Portrait: meet THE DevOps every startup dreams of hiring!

Since in the world of digital and technology (and in our era in general), everything moves very fast, jobs evolve along with their context. In 8 years, the DevOps profile has inevitably evolved.

A bit of history 🏰

Coined in 2009, the term DevOps has been heard more and more, gradually crystallizing into a real need. Born from Lean and Agile principles, the collaboration between developers and operations was organized to enable continuous improvement of software, with the aim of seizing market opportunities faster and smoothing the integration of user feedback. It's specifically from 2012 onward that we start seeing the first true DevOps experiences — that is, challenges within organizations re-articulated around this emerging way of working.

For everyone's pleasure, we note a surge of open-source technologies on the topic; here are a few examples:

• 2009: Chef, Go, MongoDB, Redis…
• 2010: Elasticsearch, OpenStack, Couchbase, Vagrant…
• 2011: SaltStack, Google Cloud…
• 2012: Ansible…
• 2013: Docker…
• 2014: Kubernetes, Terraform…

The most recent technologies date from 2015 and 2016, but it's still too early to know whether they'll break through.

Hiring a DevOps is now synonymous with good health and success for a startup, because hiring a DevOps becomes necessary when you have to scale infrastructure with a growing customer flow while staying as agile as possible on an innovative, evolving project.

So how do you become, in 2017, this new hire dreamed of by high-growth companies?

Hint: The answer rests on 3 major pillars: experience, your skills on the stack, and above all… your mindset.

#1. SHOWCASE YOUR EXPERIENCE 🎈

One of the upsides of these brand-new roles is that it's impossible to have 10 years of experience in this field. So you have to lean on and put forward other criteria:

Have startup experience in your quiver: this is the environment that suits the DevOps role best. These organizations are innovative, with modern stacks in constant evolution. If you've mostly built your career in large groups, present the projects you've worked on and highlight those that were agile and evolving.

Show your ability to take the lead… even if it's not a lead role. A DevOps sits at the crossroads of two jobs and therefore has to be proactive, full of suggestions, and a place of consensus.

Show your side projects: you're not passive, your job is your passion, and it should show!

Finally, mention the problems you had to solve (working on a large infrastructure, optimizing scaling, automating production releases, etc.), not the processes you executed.

Experience, in addition to helping you land that first interview, will give you confidence, weight, and credibility in negotiations.

#2. YOUR STOREFRONT: THE STACK!

It's the first thing recruiters look at on your resume! From infrastructure design to automation, by way of industrializing a web application, the missions are many! In the end, we're not looking for an expert on one tech but for someone competent across the board.

Have at least one skill per area; here are a few examples:

Cloud: public, especially AWS and Google Cloud (less common than Bluemix, Azure, Rackspace, etc.) — or private, self-built such as OpenStack

Microservices: Docker, Kubernetes, EC2 (from AWS), …

Scripting: Go, Python, shell as priorities, otherwise Ruby, PHP, Node, etc.

Automated deployment: SaltStack, Ansible, Puppet, Chef

Continuous integration: Jenkins, Bamboo

Databases: MongoDB, Redis, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, …

Miscellaneous: Consul for container management, Vagrant for environment, Terraform for orchestrating _provider_s, ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) for log management, …

While most companies know it's rare to find a candidate with the perfect stack (theirs), your knowledge of variants of their stack will reassure them about your ability to ramp up quickly.

So it's important to keep working on your technical culture regularly. The broader it is, the easier it will be for you to reassure and convince the CTO so you can join the project.

#3. THE MOST IMPORTANT: MINDSET

We often talk about a DevOps philosophy because this new approach to work (which has reconciled sysadmins with developers) is above all a method, a vision, and therefore a philosophy.

Mindset is perhaps the most important element in hiring a DevOps, since in general, the first DevOps hire happens when the CTO who was handling infrastructure reaches their limits. So they need to delegate that part to a dedicated person who will know how to make the right decisions and make their life easier.

So, DevOps, what's going to make the difference for a CTO? How should you present yourself? The answer in 4 points:

Be curious and have broad technical culture: this is fundamental, it's a young, fast-moving field — don't rest on what you know! Show that you can adapt fast to new developments and that you're always one step ahead!

Be entrepreneurial: they're looking for someone who can make the decisions to improve a constantly growing infrastructure. You're there to bring something to a fast-evolving environment! If you find a new way of doing things, propose it! Show that you're truly invested and engaged.

Know how to popularize and explain your choices: if we want to reconcile Dev and Ops, you have to make yourself understood. If they see you can communicate with everyone and justify your choices simply and concisely, it builds trust and proves you've truly understood your own choice.

Simply put, be friendly, warm, and smiling: the main hiring criterion remains "Do I want to work with this person?", so put yourself in their shoes and stack the odds in your favor 😉