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by blown_gasket 1324 days ago
As someone that has never worked at a startup before, this seems to be the list of skills a startup might find reasonable for a 'DevOps Engineer'. Every other place I've interviewed or have worked has DevOps Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer being distinctly different roles (SRE focusing on monitoring and logging and DevOps engineer focusing on pipeline and build).

There are also other places like where I am now where every team that works on backend infrastructure (Windows, Linux, Virtualization, Networking) also works on their own automation for their platform. We do have a Platform Engineering team that focuses on K8s and Dev tools such as Artifactory, Gitlab, Puppet.

I have an opinion that if a company has a specific role of 'DevOps Engineer' they are doing DevOps wrong. Also Jira and Scrum are absolutely not needed at all to do DevOps.

2 comments

As a careerlong DevOps guy, I’ve heard many times that “if your job title has DevOps in it, your company is doing DevOps wrong” – overwhelmingly from people with “DevOps” in their job title, delivered with a mordant laugh.
I'm a bit cynically happy to find out I'm not the only one with this opinion. I've never held a DevOps title though.
The reality is that most companies that need the help or cultural change won’t have need to even use the term so it’s a catch 22.
devops or sre might as well be a euphemism for sysadmin that can write a little python
SRE is a software engineering position -- someone needs to write the software (such as Kubernetes) that sysadmins use. It also requires a good understanding of lower-level languages, since someone who only knows Python will have a difficult time debugging a kernel panic or weird mutex issue in multi-threaded C++.
If a SRE only knows one language I'd be skeptical. Most SREs I know know multiple languages. That goes for SRE-SWEs and SRE-SEs.