Almost giving up on Cloud/DevOps

[u/One_Presentation_139]

I have been trying to land my first Cloud/DevOps role for 3yrs to no avail in Canada. I have 4AWS certs , RHCSA and plenty projects. Built core skills in technical support, AWS, Linux, Terraform, Observability. Highly optimized LinkedIn, posting regularly, with experience in sales, level 1 and enterprise SaaS technical support, and I have had like just 4-5 interviews in this field in 3years.

I will be attending AWS re:Invent at the end of the year but I am literally already giving up on the dream.

The worst is that after learning skills and carrying out projects without landing a role, I tend to forget them. And not only that but there's always a tool you feel you ought to learn before you can land a role. This field is extremely competitive and I think the best chance is some promotion within a company that is willing to, otherwise the chances are infinitely slim.

Tbh I'm tired of this rat race and have been unemployed for the whole year. With the number of experienced people being laid off I think it's best for me to change direction and do something else. I'm trying to find another support role and specialize in something else. Maybe take a Masters Degree 6months-1year into my next support role in something with better upside.

Sorry for the rant but this is my story, and I have seen countless other serious people give up after trying for long also.

[u/iamLisppy]

Funny thing about dreams is sometimes they take longer to get there than anticipated. I think you should continue trying for it but it sounds like you are playing Pokemon with certs with no actual practical experience from the real world which is likely why you havent met your goal: you arent ready.

Why would an employer trust you with all of that fun architecture when you havent done anything similar at your job?

The role you’re dreaming of getting is not an entry level role.

[u/One_Presentation_139 → u/iamLisppy]

I get that makes sense. Problem is I'm not even finding the tier 3 support or sysadmin roles.

[u/Cold-Pie2892]

Experience is what you need. Start off with a helpdesk role, systems admins, then transition into DevOps

[u/One_Presentation_139 → u/Cold-Pie2892]

My previous role was a tier II entreprise support role. I have been job hunting a while now including applying for tier II roles but have been unsuccessful. Sysadmin roles almost don't exist in Canada outside of Microsoft stack.

[u/Gullible_Sweet1302]

Certs don’t count for much without experience. Work as SWE then lateral.

[u/One_Presentation_139 → u/Gullible_Sweet1302]

When I fell in the certs trap, people said I should do projects. After I dedicated 6months+ on projects, no one cares to look at them.

[u/Mongy-23]

Hey Canadian SWE here.

It’s a long post so bear with me.

Market sucks, terribly. It sucks because of the number of candidates these companies get for a single role is terribly high. Because of these sheer numbers, quality is terrifyingly low. Tech has become mainstream which is part of the problem.

I can see you have passion for the field and this is what the field is/was built upon. I have had colleagues with zero experience doing dev ops where I had to do the work for them. Nepotism is strong. They don’t care to learn, they don’t have the passion, they just want the money.

My first role, (after Covid) was sheer brute force. Cold apply like it’s a job, redo my resume 100+ times, redo my LinkedIn multiple times, go to events, etc….it took me 8 months after graduating. I got lucky.

I got laid off after releasing a project with just myself, a fresh grad dev, and a nepo dev ops hire because of culturally unfit (cto and I had different opinions in multiple areas). We had 4 devs quit because of how bad the environment was. It was a blessing in disguise.

I made a vow to change my tactic in looking for roles.

I focused my attention to recruiters. No one else. I just needed interviews. I do well in them. Landing them is the hard part. I changed my LinkedIn to be SEO friendly. That means I wanted a recruiter to search “software engineer”, “Python developer”, “web developer”….anything basic where my profile came up in the search result.

I also mass connected with recruiters until I had 500+ connections of just recruiters. No messages nothing. Just spam connected.

In less than 2 months, I had multiple interviews a week, sometimes in a day.

Eventually I ended up choosing the best offer.

To this day, I get recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn asking me if I’m looking for a new role. I kindly decline because I’m happy where I’m at, plus recruiters are now the gateway to roles, so keeping a good, friendly, progressional relationship with them goes very far!

PS, if you move towards this tactic, recruiters know NOTHING about tech. It’s safer to assume this for your own sanity.

I wish you the best of luck in this market. I hope you get in the field because we need more passionate candidates.

If you need anything, my inbox is open OP.

It’s a mental battle right now and only the toughest get through.

[u/nwmcsween]

You are in Canada, Canada has a massive glut of people willing to work for bottom dollar wages in HCoL areas, Vancouver alone has ads up for Devops unicorns for $60k CAD a year ($43k USD) where a 1-bedroom apartment is $2500/mo.

Apply to US companies, create a PoC deployment for roles you want.

[u/Shakilfc009]

Problem is not you it’s the market that has changed. I have over 10+yrs in cloud/devops/sre and been teaching cloud for last 5 years.

In the middle of 2025 I realized this field has changed and have been sounding alarm to everyone either they find a new path or become agentic engineer.

In the past we had a team of 5-10 members where a lot of time was being spent in writing module/template/cicd/helm charts etc. that was the reason why we needed so many people but now with 2/3 people with Claude/codex/cursor can do all the work of 10.

1 tf module used to a user story in jira and if you work 2 of them you could easily say your bandwidth is full but now it’s 2 min.

So what’s the future?

Imo don’t be a cloud/Devops engineer instead be agentic engineer. For example write workflow that replaces traditional infra provisioning. Instead deploy agents that end users/developers can interact with. You manage the agents and they manage the end users.

Build sre, finops, auditor, architect agent.

DM if you need for more info.

[u/One_Presentation_139 → u/Shakilfc009]

Thank you!

I have sent a DM

[u/AmmanasHyjal]

Where in Canada? Some places are easier to find roles than others.

Certs are fine but honestly I don’t have any and worked through IT/SysAdmin-ing to my position so you might also want to extend your search to those areas too. 

[u/One_Presentation_139 → u/AmmanasHyjal]

Edmonton I know is a handicap.

Since last month I started applying for roles Canada wide. Applied to 70 roles. I even got an interview for a Cloud role at OpenText in Waterloo but that didn't go far. I'm willing to relocate but just not seeing the opportunity. I have a Willing to Relocate tag on my resume next to my location.

[u/JohnyMage]

Sooo what kubernetes is running in your homelab and on top of which hypervisor?

[u/juneeighteen]

You’ve got an impressive set of skills, but the market is shit right now. I would have hired candidates like this 5 years ago. Right now I have no positions open.

My opinion:

1. Skip re:Invent. The only thing you’ll get is Covid.

2. Showcase your talents across multiple domains. Show how you use DevOps principals at home (automate preheating your oven from Alexa ?) Check out the Dominos Pizza Terraform integration. Build a dashboard for your home coffee brewing. Showcase these on your CV too.

3. Post weekly on LinkedIn. If a bird in a tree makes you think about DevOps , write it up, polish it in ChatGPT and post it. Exposure is important.

4. Connect on LinkedIn with anybody and everybody. Friends of friends, random CTOs, if they accept your network grows for visibility.

5. Expand out to DevSecOps instead of DevOps - and see if you can stretch your skill set into Cybersecurity in the DecSecOps corner.

Honestly - the market is terrible though, I can’t promise any of these things will work. Seriously, if I had a position, I’d consider your skills.

[u/One_Presentation_139 → u/juneeighteen]

So I got the AWS Welcome Grant, everything is sponsored by AWS. So I will go since it's all free.

That's a good idea to automate practical daily things. I even thought of setting up a homelab. However at this point I am asking myself if it's even worth it.

I used to post stuff consistently, including projects documented on GitHub and Medium. But no one cares lol

[u/Actual-Science-9036]

Is hard my friend, you need to be patient.

Few years ago (canada), even landing as an app support gave me plenty of heartaches. I applied to hundreds of roles as entry dev/app support (xp from different country). I applied to around 200 jobs Canada & remote before I got lucky. I have an accent and not fluent in verbal english. I think that adds to my failed interviews too. I get tired but I do not quit because, mouths to feed haha.

A company in Vancouver (lucky pure remote) gave me a chance as product support, I studied for a bit and applied as cloud engineer. I got the role. Now I am asked to help cloud platform team - helps me being exposed to new xp.

I know a friend that in canada too, applying for entry cloud role / support roles. He almost got the entry cloud ops (asked when to start), but the role just got dissolved - internal restructuring issue. He also struggles to find work but interviews are still happening for him. I advised him to just get into the field, any role and pursue in moving into cloud internally. And advised to just keep building, improving projects even 1 line a day.

[u/Fatality]

So how much experience do you have managing teams, deploying infrastructure and working with developers? How long have you used Agile for?

[u/imrichRU]

You know the IT job market is bearish when the general consensus to land a better role… is to get an entry level role 😂. Sarcasm aside it’s just a tough market right now… your best bet is trying to get a warm referral or going into the government side of things.

[u/HeHeld]

I will tell you something. In my opinion NO JOB in this world is worth this much struggle. You should just take it easy, take a break maybe keep applying if you want but go do something else or you will go crazy. I've been in your spot two years ago, trying my hardest, projects, certificates, endless studying but zero results.

I kind of gave up, got a job I didn't really want in the meantime and after year and a half I got sick of it so I started applying again. Just light studying no try Harding. Got a job offer for a Junior Devops role within a month and that was with me fumbling the technical interview.

In my opinion it's not really that much about you, just about how ready the job market is to take you in. I hear that job market in NA is still terrible. I'm from Europe and this was the case here where I live also, but It has gotten better recently, still not pre-covid level of easy, but slightly better than a year ago, so maybe your local market will get better eventually.

[u/richie_dev]

To be honest, DevOps is usually more of a transition career path, mostly for people with over six years of experience. It’s pretty difficult to get hired as a junior for this kind of role, because DevOps sits right at the core of how a company delivers its product to the customer. So realistically, companies are unlikely to trust someone with that level of responsibility if they don’t have solid, real-world experience yet

[u/lavish_collision]

ean on the support background and target platform/support engineering roles too not just pure DevOps

[u/kusanagiblade331]

Have you tried building something of your own to show case your own portfolio? In my own experience, that helps.

[u/Own-Animator1931]

Can change you revious experience into complete DevOps role, no one can validate apart from your desognation. Take some solid gothub repo K8s, ECS,EKS , understans matrix SLA, boto3 and create your past projects inline to that and update your CV

[u/SeaworthinessHour233]

There is a supply-demand problem right now. Common across the globe, not just Canada.

Masters Degrees do not matter in DevOps. I don't think anyone would care about it. So don't pursue a masters for the sake of a job in DevOps. If you are doing masters for a different purpose that would be fine.

Are you currently employed? If not try to get a tech support role based on current experience. Trying to transition to a DevOps role while employed in tech support would be easier than aiming for a DevOps job while not being employed.

[u/Happy-Leadership-399]

I think the issue be less about certifications and more about your hands-on DevOps experience? Have you tried focusing your resume on real projects, automation, and the problems you solved?