We’ve been trying to grow our team for a few months now and the title we’re hiring for is Devops Engineer. One of the candidates our recruiters reached out to, let’s call him John, came back to us with a bunch of questions including:
How do you feel about hiring someone with a devops title?
It’s a very legittimate question, Devops is a cultural and professional movement, so how could it be a job title? What I argued in my reply to this fella is that Devops isn’t the job title, Devops Engineer is, and in this sense Devops is just a qualifier and I strongly believe a very useful one.
I really sympathise with those that are fighting hard to keep Devops real and avoid the same faith that some refer to as the sad commercialisation of Agile. My campaign to make of devops a job title isn’t a campaign to come up with a set of bullet points that define Devops as a job so that I can put it on a resume or build it into a product.
My argument here is that the guy I’m trying to hire, John, I want him to be a certain kind of guy and the best way I have to describe what I want is Devops Engineer. I’m looking for an operations guy , but I want him to be open to developers, consider engineering and the company as a whole, be focused on delivering value and not rathole into fights about technology or claim root access only on principle. I want that guy to have great communication skills and the interest to explore what’s besides his infrastructure, to be wanting to borrow as much good he can find in other disciplines across the organisation. And then of course there is the practical part, the desire to automate and escape a boring manual routine, the familiarity with cloud that willing or not has powered the movement, and even more specific things like configuration management. You may argue that this is just a good engineer or what systems engineers are becoming, in other words nothing new under the sun. And you may be right, but job titles are in many ways just another way to communicate, to broadcast an intent and a need.
So you know what I told John about hiring Devops Engineers? That I felt pretty damn proud about it. The true ones, not the ones slapping it on their CV to get a job, are fantastic engineers and I can’t but encourage them to start to respond to that qualifier. Likewise the companies and individuals seeking them out are likely the ones building great groups those people will want to be members of. Yes, the moment it becomes a keyword recruiters start to match against we’re likely to see a spur of fakes trying to land a job, but that’s nothing new under the sun.
Signed, a Devops manager
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An interesting and thought-provoking article. I was employed by a SaaS company that did ITSM software for about a year and never thought of myself as related to the concept of DevOps in the least, but this puts it in a whole new perspective. Thanks.
Hi James,
thanks for leaving a comment. That’s great to hear, and of course devops or not what you did does not change, but relating to that concept might help framing what you’re gonna do next and I think that’s where the real value is. Thanks!
Spike,
Great article, I am one of those recruiters looking for DevOps, actually a “DevOps Engineer” (yes its in the title!), but I need the real thing!
Your article really added some insight into our search. I realized that many candidates like James may not even have it on their resume, making our search all the more difficult. Our client – a large Trading Firm in Chicago – wants thought leaders on the subject or at the very least someone who deeply believes in this movement to help propagate it throughout the company. So you would think they would have it on the resume but maybe not!
So if you have any Chi-town DevOps fans send them our way! Thanks again for shedding a light on the subject! (Please ignore our website – new one coming out next week!)
Colleen
Hi Colleen,
thanks for your comment, your situation totally resonates with me. Among the things I’m doing for one of my clients is helping their recruiting department getting a better handle of DevOps and supporting the hiring process. There are many challenges associated with it, some old, but also some new unique ones due to this community being in its early stages. Going with it there is also a totally understandable resistance to label things that is not necessarily helping anybody, but it’s a delicate topic and striking a good balance is not an easy task.
I am just starting to hire for a DevOps Engineer for PacketVideo’s Charlotte office. I must say it seems pretty daunting Putting DevOps in the title is not attracting any candidates. When I search for DevOps in a job title on LinkedIn throughout the entire U.S. it only pulls up 8 people total. That is without any other search criteria period.
My quesiton would be – how do I attract DevOps people with this narrow of a title. Seems to me I need to come up with a better title that will garner a little more attention to my networking attempts. Is this really that narrow of a field?
Any suggestions are much appreciated.
Sincerely,
Cyndi Summers
Sr. Corporate Recruiter
PacketVideo
E-mail: summers@pv.com
Hi Cyndi,
I hear the pain, and given how relatively new the community is, it is indeed still somewhat of a narrow field. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are certainly people that have done this for a long time before the word Devops was even coined and there are people that do it now and do not associate themselves with that term, the comment James left being a good example. While I encourage people to use devops in their job title if they embody that spirit, this is far from a discussion that’s been settled so it’s probably not yet a good choice to find the right candidates. In the end, I think it’s more complicated than a title no matter what that title is, and my experience suggests there are better ways to get value out of Linkedin. As far as attracting Devops people I would recommend to focus on the traits rather than the title in your networking attempts, especially giving relevance to engineering achievements of your clients.
Hope that helps.
[...] One big reason devops makes sense in a job title [...]
Hi,
I see you signed that you are a DevOps Manager. What does this entail?
Thanks
Lisa
Hi Lisa,
thanks for stopping by and for your question. I’m managing an Operations team that does not use the term devops much at all if any, but heavily embodies the values and practices at the core of the devops movement. Being their manager, we reflect those things onto each other and since I’ve joined this side of the equation (I used to work as a systems engineer) I have got to appreciate the devops movement even more. You may argue that a lot of what I believe makes up for a devops manager would make for a good engineering manager or even just a good manager, but while that might be true, for me those traits came to be from the devops movement and therefore I make the association.
I see a devops manager as a sum of three things:
* A devops manager looks at business value. He is in some cases a in a better position to understand the direction of the product and he can then communicate that to his team and help them think in terms of added value to the business rather than just technology.
* A devops manager puts collaboration at the top of his priorities. Encouraging and facilitating work with other teams (devs, QA, security, networks) is high priority.
* A devops manager is a serving manager. He takes that spirit of collaboration into his own team and puts himself at the service of the team, not at the top of it.
There are other things I believe to be necessary/useful to make for a good operations/engineering manager, but as far what a devops manager mean to me, I think the above captures it well.
Hope that helps,
Spike
[...] you reasons? Has it given the results you hoped for? It’s been a while since I posted about why devops makes sense in a job title and a few weeks and a few discussions later I have a some thoughts that you might find useful if [...]
[...] were you reasons? Has it given the results you hoped for? It’s been a while since I posted about why devops makes sense in a job title and a few weeks and a few discussions later I have a some thoughts that you might find useful if [...]