This is my personal experience on the matter as a DevOps consultant who periodically interviews in the traditional manner (as opposed to getting gigs from people that already worked with me).
Despite having 15+ years of *nix experience, including internals, having a track record of building large scalable infra and knowing a few different programming languages, what happened to me was this: I was getting filtered out because I didn't have Docker and Kubernetes and even (at one point) Cloudformation and/or Terraform. No problem - I learned those things (minus Kubernetes, so far) quite quickly. Much more quickly than the grueling trial-by-fire years of Unix administration. I like to know how things work, not just how to use them.
So if you wonder and worry about the state of enterprise IT some days, look no further than hiring managers themselves, who will pick a 25 year-old who writes YAML for some abstraction-of-an-abstraction system that does infrastructure under the hood, infrastructure that people kind of don't really try very hard to understand. After all, it's disposable thanks to infrastructure-as-code, right?
How do I know this? Well, I've seen shop after shop that's suffered a spaghetti infrastructure, using all the latest and greatest, from AWS and Kubernetes and Docker and other abstraction layers above AWS. And what happens is that it gets so complex that no one knows what's really going on, and at the very least two common symptoms arise: people are terrified during releases and they take hours, with many people on a call together very late at night; they spend a fortune on extra instances (in the case of AWS) because they haven't properly worked out environment separations (they had trouble keeping them the same, or one of many other problems).
A talented dev manager I used to work with used to complain that they had trouble hiring people who knew Javascript well, but they had expert after expert of some fancy JS framework try to interview, unable to answer the fundamentals-types of questions. I think it's similar with enterprise infrastructure.
I don't know what to say. I hope things go full swing and people who know how things work under the hood can charge consulting dollars for fixing the fuckups. It's not enough to know YAML, you also need to have wisdom in maintaining complex infrastructure, understand the delicate balance between change and stability, and be able to troubleshoot when it goes wrong WITHOUT just 'rinsing and repeating' where you learn absolutely no lessons at all.
[edit:] One theory for all of this. Some of the big shops (Google, FB, Netflix, etc.) did it right, and now everyone is trying to copy the style of infrastructure management, except doesn't have the talent or wisdom to do it well.
Despite having 15+ years of *nix experience, including internals, having a track record of building large scalable infra and knowing a few different programming languages, what happened to me was this: I was getting filtered out because I didn't have Docker and Kubernetes and even (at one point) Cloudformation and/or Terraform. No problem - I learned those things (minus Kubernetes, so far) quite quickly. Much more quickly than the grueling trial-by-fire years of Unix administration. I like to know how things work, not just how to use them.
So if you wonder and worry about the state of enterprise IT some days, look no further than hiring managers themselves, who will pick a 25 year-old who writes YAML for some abstraction-of-an-abstraction system that does infrastructure under the hood, infrastructure that people kind of don't really try very hard to understand. After all, it's disposable thanks to infrastructure-as-code, right?
How do I know this? Well, I've seen shop after shop that's suffered a spaghetti infrastructure, using all the latest and greatest, from AWS and Kubernetes and Docker and other abstraction layers above AWS. And what happens is that it gets so complex that no one knows what's really going on, and at the very least two common symptoms arise: people are terrified during releases and they take hours, with many people on a call together very late at night; they spend a fortune on extra instances (in the case of AWS) because they haven't properly worked out environment separations (they had trouble keeping them the same, or one of many other problems).
A talented dev manager I used to work with used to complain that they had trouble hiring people who knew Javascript well, but they had expert after expert of some fancy JS framework try to interview, unable to answer the fundamentals-types of questions. I think it's similar with enterprise infrastructure.
I don't know what to say. I hope things go full swing and people who know how things work under the hood can charge consulting dollars for fixing the fuckups. It's not enough to know YAML, you also need to have wisdom in maintaining complex infrastructure, understand the delicate balance between change and stability, and be able to troubleshoot when it goes wrong WITHOUT just 'rinsing and repeating' where you learn absolutely no lessons at all.
[edit:] One theory for all of this. Some of the big shops (Google, FB, Netflix, etc.) did it right, and now everyone is trying to copy the style of infrastructure management, except doesn't have the talent or wisdom to do it well.