DevOps is a very lucrative career path and the engineers that are equipped to handle this type of work are few and far between. What does that mean for the DevOps community? Basically, you’re wanted and you’re worth a lot of money.

As an IT Recruiter at Relus, I conduct internal hiring for our Cloud team and speak with DevOps engineers daily about their interests. I asked a few of our internal DevOps engineers and the DevOps community here in Atlanta what they value when selecting an employer.

It was the best coach I’ve ever had!

Executive Buy-In for Tooling DevOps Teams I can’t count how many times I’ve heard from DevOps engineers that their current organization is not forward-thinking enough. While tech giants like Google and Amazon are setting industry standards and venturing into new technologies, not every organization should or can function that way. I think what organizations can learn from iconic tech brands is that they prioritize technology and innovation over a concern for budget. Of course, they have big bucks to spend, but Google is known for creating new technologies simply to see if it works.

DevOps Engineers Cling to Innovation DevOps is a fast-moving role that requires innovation. I mean, engineers are building tools to automate tasks that would typically be completed manually. Not every organization is ready to add more complexity to their environment, but if you are attempting to establish a DevOps culture, your organization need to unify the DevOps team with the entire organization to see the value of implementing these tools. Otherwise, one area an organization might have the idea that Chef would be the best tool to implement whereas another group would prefer Ansible. Kubernetes is an amazing tool for managing Docker Containers, but others may not agree. I mean, why fix what’s already working, right? Innovation in this instance means not only keeping a pulse on and being open to which new technologies can benefit your organization, but also fostering a culture that emphasis educating employees on how these new technologies can benefit their department.

Know Your DevOps Engineers – SysOps/DevOps/Building Cool Stuff To be specific, DevOps engineers tend to have both a systems engineering and a development background. It’s hard to identify the spectrum on which DevOps engineers want to focus. You’ll find DevOps engineers on your team that want to focus on deployment and others that want to focus on SysOps work, but typically there should be involvement in both. DevOps engineering is hybrid by nature and so you can’t just call a position “DevOps” if you are exclusively focusing on the SysOps piece and expect members of your team to be happy.