[merciBien]

I interviewed someone for a Senior DevOps Engineer position earlier this week. We don’t do coding exercises for this position, but we’re unlikely to hire someone for Senior roles who can’t convince us they can automate a project without help. Non-Senior roles don’t need Python coding experience, but it helps.

I asked questions about experience coding with Python and shell scripts, and experience creating and managing infrastructure with Terraform. So far we haven’t found a good candidate for Senior.

[stevekemp]

I came to devops, after being a syadmin, and after working as a full-time developer.

Amongst colleagues over the years the ones who have been best at their jobs could code, often very well. In my current role I write utilities in golang, write pipelines in bash, and generate cloudformation templates from python. There's a lot of programming going on in the background, even for those people that just manage systems with puppet, ansible, and similar.

I've never really been involved in coding-assignments when either giving or receiving interviews, but it doesn't feel like it would be out of place to do a little.