SysAdmin to DevOps?

[Mastic_Warrior]

@et_tu_brute

I’m in the middle of this journey and have found it hard to be taken seriously in DevOps related interviews coming from more traditional sysadmin activities. To the point where every interview I’ve had has asked why I didn’t get a CS degree if I was interested in “developer” work.

I know I commented in your other thread, and this one may get necro’d, but I think that you are interviewing at the wrong places, or you just don’t have enough experience to counter the arguments. There is no need to have CS degree if you want to be a developer. The Software Engineering degree and path is more than suited for that. If you want to architect stuff, that is where a CS degree would be better suited. It does not take much to be a coder honestly.

I would have countered with something like, “I did choose to do a CS track because CS does not guarantee that I would have a solid software, networking, and hardware troubleshooting background. There are developers that cannot even setup their IDE, let alone troubleshoot computer issues. For DevOps, you need to have solid all around working knowledge of the back ends and the front ends, and everything in between.”

One thing that I would like to stress about interviewing is to learn how and when to take control of the interview process to achieve you goals. Remember that the questioning goes both way. It is not just to see if they think you are a good fit for their desired outcomes, it is also for you to ask them questions to see where they fit in you career path and goals. If their moral compass does not fit with yours, walk away. If they seem to pushy or you feel uneasy or uncomfortable about something and you cannot resolve it during the interview, walk away. Don’t get to cocky, but remember that they need you just as much as you need a job. It is okay to push back because, if they were not interested, they would have never called [you in].

[anon85095355]

@et_tu_brute

every interview I’ve had has asked why I didn’t get a CS degree if I was interested in “developer” work.

what the actual fuck

what kind of companies are those?

where’s all that “you don’t need a CS degree to be a software developer” we can see all over youtube (from people with CS degree)?

[risk]

@et_tu_brute

I’m in the middle of this journey and have found it hard to be taken seriously in DevOps related interviews coming from more traditional sysadmin activities. To the point where every interview I’ve had has asked why I didn’t get a CS degree if I was interested in “developer” work.

Depending on the tone of the question, it could be a fair question, or it could be snarky/demeaning.

It could be the interviewers were just poorly trained, you would do well to ask them, why they would be asking that - since most people in the industry keep saying how background doesn’t matter as long as you have the knowledge, the skill, and culture fit to do the job.

Do you care to share the company names or would that be to de-anonymyzing? (I’ll take the names over a PM if you don’t want to post publicly).

@et_tu_brute

It really seems like many companies are treating DevOps/SRE positions as the dumping ground for low quality CS majors they feel wouldn’t cut it in SWE roles, this mentality is reflected in compensation and work hours for positions.

If you apply for a “pure dev” position, do your interviews, and they’re not sure, but you mention something sys admin-y on your resume or mention it in interview, they might decide to “re-interview” you for a SWE/DevOps position. What you may lack in theoretical algorightm knowledge, you may make up (and more?) for in systems knowledge, and two together may make you a useful DevOps/SRE person.

Most places determine pay by having some kind of job ladder, where you get paid more for more responsibility. Each rung on the ladder corresponds to a band of pay.

“work hours” shouldn’t really be up for discussion. Typically there’d be normal business hours ; for DevOps once in a while you’d typically get an oncall shift. That ideally should never be 24/7 and should be compensated.

Ideal rotation size (number of people) and length varies from company to company and org to org. Where I work, 3 people is considered not sustainable, 6 people is “ideal” minimum, 10-12 people works and is ok, but at that point you may want to consider sharding the team along technology lines. So instead of 10-12 people caring about a lot of stuff, you have 2 groups of 5-6 people in each caring about half of a lot of stuff.

For example, we have two tiers of oncall compensation depending on oncall response time for the oncall rotation you’re a part of. While you’re oncall, you get compensated for time you’re oncall outside of regular business hours. If you’re response time for your rotation is <= 5min (from receiving a page, to fingers on keyboard working on a problem… plenty of time to get out of the shower typically, or wake up early morning) you get 66% of your base pay for time you spend oncall . (33% for 15m+response time). There’s no expectation to be online and working while oncall, unless you’re paged.
This means that if you’re oncall for well behaved services, you just get paid extra for not doing much extra. If your service sucks, you’re paid less than business hours for lots of work … you’re financially incentivized to make the service not suck … beyond it being a part of your core job.

[et_tu_brute]

@risk

Do you care to share the company names or would that be to de-anonymyzing? (I’ll take the names over a PM if you don’t want to post publicly)

Sure I don’t mind talking about the mess that was interviewing. IBM, Amazon, Facebook, were the most hostile ones I can think of.

IBM is a dumpster fire so no harm in being gated from the job over not being a CS student, their programming interview was a disaster that expected I’d import pandas to do some CSV analysis with no indication outside libraries were expected.

Amazon the interviewer asked why I didn’t commit to CS if I was interested in software engineering as a career. They didn’t seem to like my explanation that my degree was taught under the engineering department but focused on system design and business integration rather than AI theory and algorithm complexity in my senior year.

Facebook the interviewer asked a lot of probing questions about my algorithms abilities and commented that CS students were preferred as they had more advanced algorithm exposure to “do the real work”

Keep in mind my entire interview exposure was during the pandemic and I might not have been dealing with the normal process

[anon85095355]

@et_tu_brute

IBM, Amazon, Facebook, were the most hostile ones I can think of

what the actual fuck

that was unexpected

that’s bad, but have you gotten algorithms and programming figured out?

have you got a good github?

[risk]

When I interview folks I tend to pose a problem and then let them tease out some of the parameters of the interview.

So e.g. pandas … if they’d asked if they can use it, I’d ask why? and I’d expect an answer along the lines of “it’s got a relatively efficient albeit somewhat limited parser written in C” and it’s common these days with all the cool kids using it for ML. As long as we can hold a dataset in ram. That’d take a whole 30s-60s. From there we could discuss inner workings of data frames and memory layout, python object models and metaclasses, or we could go back to the original problem… In general the goal would be to find the edges of the candidates knowledge and abilities and confidently recommend hire/no hire and if hire then at what level.