DevOps Hiring: The Ultimate Guide

The rush is on to build DevOps teams, in industries ranging from banking to manufacturing. Why? As Red Hat’s Senior VP, engineering, Matt Hicks noted in an Enterprisers Project article earlier this year, “More companies are trying agile and DevOps for a clear reason: Businesses want more speed and more experiments – which lead to innovations and competitive advantage. DevOps helps you gain that speed.”
Not all IT leaders like the term DevOps: Some prefer to just call it the agile way of working. But however you describe it, this style of working – which prizes speed, experimentation, and collaboration, all happening on nimble, cross-functional teams – has taken the enterprise by storm. It has demanded new IT leadership strategies. Above all, it has demanded culture change, as teams ditch old processes, rip down rules between groups, and accept “failures” as quick lessons on how to iterate their way to better products and services.
At times of great culture change, people will make or break your organization’s efforts.
People on this new breed of team need to be strong communicators and collaborators. They need to be able to fall down and pick themselves up. They need to be curious enough to chase down the exact spot where a process is failing. They need to be flexible enough to listen to input from people across the enterprise. DevOps team stars have all of these qualities. As you can imagine, such people find themselves in great demand right now.
That’s great news if you’re a job hunter – and not such great news if you’re a hiring manager. But even for the job hunters, DevOps poses tricky challenges. For one thing, it’s still a relatively new skill set, so it’s tough to show years of experience on your resume. Second, hiring managers are less interested in some traditional measures of qualification – think technical certifications – and more interested in your interpersonal skills, communication skills, and ability to adapt. Demonstrating these abilities on a resume or in an interview won’t be easy. On the flip side, evaluating such factors demands hiring managers cook up new screening and interview techniques.
We’ve been writing a series of articles to help both DevOps job seekers and hiring managers navigate these changes and challenges. To that end, this guide brings together practical advice, analysis, and statistics on the state of the DevOps hiring market - tapping the wisdom of IT leaders, DevOps practitioners, and related experts such as recruiters. Get the guide, now: