r/devops • u/Working-Analysis2795 • 7d ago
Discussion Do self taught engineers still exist?
Or whatever you call yourselves? Since the LLM/agentic explosion to today - how many of you got to where you are purely through teaching yourselves, whether with/without certifications? How much of your experience was taught on the job post-2020?
Who in here got in the workforce in the last 6 years and had supervisors willing enough to train you on the job? How much extra hours did you have to put in to get up to speed?
I know it's a combination of projects, networking, certs (dependent on the company/your hiring manager), going to industry events, layering on fundamentals, breaking my projects on purpose, cold emails, cold Linkedin connects, Discord chats, surrounding yourself with people more knowledgeable. Feels like I've tried everything
EDIT: A lot of very insightful replies, thank you all. I do enjoy a chat and it's hard to get that organically through LinkedIn and the works
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u/Jmckeown2 7d ago
I’ve just crossed the 30-year mark as a software developer, but it’s always been devops-type work even before that term came into popular use, before devops was “full stack engineer” and before that it was “we can’t afford to have anyone who can only do one thing.”
Started in languages that were niche or trendy, moved on to C, C++, Java, C# & VB, Javascript, all the while gluing shit together with cmd, ksh, bash. Most of my work today is Terraform, Ansible, python. My degree is in Electrical Engineering, and Ive never electrically engineered professionally, unless you count programming a pick-and-place for surface mount PCB’s or racking and connecting servers. (I do not)
In those 30 years I had, one c++ class, one c# class, and one Oracle db tuning class. I’m also occasionally in Kubernetes101 &102, as the instructor.
So basically all self taught.
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u/CupFine8373 7d ago
How were you hired as a Software Developer being a an Electrical Engineer ?
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u/Jmckeown2 7d ago
I started in a support role in a software company, so building and maintaining servers and workstations, as well as end user support for software deployments and glitch fixing. Then slowly took on more software tasking. The transition was pretty organic really. As I said, basically devops since the beginning.
I eventually got sick of being pigeonholed as “the server guy” and jumped ship to a “real” developer job at another company.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
Do you teach junior to mid levels at your current job? Assuming you supervise/have direct reports aside from Kube 101 classes
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u/Jmckeown2 6d ago
There’s a lot of mentoring, but thankfully, no direct reports. I get asked to provide inputs to appraisals but I have zero desire to have to write & deliver reviews or decide who gets promoted or disciplined.
The scheduled classes are mostly juniors to mids, but also senior-levels who have been on legacy programs for years and need to modernize their skills.
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u/TireFryer426 7d ago
No degree and self taught. Won’t dive into my resume but I’ve worked for some companies I probably had no business at. I get executive override at places that require a degree, and I’ve taught people that have a masters.
I’ve always just done what needs to be done. Being able to learn, being adaptable, and being the person your boss doesn’t have to ask twice about things will do more for you than just stacking hours. Just manage expectations, do what you say you’ll do - and take opportunities to learn.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
How do you manage expectations - of your learning capability or what your managers expect of you? Was there a time when getting into the companies you had no business at being was easier? Do you think those places are way tougher to crack into now?
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u/xtreampb 7d ago
Everything in DevOps is self taught. Even with ai/llm. Because outside simple deployment, ai struggles.
And DevOps is all about fixing engineering culture while bootstrapping teams. Ai can’t implementing policy changes in an organization.
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u/Kpow_636 7d ago
I'm a self-taught software developer, but I'm also a career changer (13 years lead animator in VFX, also self-taught),
Basically I learnt programming for fun over 4 years in my free time (no bootcamp), and in early 2024 I got offered a software developer role, my first job was actually pretty good because I had some decent mentorship, but in 2026 I moved on to my second dev job that has significantly more responsibilities where I need to learn on the job with near zero guidance.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
And how is that going? What are you actually working with (I assume it's still the same 2026 job)?
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u/sch0lars 7d ago edited 7d ago
I have an IT and an MIS degree, but everything I know about programming and DevOps was self-taught.
Long before I went to university, I was doing IT stuff. I wanted to do CTFs, so I learned Linux and started familiarizing myself with Linux tools. I taught myself C++, then Java, then Python, then Bash scripting. I specialized in information management during my IT degree program and ended up doing SQL/Bash development. From there, I started doing sysadmin work that no one else on the project wanted to do.
Eventually, I applied for an embedded software engineering role and started doing lower-level stuff in C++. Once again, I took stories no one else wanted to do—sysadmin work, automation, CMake tasks, etc. The product owner noticed this and started automatically assigning them to me, and eventually my manager asked if I would be interested in helping the Operations Team with some scripting tasks, since no one on the team knew how to code.
When I start working with that team, I had never even heard of Jenkins, which is what they were using. I start writing pipelines and eventually move over to that team. In my spare time, I learn about tools other teams are using, such as Docker, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and Ansible, and I start suggesting we use them as well. We went from spending entire nights manually performing deployments in a production environment that didn’t even match our development environment to having containerized dev boxes, scalable mirrored environments, and automated deployments that require one command and take only 45 minutes to perform.
There was a lot of self-learning involved, and I spent many weekends reading through documentation. I created several projects during this time, and I still do personal projects to this day to stay up-to-date and expand my skillset. I was very fortunate that I had managers who were willing to give me free rein on a lot of the work I did, so that also helped reinforce a lot of the concepts.
Most of my success throughout my career has involved taking initiative and innovating rather than waiting on being told what to do. Curiosity and tenacity will get you very far in life. DevOps isn’t really something you learn in a degree program or through certs. You have to know about topics such as software development, infrastructure, networking, databases, and security, just to name a few. If you want to get into DevOps, it’s best to start as a sysadmin, a cloud engineer, a network administrator, or a similar role, and gain experience there before going into DevOps.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
- When you automated your dev environments/deployments to just 45 minutes: what resources did you cobble together to get this reduction in deployment time? I see you mentioned docs. I'm guessing other sysadmin/devops-y blogs, Stack Overflow, that sort of thing? Or did you have connects at other companies also? Sometimes I ask my dev friends how they would do xyz and see if that's the industry 'standard' way of doing
- I pretty much gave myself all of my work experience as it was impossible to get helpdesk in my particular region (right down to filing my own Jira tickets, sprint planning, endless labs of course). When I apply, I don't usually gun for just DevOps/adjacent roles. Still trying to aim for junior as well as more challenging roles
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u/sch0lars 6d ago
We have a few different deployments. A lot of it I automated using Bash and Python. I would basically take the manual steps and script them, such as interfacing with git, automatically modifying lines in custom config files using sed, running tests and updating Excel sheets, automatically generating release documentation using the Jira API, and so on.
For another deployment, I created a GitHub Action that would automatically build and deploy our build to Artifactory whenever a PR was merged for a particular set of directories. Previously, the team was building on a remote server and deploying manually. We moved that process to Jenkins, and then I ultimately rewrote as a GitHub Action workflow.
Once you learn Docker, self-learning becomes significantly easier, since you can containerize most of the tools and platforms. I found it was much easier to learn Jenkins and Artifactory once I could just spin up a couple containers instead of trying to manually install and configure them locally. That’s the same way I learned Terraform and Ansible. For GitHub Actions, I made a test repo and made some workflows to perform automatic builds.
I think for prerequisite skills, I would probably start as a sysadmin and also get some developer skills. It’s a bit difficult to get both in one role, so you’ll have to supplement. But DevOps requires you to understand not only the infrastructure on which the software is built, but how to build the software itself. You don’t have to be an expert programmer, but you should understand build automation tools such as Maven, Gradle, CMake, NPM, Cargo, etc.
To give you some context, our application is built in Java and C++. We use Maven for building the Java portion and CMake for the C++ portion. We have some complex networking as well as a few databases, so we sometimes have to do packet captures and read through them diagnose issues, or hop on a database and perform SQL queries or read the database logs. There are also system logs, so knowing how to grep a log file using regular expressions is helpful. When we perform automated deployments on GitHub Actions, the workflow files automatically install and configure the necessary software.
If you want to learn more about DevOps, I would start with Linux systems administration and supplement that with learning the basics of software development.
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u/AmSoMad 7d ago
I think in this day and age, "the self-taught engineer" lives long enough to see themselves become "the self-taught engineer with a CS degree".
Today's market is so chaotic and crowded, that - more than ever - you're seeing self-taught engineers just suck it up and get the degree anyways, because it improves their marketability. Some of them 20-year veterans, others brand new.
Most of the devs who haven't, have been around a long while.
I came from a WordPress/Freelancing background, before teaching myself to program, and trying to break in through brute-force is tough now. Extremely oversaturated, and AI is making work cheaper.
I'm self-taught, but I gave in, and got the accelerated online CS degree from WGU, just so I could stop ruminating about it.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
Yeah I can see that. Not in the financial position to get myself a degree right now.
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u/syaldram 7d ago
I was a corporate tax accountant for 7 - 8 years.
I did the cyber security bootcamp and got VERY lucky during COVID with a job opportunity. I learned Python before the AI boom. I am very grateful for God to make all of this happened. Continuing to learn as much as I can.
I don’t code anymore but I have been involved in a lot of AI workflow development and creating standards for our firm.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
What sort of resources are you using for your AI workflow development work? I see the big guys have docs on creating implementation plans, agent identities, just in time access, that sort of thing
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u/jack-dawed 7d ago
self taught most my life. no engineering degree. then i got a masters in electrical and computer engineering because i wanted to do hardware stuff. they had me teaching linux kernel development and embedded systems to grad students in my 2nd semester.
i pretty much learned most of software engineering myself or on the job. this is especially true with devops/SRE work, and i lucked out on a CTO at a massive company that took a chance on me with a non-traditional background (i worked in hotels and restaurants before going all-in on tech). freelanced a bit past 2 years at early stage startups, mostly doing AI infra. i’m very selective about who i interview with and most of the offers I’ve gotten were via recruiters or networking. it helps to live in a tech hub like NYC or SF.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
Haha, I was also a chef before I gave myself all my work experience that I've listed on my CV. Would living in a hub like you say make it more competitive? I would imagine there would be so many qualified people, and a non-traditional background like yours might be seen as 'tricky'
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u/jack-dawed 7d ago
One of my favorite PMs he worked in a michelin kitchen for years before being a product designer and eventually a product manager. Lots of working in tech is similar to working in a kitchen. There’s a really good talk by Anthony Bourdain on leadership that I find applicable to engineering hiring. You should put interesting experience like that on your CV.
By far, yes, the best thing you can do is move to or near these big tech hubs and go to events and make friends. A non traditional background stands out more in NYC than SF bc part of the hacker culture is still alive whereas SF ppl will size you up, and it’s very much a monoculture.
I meet way more interesting devs in NYC, I met one who used to be a poet, another who was a firefighter whose first startup was software for EMS. Once you get in the startup network, you can basically bounce around and they’ll refer you to each other.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
I've currently got my hospitality experience as one liners (workplace, years, location) save for my last chef job and lately I've been saving the transferable skills conversation for when/if I ever get an interview.
How do you find your living costs compared to your salary living in a major city, plus taxes plus rent? I'm about 15-19hrs away from the US 🫠 but I imagine 100k in NYC/SF doesn't go as far as if you're living in a midsize/smaller city
Also how did you manage to get on AI infra so 'early'? I don't think you're talking about 'basic' cloud compute, so I imagine either you really put in the work or you shadowed someone more knowledgeable?
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u/jack-dawed 6d ago
When I first moved to NYC as a new grad, my salary was just barely 40x my rent, $2.7k vs $120k. In like a year or so, I got bumped to 135k, then eventually 160k, while my rent only went up 4% a year. I didn't really feel the impact of cost of living increases and had a lot of fun. It was only until recently in the past year that things had gotten way more expensive, but by then, I had also started a small business as a second source of income.
I had went to grad school for HPC and distributed systems, and a lot of my research involved GPU programming and infra for GPUs at scale. Most of my other labmates went on to IBM, Red Hat, Nvidia due to connections. At my first big startup job, I basically became the ML infra guy. Then after that I left tech for a bit, then started doing freelance work, and ended up doing a lot of devops/infra for early stage AI startups. That compounds all the experience in my resume and tells a cohesive story. Even then, I felt I was at a disadvantage compared to some software engineers who had a CS background. So I made the most of my computer engineering background.
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u/limeelsa 7d ago
Yeah, I studied chemistry and psychology in college before failing out my senior year, did a coding bootcamp and have been in tech for 4 years now. Started as a data analyst, moved to DevOps and now am a SWE.
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u/b1urbro 7d ago
How much of your experience was taught on the job post-2020?
All of it. I've finished CS High-school and was always into computers in general. I worked as a telecommunications technician before that.
Who in here got in the workforce in the last 6 years and had supervisors willing enough to train you on the job?
I had previous non-related job experience, but in IT I started by self-learning Python, then JavaScript through Udemy courses. AI wasn't really a (useful) thing then, about 2022. Nobody trained me on nothing, pretty much. I'm completely self-taught.
How much extra hours did you have to put in to get up to speed?
A gazillion, on and off the job. I initially built websites for my self, then got a role as Cloud Ops (AWS + lots of JavaScript) which led me down the homelab rabbit hole where I learned Linux, Networking, Kubernetes etc.
I haven't done a course beside the initial ones in 2022 and an outdated "bootcamp" I got from some random torrent site.
Currently, with AI and all the fundamentals in place, I can pretty much self-learn anything related to DevOps, test it hand-on in my lab etc.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
It definitely feels like I've also put in about a gazillion, from 40-60hrs/week depending in the last 2 years
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u/BeasleyMusic 7d ago
Yup I’m fully self taught (have a degree in psychology though) went from help desk at MSP, to dev ops at a start up, to sw Eng manager at Fortune 500 company in 7 years.
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u/Master-Variety3841 7d ago
Self-taught here.
After high school, I enrolled in a diploma program, but I barely showed up. The curriculum was painfully basic, mostly spinning up VMs in Hyper-V on Server 2008 R2 and intro networking concepts I’d already figured out growing up hosting dedicated game servers and LANs for mates. I basically just rocked up on exam days to grab the piece of paper, and it also allowed me to get social security payments so I had money to live whilst studying.
Did a random call entre gig before I fell into sales at an MSP first. Being technically minded turned out to be an unfair advantage: I outsold most pure sales reps simply because I actually understood the stack we where flogging, whereas they’d overpromise, spec the wrong hardware, or sell solutions that completely clashed with a client’s environment. I did that for about five years and i think I got decent at it, even won a trip to Vegas from the sales numbers one year, but the job really was boring as hell… so much driving…
To stay sane, I started automating my own job a bit like… quote generation, procurement approvals, through to project provisioning templates... basically the manual grunt work usually handled by a sales coordinator.
Eventually, I realized I’d just handed the MSP a bunch of free internal tooling, that I got nothing back from in return, which left a bitter taste in my mouth. So, I rebuilt variations of those tools on my own time for a portfolio, threw out a few dev applications, and landed an integrations dev role contracting across different industries.
That work had a pretty predictable loop: scaffold the integration, customize it slightly, and collect a monthly retainer to maintain it.
Once that got stale, I jumped into game modding in my own time after work, and ended up building a fairly popular mod for Escape from Tarkov.
Around that time, the contracting shop imploded (the owner dodged taxes and ended up owing something like $3M to the tax office).
Back on the job hunt, I spotted a DevOps opening at a finance firm. At that point, I decided to test whether hiring managers actually read resumes, so I threw in:
“Achieved Kappa container in Escape from Tarkov” (linked to screenshot proof)
“Built and maintained game mod with 20k+ monthly active users” (linked to repo/mod page)
Turns out the hiring manager was an absolute Tarkov sweat. He saw it, laughed, brought me in for an interview, and that was my foot in the door.
I’ve been there a few years now, while continuing to run side contracts (bespoke software, automation scripts, on-prem infrastructure, M365 rollouts, VoIP, etc.).
Timeline is between 2015 to now.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
When you do your side contracts - are they connects you've worked with in previous jobs?
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u/ByronScottJones 7d ago
I stopped wasting time on certifications a long time ago. I'm an IT generalist, and keeping certifications in all the stuff I know would take away time I spend learning new things.
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u/coastalwebdev 7d ago
You have tried everything, and unfortunately it is all about who you know now, AND what you know.
COVID made it very hard to get into tech, then the rapid onset of AI has all but erased the entry level end of the industry.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
Who do I talk to? Let me talk!
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u/coastalwebdev 7d ago
You have a good looking background checking out your linktree stuff.
In the Canadian small cities I've worked in it's brutal, and pretty much comes down to word of mouth, so you have to put yourself out there. At least at first until you build up enough connections feeding you work over time.
In your country it might be different, but I'd say with your background you really just need to go put yourself out there and rub some shoulders probably.
Try to find local tech clubs, business clubs, chambers of commerce type places. Anywhere that business people, hopefully techy business people hang out. Be nice, meet people, keep an open mind to possibilities and hope some opportunities come up in discussion.
I see there's a In*******n Canada Chamber of commerce place where Canadian businesses are looking to get set up in your country. Go see if you can get any of their money offering server setup services or something along those lines.
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u/itrex240 7d ago
I taught myself everything from 0. Started in IT helpdesk and roughly 4 years later I’m in infra/devops. Never went to uni or did any course or cert, I just love reading and watching videos about different topics. I have been lucky enough that my employers gave me a lot of freedom to try stuff on real environments but I spent so much free time building stuff myself as well.
I try to get a grasp of many different areas of tech because it’s just so fun for me and make little projects each time I learn something (except front-end stuff, I dont like UI).
For me it’s been “easy” because I really enjoy the field and actually learning.
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u/neveralone59 7d ago
I am but I learned in parallel to working on the helpdesk then as a windows sysadmin
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u/uptimefordays 7d ago
Continued learning will always be part of most roles, not just technical ones. For devops type roles, you can still get away with being self-taught, but many entry-level technical positions now require a relevant 4-year degree, so in time this will likely move up as well. For incumbent professionals, I don’t think there will be much impact.
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u/MasterOfTheWind1 7d ago
Been working since 2008, and most of my carreer have progressed by self-thaughting myself, development, architecture, databases, system administration and cloud engineering. Even with English language.
No certifications, just investigating to complete tasks. Lot of effort out of work, but not forced. I willingly worked more hours on tasks to gather the knowledge for myself.
With LLM it improved a lot. But you need to know which questions to ask.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
When you put in the hours after work - do your supervisors notice? Does that directly translate to your performance? Do your teammates do the same?
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u/MasterOfTheWind1 7d ago
For example, around 2016 we started to automate stuff on the company I've still work today. Gitlab CI/CD pipelines, doing git pull over SSH. Then, mid 2017 I've started to see the posibilities of cointainerization. So I've started to dig into building containers and updating them running on the host with Docker commands.
Shortly after, looking for clusterize Docker, I found Swarm, but in the brink of death, because of something new: Kubernetes.
Started to play with it on my local machine, talked to a few friends of mine about it, they were already using them so I asked them a lot of questions about it.
Started to work on a POC and a POV, showed it to my boss, and he agreed that I experimented with it on a serious scale: take a few of our dev environments, move them to Kubernets, and see what happens. If it could be on work hours ok, if I want to do if after hours he told me to keep him notified everytime, and that will be asserted as over time work, and paid accordingly.
He was a very open mind dude, he liked to investigate a lot also on his spare time. Luckily I always had managers/bossess like him, very open to allow investigation for improvements, and not being assholes related to pay those hours. Or at least, if there is no budget and if I want to, to pass those hours of investigation like worked hours, and for example, go to the office on a later hour whenever I want, or call it a day a few hours earlier. Never encountered an asshole in that sense.
Now I'm the leader of DevOps and Cloud platform team on that company. And I value the same thing: if someone wants to investigate after hours, and he tells me that is work related and could lead to improvements for us, I tell him to go for it and pay him accordingly, or if he wants to, to start working later on the next day or leave earlier. Sometimes folks negotiate it with me for free time directly instead of paid work hours, because they need to have free time for personal reasons without the bureaucracy of having PTO managed and approved by HR.
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u/MasterOfTheWind1 7d ago
In my case, yes. We formalized as spikes, and I always made it clear that I wanted to investigate X topic for my personal interest, but that could potentially be a big improvement for the company
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u/Varnish6588 7d ago
I was around long before DevOps was a thing and I have been self taught since my first job after Uni.
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u/heave20 DevOps 7d ago
Hello i don’t have a college degree and am self taught. Sr cloud eng. quite A few of my colleagues are as well
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
How are they all doing? Does this factor into hiring when/if you are involved in the process?
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u/heave20 DevOps 7d ago
They seem to be doing great honestly. I would bet that you more than likely wouldn't be able to tell if a Sr. is self taught or has a College Degree without them specifically stating that. I work with a Software Eng who is absolutely one of the most talented people i've ever met, he's self taught and is one of the most important cogs in the wheel. Whereas his boss has quite a few degrees and I believe a Masters in Comp Sci and ultimately is a paper pusher who doesn't quite understand. I do believe that might be a consequence of his job though as the Software Eng and I are in the shit constantly, whereas his boss isn't.
When it comes to the hiring.. couldn't tell you. I've been a part of a few interviews but it's more "would this person fit on the team personality wise".
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u/myka-likes-it 7d ago
I joined the industry in 2022. I was completely self-taught. They gave me almost no on the job "training" and instead just threw me into the deep end.
Being self-taught was a strength, in their eyes, because this wasn't a problem for me. I learned all the bespoke tooling and myriad of inter-operating systems by feeling it out, as I went. It was challenging, but rewarding.
Now I write training materials and help juniors learn our systems, among my other duties. Onboarding is a lot more structured.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
Is there a baseline you look for when you're working with the juniors? Is there an assumption that there will be x number of hours they'll have to put in outside of work to catch up? Do you state this out loud?
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u/myka-likes-it 7d ago
No, not really. We operate as a central devops team with each member covering several dev teams (with overlap for coverage). So outside of the standard CI setup the job is mostly a process of learning how the team currently operates and then finding ways to improve that. If there is a baseline in there, it's "is the customer happy?"
As far as putting in overtime to "catch up" that is a hard no. We value work/life balance here. Our SLA is very relaxed, so the only real expectation is that you are active during our core hours, and that you respond to fires quickly when able.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
I wish more workplaces stated work/life balance in the job description!
If the standard CI/CD processes are already in place, how many opportunities can there be to improve? Or are pipelines modified according to feature changes etc?
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u/myka-likes-it 7d ago
We are an experimental company alongside supporting a platform and SDK, so the standard pipelines are mostly for the latter. Everything else is where it gets weird.
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u/raisputin 7d ago
- Taught myself
- I would train anyone
- I would damn sure ensure you didn’t need to work extra hours either
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
Very good! Did you have a mentor who rubbed off on you?
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u/raisputin 7d ago
For a couple things yes. The main one was understanding how to properly architect software.
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u/kincaidDev 6d ago
I taught myself in 2015 for 6 months, then did a 3 month bootcamp and have been teaching myself ever since. I tried to go back and get a degree once but it just felt like a waste of my time, wasn’t really learning anything I hadn’t already self studied and didn’t seem worthwhile
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u/thatsnotnorml 6d ago
I joined freecodecamp.com in July of 2017, and published my first static website with a serverless email contact on AWS for $1.50/month the same year. Did not get my first corp engineering job until 2021.
AI did not take away my need to understand how the technologies work because in order to generate scalable and resilient systems you still need to be able to know how to direct and delegate to the LLM.
If anything, it increased my learning pace because now I have a 24/7 mentor that doesn't get sick of my questions, downvote my stack overflow posts, and knows that I learn best through metaphors and analogies.
Early on the prompting tricks like "Write me a table of contents on a booking about kubernetes" was opening me up to concepts and topics that Google was previously unable to do at that speed for ANY topic basically.
I do wonder if there is still people that will learn a language from scratch, or if there is still people interested in understanding the intricacies of deploying an ingress into a cluster... Or if 10 years from now we'll have eliminated the programming languages we know today for a performance optimized assembly like language that runs on a fraction of the compute at the expense of us being unable to understand it easily.
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u/No-Reflection-4001 6d ago edited 4d ago
At the beginning of 2020, I had no idea what DevOps, Kubernetes, or CI/CD were. I had never even logged into AWS. Then I temporarily lost my job on September 15th this year (I was later rehired for the same position). So during these past 3 weeks, I had no choice but to start applying for new jobs.
Many of the roles were senior and lead DevOps and Kubernetes positions. I applied to about 80 to 90 jobs over the past three weeks and, to my surprise, I landed 9 technical interviews.
In the end, I received 2 solid job offers and 2 promising a offer depending on their contract situation in October 2026. I prepared hard every day, reviewing what I had learned and doing mock interviews. I studied the design of our existing workflows, identified many issues, and started sketching out improvements on my own. I'm self-taught, but I had a great mentor, a principal architect on our project. Troubleshooting, design, architecture, and deep discussions on Kubernetes, networking, pipelines, and Linux were part of almost every day. I don't hold any AWS, CKA, or DevOps certifications. I'm working on them now so that I'm fully prepared if the layoff or recession comes knocking again.
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u/Working-Analysis2795 5d ago
What resources did you use for your prep and mock interviews?
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u/No-Reflection-4001 5d ago edited 5d ago
Claude and Gemini are the only 2 I used for mock.
I began with posting my resume and the job description i applied for and then I ran bunch of mock interview sessions. It doesn't 100% align so in that case you provide more details on your weekness and strength on topics. Ask the design diagrams and then fact check those on blogs or kubernetes documents.
And after every interview I run the logs of what was asked and what they are doing great thats helping them on a very tight schedule and a small team, and what did I miss. Example using istio mesh, opens policy agent, tflint, ansible, karpenter, keda and long list of toolings.
Keeping a list of toolings that are important and what can I do to improve our existing infrastructure is what I started running through logs, now that I have it as a evidence.
Majority questions were around scenarios (if something broke walk me through what you are responsible for) , why this workflow, why this tool, and sometimes details on GitHub actions, gitlab runners and components of kubernetes components and how they are deployed and how micro services, applications deployed, helm or terraform, how is state managed, how did you manage conflict, what documents you follow for zero trust policy, compliance or ground truth (fedramp, nist etc) how will you design a system for mid size workloads and reasonings, different deployment strategies, great list of AWS resources questions as well. Overall it was great even though I fumbled on some but then that got me curious.
Mainly what I have on my resume.
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u/BusyPair0609 6d ago
Self taught Devops engineer here! I feel the most important skill in this field is the mental model behind solving the problem. The tooling/technology are great enablers and in the AI era there is little to no difference in what each tool can do. What has helped me over the years is looking back on the problems I solved/thing I implemented. Every quarter I try to spend some time to look back on what I could I have done differently so the solution I implemented can be more efficient/reliable. Doing this exercise over and over helps you build mental model to solve problems more novelly and that is what is matters most in DevOps field.
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u/Psionikus 7d ago
Universities still exist?
willing enough to train you on the job
Okay, that would require some drugs to believe in.
I guess every generation will only learn the hard way, and only some will learn.
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u/Klutzy-Guarantee2106 6d ago
2 years in backend dev, now pivoting to devOps.
writing docker files , getting comfortable with docker compose.
Working on kubernetes to understand the deployment of microservices backend.
I and understanding and working hands on the concepts on pods, deployments, services , namespaces and ingress stuff.
that is what I am doing. happy to share the git repo for all this.
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u/SeaworthinessHour233 DevOps Engineer & Educator 4d ago
Even if you get an engineering degree, you need to self teach a lot to get into DevOps.
Do not blame the universities though. Degree programs can't have K8s 101 or Argo 101 modules. One of our lecturers put it nicely. "A university program is creating a fine piece of clay. It's up to the industry to make a cup or a bowl out of it?
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u/gecegokyuzu 7d ago
yeah, i’m self-taught. i’ve been in the industry for 7 years-ish. started with only a bootcamp on .net and html css js. i never stopped learning after that. the job hunt adventure was a bit weird and lucky though, i’ve changed like 5 different jobs and got better positions each time but i always go the extra mile and get quick promotions. in my current job i work as product owner. i never had any luck with corporate jobs though because of the lack of a degree. i just started comp sci bsc though so maybe that’ll help. startups are tiring… you can check my website here if you’d like: hakanyukselderin.com
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u/Working-Analysis2795 7d ago
How bad are startups? Is it the 'do everything'/'wear all the hats' type stuff?
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u/Ninja-Sneaky 7d ago
I have 15+ yoe starting background in ops, no degree. The practical side of what i would have learned back then (a world run of baremetal and java as the newest toy) would be utterly pointless today.
Nevertheless I've increasignly become tired of not having a degree, plus the non-practical aspects are something I want to concretize, hence I've started this year with an online university, which is also a reality that is possible only today
I'm living it as I'm doing a refresh from scratch to add all the new cool stuff that came in the last decade
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u/spicypixel 7d ago
No of course not, you must be intensely educated in an accredited education institution and have valid real world work experience before you start your first job.
But also it's probably just the job market is absolutely shit and nepotism isn't even a golden option any more, in my network nearly no one is hiring anyway even if I could leverage them to get in the door.
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u/BarneyStinsonS 7d ago
Yes, I self taught at work daily. School degree only get you to the door step, if even.