How can I be DevOps?

I was talking with a friend cum junior professional. I have known him as a bright person taking right moves in the career. He messages me that he wishes to pick DevOps as a career after being in practice for years in Presales and technical support.

I asked him to call me so that I could understand what he was upto. Whether he was stressed with the job or he was positive to take up challenge was an important point to know.

We talked at length. He is placed in a good organization primarily as a sales and Support professional and developed interest in DevOps. He read books and following online learning , was upto doing Azure training ..and also started supporting his dev team for Docker

I was impressed. I asked him to continue what he is doing. after some more talk I felt he was keen on doing certification. This is good but in my opinion, was not a dire need looking at his trajectory.

He said he felt like talking with me as he read through my profile and see I had led DevOps and automation projects.

As a person, who have been there leading multiple areas around automation, my thoughts came to build a platter of suggestions for the DevOps aspirants . Here do I pen them down to see if it can help broader community.

1. Understanding that DevOps is specially remarked role, it could well be understood generically. And, there are two aspects to look at it

a. For a transitioning organization with legacy setup of development practice over years ( few or concrete) ,DevOps is ideally a need and hence should evolve. 

b. For a new startup, this would be a foundation protocol.

2. DevOps = Development + Operations synergizing to achieve efficiency in both the areas

3. DevOps engineers essentially are employees with continuous improvement attitude so anyone and everyone can be! They could be gifted with automation tools or preexisting hands-on experience when start officially 

4. DevOps engineers are people with broad mindset and collaborative temperament. Its a culture thing

5. DevOps engineers are the ones who love to make their hands dirty anytime ( break from coding career doesn't matter to them) . They are ready to take a dive

6. In an early career, if non-DevOps people leverage their passion and start using tools, write scripts for small automation, there are high chances they could lead their life as DevOps but mind well, attitude still matters.

7. DevOps is just symbolic to represent two divisions( Dev and Ops), striving to Stitch gaps and improve efficiencies in any dependent areas in an organization, more with the help of automation is the way to be a true "DevOps"

8. It's important to see GAPS and fit your DevOps passion to start with .

An organization may not have plan to specially recruit DevOps but they may have unspoken needs. Try and see if you can see through them and take a step there. Everyone wants to be "DevOps" and an organization may not label each aspiration to be "DevOps" but its how one understands the situation, balance the skills and keep topping up to really take care of pain-points in the organization.

In my 20 years or experience, I was a build and Devops stamped officially for say 10+ years but that did not stop me being DevOps in further career when I managed Test Automation OR I dived into quality management. I tried to envisage the needs and provided or worked on all those integrations or synergy projects which reduced troubles for R&D on many fronts including Project Management tooling like Atlassian, Ops tool administration for PagerDuty and Collab tools mastery like Teams and so on.. Now while I am in the leadership and SME for an entirely different areas like #ExportCompliance which is ideally close to legal , business and touch base with R&D, I use the programming lever at times to quickly automate, find opportunities to speed up, more importantly share the know-how to teams and encourage them to think like. This all while keeping the human aspect into consideration. And IMO, thats a "#DevOps" spirit that can keep you going.

In short, it all takes a "#ContinuousImprovement attitude, #Collaboration mindset and courage to try hands on" to be there and do that! Go For It if you are ready to embrace these ..

The positioning matters but it should not deviate you from going there without stamps.

Good luck and let me know if this helps!