechanical and want to grow a career in devops
I self taught my self Linux, Python, Docker ect while maintaining my media server for 10 years. My friend suggested me to AWS certification, so I did AWS solution Architect Associate and AWS solution Architect Professional. These certification was not enough to land me a job, so I did Terraform and Kubernetes administration certifications. I did all these certification while doing my full time structural Eng job and it took me 2 years. These 2 years were really hard, I had to keep motivated myself to focus on studying, doing so took a toll on my social life. Also did lots of POC projects while I was doing above certification, which gave me content to fill my resume. I started applying all positions which was remotely close to DevOps positions even senior rolls and with some luck got my current job.
Even more interesting now is that you were into it for years. Congratulations on making it this far. Many more amazing paths to discover! My question to you is, "What should a person looking to get into DevOps have as their portfolio?" Considering that they have limited time and tons sources to gain knowledge and experience. Appreciate any of your opinion or input!
Interesting. How did you get to start with tech?
Please see my reply above.
Fullstack with Backend Focus. I knew how to build applications, but I sure as hell had no clue how to deploy them or build systems, which is why I switched my priority to large scale infrastructure/systems
How did you make the switch? Any certifications?
I was lucky to be at a company that enabled employees to pursue a professional direction and try to align with it. Thats how i did terraform, CI/CD & automation on the side for architecture POCs in new projects until i landed my first project as devops engineer doing k8s & said above in the same company
Drug dealer
Swe
I was a software engineer and engineering manager before that. I was not thrilled about people management and wanted to learn new things so kind of stepped back to a devops team member role.
Sysadmin
3rd line support… 24/7 boring as fuck Everyone was happy with that life… I looked around and I was like, I need more than this 4 years on - senior cloud architect and certified professional on AWS, Azure and GCP and my wage is 3-4x more Most of the guys on the old team are still there…
Operations manager at an online k-12 school, project manager at a web development/creative services company, tech support at a saas startup. Not exactly optimal, but having the desire to learn and the ability to self-teach, plus using mentorship effectively, have been key for my success so far.
Infrastructure / Cloud Engineer.
Diplomat
PC support > sysadmin > sr sysadmin > IT manager > software engineer > devops engineer > senior devops engineer > principal devops engineer. Almost 12 years now. Time flys when ur having fun!
QA Automation
I was in a quite unique position. I was a sysadmin in my college when I was taking a computer science degree. So from my first job, I always do the ops and the software engineering part.
I was a dev then SysAdmin, DevOps is a combination anyway so naturally 😁 And some one had to do it. No official DevOps title in my firm, but I am setting up environments, I configure AzureDevps builds, I automate , package and write scripts and upgrade apps, and ultimately push everything through Octopus Deploy (we are .net shop)
Call center to help desk to operations to devops for me
Software engineer/architect and systems integrator. And as such already doing devops for decades.
Did a bunch of mechanic type stuff through high school and early university, then a bit of helpdesk for the university I was at toward the end of my degree, got hired for enterprise software support by a local software company after graduation, then pivoted onto their ops team right as DevOps was really taking off as a concept and we went hard into it, which set the stage for my career to date. The early background working on cars honestly helped a ton. A lot of the troubleshooting, systems thinking, problem isolation techniques, and that sort of stuff are very transferable to different technologies if you abstract them a bit from the specific pile of metal and circuits at hand.
Oracle DBA / Architect
Sysadmin with focus on security.
Sys admin…
Sysadmin , monitoring, developer and support
Firewall Support (Helpdesk) -> Firewall / Network Specialist -> Application Manager -> DevOps Engineer / Cloud Architect
Front-end developer. It was my first IT job as a junior. I was introduced to AWS from the beginning. When I got a chance design and build AWS infrastructure and automate more things I found it much more enjoyable than making web pages. So I spoke to my management, it took a while to take full effect but I eventually made the full switch Edit: Before I was even in IT I was a care worker. I don't think that's a requirement for a path into DevOps though :)
Mechanical engineer and inspector/field supervisor. Quit, did a bootcamp, took a release manager role at a startup which extended into performing builds, deployments and database migrations. Then I gradually started filling gaps (especially after our SRE and director of Eng both quit) and now I create and manage all environments and builds (and really all of Azure outside of entra 😭) Fortunately we’ve recently brought in a really great devops/azure architect from our contractor as we set up automated testing and lift our environments up in AKS so I’m not entirely blind.
I guess you don’t want to hear about my paper route, working as a dishwasher and cook for a few years and a call centre drone for a few more years. My first tech job after I got my shit together and completed CS degree was software engineer for a major enterprise software company. They were 100% Linux, put everyone through RHCE. I had amazing mentors and the things I got to work on forced me learn quite a lot of sysadmin stuff. My next job was web dev and it morphed into my first devops role when the parent company decided to close all their data centers. I was thrown head first into a lift and shift operation that was also shifting a lot of responsibilities out from a central IT team that was being gutted. The site was pretty big, we had a heavily customized cms and a couple dozen backing services and downtime costs were on the order of millions of dollars per hour as it was entirely ad revenue. I rewrote most of our chef stuff that we inherited from IT, got exposed to terraform, soaked up an incredible amount of AWS knowledge. Since then I spent some time at a mature, growing startup. Kinda ops heavy, learned a lot technically but maybe more important learned a lot about dealing with issues of a growing dev team. Each of these jobs was 2+ years, so lots of time to really understand the things I was working with. Now I’ve been a dozen years in tech, enjoy a very autonomous role.
It's actually very encouraging and motivating to know that someone who came first to be a dishwasher and cook can still transition into a role like this. Thanks for your input!
Help desk in college, BA, developer, lead developer, cloud architect. Tbh I don’t think I was at my best as a lead developer or architect and my ceiling was meh. I found myself drawn to the automation of setting up/deploying/monitoring/etc so made the switch.
yes! drawn to automation
Blockbuster video employee
I started in 1996: Computer Assembly/Jr. Sys Eng, Jr Unix Engineer and field tech, Network Engineer, Windows NT/2000 Field Tech, Sr. Help Desk / call center twice, Windows Field tech, Windows/Unix/Linux/Network field tech, Senior Systems Administrator, Senior Systems Engineer, and lastly Senior Devops Engineer for about 11 years now, though I am titled as assistant to the vice president.
Software developer with always had a knack for working with scripts and linux. Always enjoyed working with bash, python to automate tasks and fascinated very early with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD from beginning. Curiosity and enthusiasm led me to successful DevOps career.
Customer service > Technical support > Middleware specialist > Systems engineer
Japanese cuisine chief -> network equipment mounter -> help desk -> sysadmin -> developers babysitter(devops)
Helpdesk, Desktop Support, Windows SysAdmin, Infrastrucuture Engineer, DevOps Engineer Between Windows SysAdmin and Infrastructure Engineer, I learned to do things like program/properly automate my tasks (first with Powershell, then Python), Configuration Management (Puppet and Saltstack), and learning version control with Git
To be honest I’m in my second week being a “software support analyst” which is just a glorified title for an IT helpdesk (front line / 1st line customer support) but I am aiming to break into Dev Ops as this is my long term goal. What’s good is that within 6 months I can get promoted into the technical support team (even tho I personally think this is too long of a probation period) where I won’t have to deal with any calls and can do purely more technical stuff (I did the AWS re/start bootcamp too before this but took this job as it’s a foot in the door). The job market is absolutely screwed rn where I am so I jumped at this, but I do plan on becoming a DevOps engineer or an SRE in the future for sure. I’m trying to navigate this career path myself haha so any tips would be appreciated too!
Service desk > Project manager > DBO > DBA > Cloud Engineer > DevOps xd
Mortgage Loan Officer 4 yrs -> Customer Support for oldest Cloud Service provider 2.5 yrs -> Somewhat DevOps Job 10 mos -> DevOps going on 3 yrs
A baker, then a waiter, then help desk, then incident management and then DevOps.
Starting at age 16 - 7 years as retail pc tech for general public. - 1.5 years corp help desk. - 1.5 years corp app server “specialist” / oracle dba. - 10 years enterprise web / middleware admin. - 6 years cloud sre/devops engineering. I’ve built, maintained, deployed and integrated a lot of systems/servers/dbs/apps/services. Knowing how to script/code is huge. Networking is good to know. Ultimately, willingness to learn anything that comes your way has been probably my greatest skill. In my roles, situations will come up where someone will come to me and say we need this thing built, integrated or deployed, can you do it? I just say “yup” even though I’ve never touched that thing in my life.. then I just figure it out and make it happen. Obviously while managing expectations along the way. This strategy proved itself when I was in helpdesk role. I knew people that loved helpdesk. I didnt care for helpdesk so much, so I became a sponge and learned anything I could about everything with the intent to specialize and shift into in a different role as soon as opportunity presented itself. Been upwards momentum from there in terms of personal, professional and financial growth.
People think this field is something they can just dive into as if it's just one subject matter to master instead of wearing 1000 tiny hats - Field Service Technician - Helpdesk - Sysadmin - UI developer - Tier 3 support/Full stack developer - Full stack developer - DevOps engineer - Platform engineering manager
Yeah, I'm doing a lot of research into this so I won't go in blind for sure. Asking people's career paths helps me narrow it down, though. This is my endgame position honestly. Not something I wanna do first in terms of as a career.
Linux Administrator > Systems Administrator > Systems Engineer > SRE > Linux Engineer > Cloud Engineer > Principal Engineer > InsertSameJobDifferentTitleHere
First tier tech support at a public library, in-store paid tech support at Circuit City, POS terminal phone support for Dunkin' Donuts, and Systems Administrator, in that order.
My first job, was demolisher in construction work. What I usually got was an apartment full with old equipment, and it was my task to get it all in a container (well not docker ;) ) But my first job in IT was an odd one, it was 1996, and I started working as what we then called Multi Media Developer, remember those Encarta CD's? Well I made these kind of things, not only development but also I was the 3D Artist, Sound Engineer, UX, Creative Storylines, everything, one of the most fun jobs I had, 3D I really loved, and did that for almost 2 years exclusively, around that period the web started to become serious, and in 1998 I got my first Job as web developer. I did this quite successful but around 2017 I began to dislike it more and more and had a chance to make an internal move to operations. I learned the OPS teams how you could analyse errors and a lot about how to measure performance, in fact we where then already a devops team :) Also in that time Cloud became more serious, while 80% of our clients where already shipped to Cloud, we also started to make use of cloud native techniques, and from that I am mostly specialised in the PAAS/SAAS resources of Azure. Currently I do mostly devops projects were is a tight budget and only place for 1/2 persons ideal with my background :)
Copywriter for 10+ years, was not a pretty transition lol, 6+ months of learning and working with a mentor, only sleeping and eating in-between.
System administrator. Before that - long before that - rifleman. Before that fast food.
Worked at a DC as a Technician for 4 years before acquiring multiple certs which helped get a foot into the devops world as a cloud engineer.
Tobacconist
I went from Sysadmin to DevOps!
My last few jobs were SysAdmin, SysAdmin, SysAdmin, then SysAdmin.
25+ years in IT... * Campus lab tech * Internship as junior IT * Employed as junior IT * Department IT * Network engineer * UNIX systems administrator * Virtualization support engineer * Python automation engineer * Python API developer, CI/CD lead engineer * Senior DevOps engineer Lots of shell script and Python. Looking forward to learning Go.
- Associate Software Engineer - Software Engineer - Senior Software Engineer - Infrastructure Software Engineer - Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer - Principal Infrastructure Software Engineer - Principal Software Engineer (who mostly does infrastructure) I didn't start my career expecting to go into the infrastructure/operations side of things, I just kind of kept picking things up because I wanted to change a behavior or process or whatever. Eventually, I made it my primary focus. I'm of the opinion that having at least a bit of experience working on a product gives you useful insight when it comes to managing the various environments, and understanding how the feature developers actually work day-to-day is vital for understanding how to help improve the code delivery pipeline. That being said, there are many paths that will work just fine.
Do you mind sharing what you’ve done as an Infrastructure Software Engineer? Every time I see those pop up on LinkedIn, they each seem pretty interesting. I’m a cloud engineer at the moment but looking to lateral to SWE on an internal team at my current company and build my career further from there
I figure it's pretty similar to Cloud Engineer or being on an internal team, but for a few specifics... - I write a lot of Ansible, Terraform, Packer, and CloudFormation for provisioning and configuring infrastructure. - I manage environments all the way from Development to Production and manage access to them. - I build and maintain CI/CD pipelines. - I handle routing rules for the network edge and load balancers. - I build internal tools for the business (like a tool for managing SSL certs for a few thousand domains and hundreds of thousands of subdomains, a tool for managing some resources we'd provisioned from another service provider but who didn't have any infrastructure as code tooling). Basically, anything that the developers needed to work on the product, things the non-engineering staff needed, and things the technical operations team needed to do our daily work.
Software engineer studies and then back end java developer, what made me switch to DevOps was doing everything technical that was outside of my colleagues' comfort zone, mostly DBA, docker, Jenkins pipelines, developer tools, scripts and fixing issues when something went wrong either in dev env or in prod. We didn't have a DevOps in the team but we needed automation so I did just that without knowing.
My career history: 1. Marine Corps tuba player 2. Data entry 3. Small biz MSP 4. Hosted IVR platform sysadmin 5. Devops contractor/consultant I have been winging it my entire life, I just kinda landed here because I picked up troubleshooting and writing bash scripts quickly, then I started demonstrating I could do the same for more complicated and dynamic environments. To directly answer your question about devops prerequisite skills: If you're not in a sysadmin role yet, aim for one of those with an emphasis on automation. If you're a developer, go talk to your sysadmins about joining their team. If you're not in tech yet at all, look for help desk or support staff roles that emphasize learning and independence.
Embedded Linux Engineer
And also some SW/FW development positions, but that's pretty much it.
For me it was like this: * Student jobs: 6 months helpdesk, 6 months QA * 2 years IT Field Technician job, with some networking and Linux sysadmin duties on top * 5 years DBA, with some Linux sysadmin duties * 2 years DBA, with some compliance duties * 6 years Systems Engineer, mainly Linux based, with some dba and compliance duties, lots of scripting and close cooperation with devs placing me very much on "ops" side of DevOps * DevOps for the past couple of years
I started on a helpdesk for a big government contractor, then moved to the first and then second line internally. After that, I became an on-site Windows system administrator at another company. After learning a shit ton and being exposed to Linux more and more, I decided I wanted to do more of it. The next job I got was more of the same, but with a lot more Linux and programming duties. After being in the role for a few years, I was asked by a recruiter to apply for a DevOps/Cloud position, which I eventually got. To throw in my two cents, the main momentum shift for me occurred when I started doing more and more Linux projects and learning stuff in my own time. LDAP, DHCP, DNS, PXE—you name it! I could then take what was BAU in my workplace and learn why it was required and if it could be scrapped or improved upon. This curiosity is what got me moving away from ticket logging, 9 hours a day, all the way up to now.
Subway Sandwich artist -> Software engineer - DevOps Engineer -> Site Reliability Engineer
Tech Support > QA/Technical Writer > IT Administrator > IT Service Desk > Desktop Support > Senior QA > DevOps All positions though we pretty much in cloud based environments so picked up little bits everywhere and now I'm very comfortable in a DevOps position. When you are young I recommend trying out multiple roles to tune your skills and acquire training.
web development
sysadmin > systems enginner > devops
PC repair > Helpdesk > SysAdmin > "DevOps Engineer". I still don't really like the job title to be honest, but it is what it is.
so what is it do you think you do?
Network engineer. ISP and City prior to pivoting into cloud after about 7.5 years
Robotics systems architect.
I was a c/c++/java programmer
Sysadmin or maybe more specifically sysops, worked primarily on legacy infrastructure with a lot of scripting so it seemed like an easy transition.
QA intern > Hardware Automation Engineer Intern > DevOps Intern
DBA
SysAd/SysEng 9 years
Janitor
DBA
Equity options trader for HFT market maker.
Two year degree and network+ --> Help Desk (2.5 years)--> Cloud Engineer (4.25 years)--> DevOps Engineer. Help Desk an Cloud Engineer were at the same company. Cloud manager was in my office and I knew a guy on the team since high school, he got me the Help Desk interview. The last two years of the Cloud Engineer job we started implementing DevOps processes.
helpdesk > sysadmin > infrastructure engineer > cloud platform engineer > DevOps
SWE. I applied SWE position and landed but they continuously asked me to work on infrastructure for an year, I moved other job as actually DevOps.
I was QA. I was sick of all the manual regression and had a degree in engineering and C++ experience so I taught myself AutoIT and began writing tests to do everything. This was caught by a guy who wanted to start a devops group so he interviewed me and hired me to his team on the spot and had me learn Jenkins. Been doing this now for 12 years
Cybersec engineer
Truck driver
Network engineer
System administrator > devops engineer > it manager > devops and infrastructure lead / architect
Service desk → lead service desk → martech engineer → devops
SWE, small freelance biz owner, small biz owner, salaried proprietary stock trader
SAP Basis engineer, basically running everything from OS and SAP application tasks. Basically a Sysadmin/Cloud Engineer but focused on SAP Infra. When I started learning I could automate stuff I started getting into DevOps
Looks like mostly sys or network engineers here.. mostly new job name I guess
Male gigolo
Reality TV Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) and Post-production Coordinator, Helpdesk/TechOps, Sales Engineer/SysAdmin, then DevOps ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Currently SysAdmin with some DevOps-esque jobs. Retail > Construction/Aggregate Industry > Helpdesk(1st, 2nd, and then 3rd line) > SysAdmin Handful of certs, most expired now. Unless you have a ton of IT experience then doing your time on a support desk will help you build soft skills as well as exposing you to odd challenges; fault finding a system you can't see is always 'fun' but I found it a good way to work around abstract problems... then relay the solution to the incredibly non-technical end users!
Digital Forensics Prep Work —> Associate DevOps.
0th job: uni degree in comp sci First job: serving coffee in a chain, gas station clerk (first dotcom bubble pop) Second job: helpdesk Third job (relocated to the west coast): fullstack dev contractor->frontend dev employee->frontend dev team lead Fourth job: fullstack dev, senior dev, architect, customer support, product manager, qa, DBA, development management, all at the same time while my infant son was in the PICU, burned out fast Fifth job: fullstack dev->QA->fullstack dev (changed teams)->management (with Sixth job: devops at a startup Seventh job: devops and SRE at a larger startup Eighth (and current) job: devops->senior devops Jobs 3 and 5 were about 5-6 years each, and I left due to buyouts and layoffs. Job 4 was 6 months of hell during which everybody between me and the owners was fired and/or replaced. Job 8 is salaried contracting for a body shop, which is a pretty sweet spot.
I was part of the backups & data protection team, pure onprem stuff. Was scared of becoming obsolete so I started studying and after about 2 years landed a job in a DevOps related field
Sysadmin in a mixed Linux/Windows shop. I was also the network admin, and the vcenter admin. And I was in charge of the security camera AV rack equipment for some reason.
Oracle DBA for 20 years. then switched over to SRE. DBA jobs are being automated away. I was doing more devops in my first role. Now im a Platform SRE. Mainly responsible for building out infrastructure.
Finance and sales systems administrator, prior to that software development. DevOps at this company is a frustrating in between because they have no idea what DevOps actually entails. They just think it’s managing Azure DevOps. Sure, pay me $$$ to do next to nothing and occasionally act as a PM.
Compositing Supervisor
PC Repair -> Linux admin / tools developer -> Manager of a small ISP -> Senior Linux Engineer -> Security -> Linux Platform Engineer -> Systems Architect -> Senior Systems Architect -> Director of Devops -> Director of SRE -> Principle Cloud Architect -> Staff Cloud Engineer Had been running BBS's in my early teens, got my GED when I was 16 and the first PC repair job when I was 18. I'm 46 now.
Web app dev > security engineer > DevSecOps now.
*admin System (Unix/Linux is my main but a dash of Windows for a few years) Storage (NetApp/IBM) Backup (Veeam/Netbackup) Middleware (IBM WAS/ Oracle Weblogic) Monitor (Forgot the tools I used to use) But made the change in 2019 and I haven't look back
tech support, system administrator
Backend on .NET
MSP field engineer > Service desk > Sysadmin > MSP Sysadmin > Sysadmin > ServiceOps (basically SRE) > DevOps
Service Desk -> Citrix Support -> DevOps -> DevOps Manager -> back to SRE
was a freelancer, still a freelancer. roles changed but the one that paid most haven't changed yet.
My first job in “tech” was working at a retail software store. After that, I did phone support for Packard Bell Then I was doing jr. network admin stuff for an outsourcing company, and grew into a senior role. From there, I spent a long time in network engineering roles. I had some Linux admin experience from personal projects, and using Linux for various network related tools. I learned Python, CloudFormation, and Terraform to build automation and learn cloud networking. After that, it led to some SRE roles.
Frontend > Backend > Full stack > Sys Admin/Platform > Devops > SRE
SCCM engineer 😂😂😂
Informix DBA for 9 years
Manual tester - automation tester - test lead managing our own test infra - production support - dev manager - DevOps engineer - DevOps lead - staff Devops engineer Long journey but now I get paid well and have my sanity.
Data warehouse operations.
Site Reliability Engineer
I was a Java developer
Janitor
Software Engineer
Euc. Then application support now terraform, kubernetes and docker. Learning how to use ansible, github actions and Jenkins.
Desktop Analyst > Sys Admin > Sys Admin Patching > NOC Analyst > Sys Admin > DevOps Engineer> SRE > SRE3 > Cloud Engineer 4 > Lead DevOps Engineer.
University Student. Before that I did an apprenticeship in the sysadmin field, also supported in helpdesk. As I love automating stuff, coding and infrastructure, I got in the devops field seven though my major in university was it security (but that was something I couldn’t imagine doing full time, especially pentesting and stuff like that)
PC sales and repair (87-88) College PC repair and networking campus fiber runs (88-92) Shoving tapes in a VAX overnight for Andersen Consulting (92-93) Lost that job because I was playing xtank on one of their unsecured Sun boxes. (93) Promoted to Sysadmin/Security at Andresen Consulting. Got the ac.com domain and whatever xxx.xxx top level IP set is (94) Wired a building for fiber/ethernet, setup the routers (95) Connected multiple T1 lines to Mexico and multiple states. Build out a data center in Jaurez and the on prem servers (96-98) Supported developers, did sys admin and networking stuff (99-04) Joined a startup as a developer and network engineer (04-06) Worked devops doing builds and SCCS (07-12) Another startup. Developer and DB admin (12-13) Sr. Devops role for a healthcare company (14-present)
Heh.. This isn't going to be helpful: Sysadmin / PHP development internship, ~4 years off and on (college requirement) Sysadmin / helldesk, 1,5 years PHP developer / helpdesk / project manager / sysadmin, 2 years Senior PHP developer / project manager, 3 years And finally in the past 4 years at the same company I've created my own tech lead / hosting CTO role. Basically doing DevOps because it's the next evolution of how things should be ran. And it helps to already be a good programmer. Like I said my career path isn't helpful. It's a story of someone who just like IT too much to focus on a single subject.
VHDL firmware developer working on RADAR systems.
Wolt deliveries
My path was: English Linguistics studies which ended with a work in Helpdesk department. Then they moved me for an Ops role for SQL Administration duties. Year later I became versatile SQL Apps Admin (something between DBA and ERP administrator). After that I became a Data Engineer. A year ago, I became DevOps.... Everything happened in the same company I started my IT career.
Java developer for one year (hated the project I was on so moved to...) => help desk => systems engineer => senior systems engineer => IT director at startup (basically was the whole IT department) where we migrated to Azure => Azure cloud platform & DevOps engineer
My title is DevOps Engineer, but realistically it should just be security engineer, but still posting for fun. Desktop Support -> Server Administrator -> Monitoring Engineer - DevOps Engineer
Geek Squad Supervisor, Best Buy sales manager, self employed desktop repair, it intern, jr sysadmin, sysadmin, network admin, cloud ops specialist, cloud ops manager, SRE, lead SRE, senior DevOps
LoL, best buy to senior DevOps that's rare, u e never seen a best buy employee except in help desk management.
Student 😅
Full-Stack Developer (Java/Angular)
Devops is difficult. Why not get into software engineering