Tomorrow's DevOps Engineers, Today!

(Transcript of an ignite talk delivered at DevOpsDays Zurich 2025)

More than 10 years into the DevOps movement, by now we know that it’s not just a job. We know the truth about DevOps (do we?) and understand that in principle there is not such a thing as a DevOps Engineer or a DevOps Team. Yet, our industry needed to find a label, a way to name the new role which Sysadmins or Developers were further growing into.

Today, it’s a pretty normal job ad: “We’re hiring! Join our team as a DevOps Engineer!”, and the variety of job descriptions is quite big. I went through the hiring process for such a position in my team last year, and after interviewing a decent amount of candidates with different seniority levels I started reflecting: What about the next generation of “DevOps Engineers”? How do we get them “fresh” out of university? How does someone come to the idea of starting their career in this field at all?

Maybe let’s just take a step back now. First things first: What does a DevOps Engineer do? Basically, the role is at once associated with some sort of automation. But the exact tasks can cover a very wide range. Does the team need the balance to be more inclined to Sysadmin than developer? Or the other way around? Are we talking about cloud infrastructure, on-prem or even hybrid? How many cloud providers need to be known?

You need to have been around in our industry for at least 10 years as a developer and or sysadmin to have a feeling about what the job is about. Now, how about those folks who don’t have that experience?

How can we nurture the next generation of engineers coming to work in this field? Here are a few ideas:

1. Principles & Concepts > Tooling: starting from university, continuing at the workplace and always keeping in mind what the concepts are, behind any tooling discussion, before any tooling decision. What is the problem that we need to solve and what principle are we going to use for the solution. As a result, we get simply better professionals for the future.

   
   

2. Define the job better: make clear to juniors the “what if”, explain what the consequences of failure are, help them understand what’s at stake. We need to make very clear the tasks and responsibilities for the role, considering the seniority expected. Only then we will attract the right talent.

   
   

3. Cultivate a culture of learning/mentorship: take juniors by the hand and remind about point 1 (principles > tooling). Provide the right conditions and environment for continuous learning, make it a normal thing. Do stuff like coding dojos, chaos days, visit meet-ups, network and attend conferences like this one.

I’ve heard multiple reasons why people decided to make a career in DevOps: money, fascination for automation, evolution from another role into this one, sometimes even just random (like getting inspired by someone else). Especially for those folks out there with little experience but a great desire to land a job in this field, here a few tips as well:

1. Be proactive learners: to succeed in this field you need to be ok with continuous learning, even better if you enjoy it

   
   

2. Contribute to Open Source: it could serve as a good training for the future work in a team.

   
   

3. Do a few internships: before finishing the uni, super important!

   
   

4. Have a blog (or something similar): whatever you learn, publish it! Hiring managers will for sure take a look and it might be adding plus points as well!

As more businesses move to digital platforms and adopt cloud technologies, the need for skilled DevOps professionals continues to grow. There are many vacancies, that need to be filled badly.

It’s hard to find the right profile at times. So, let us all nurture the next generation already. With patience, because we need tomorrow’s DevOps Engineers, today! :P