Cloud
Data & AI
Tech companies are launching and growing at a rapid pace. These emerging organizations all understand the importance of fostering a DevOps culture and having the right talent to accelerate growth. DevOps roles, including Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), are in high demand for emerging tech companies.
But what skills are these companies explicitly seeking?
The DevOps Transformation
Since becoming a verified culture and approach, DevOps has grown in importance. It’s no longer in its infancy. It has matured considerably, becoming a proven way for developers and operations leaders to collaborate.
Huge tech giants have since built impressive DevOps cultures, but DevOps is not just for large organizations; it’s a viable option for small and midsize tech companies as well.
However, embracing a DevOps culture isn’t as simple as saying you’re doing it and hiring some key players. True transformation must involve all stakeholders and completely reframe the company’s software development process.
"DevOps is all about empowerment."
Teams should have the autonomy to build, test, and deploy more rapidly and with higher quality. What keeps everyone focused is that DevOps encourages communication, shared goals, and transparency. Now that DevOps is the go-to for tech companies, demand is surging. Let’s explore why.
Demand for DevOps Roles Is Rising: Here's Why
DevOps is infiltrating the cultures of so many tech companies because those companies have realized their processes were broken. The traditional software development lifecycle no longer works, and these organizations were ready to start a revolution.
It’s become clear that the benefits of a DevOps approach are worth the effort of transformation, and that effort drives better business value.
Companies adopt DevOps for these benefits:
Faster delivery time:
DevOps principles such as automation, continuous delivery, and rapid feedback loops support faster delivery. These tools, along with a commitment to collaborate, foster faster, bug-free releases. This is advantageous to tech companies because they are always updating and improving their products.
No more silos:
DevOps brings together all the key players and stakeholders. It includes development, operations, and the business aspect. These stakeholders now communicate in real time, and it’s easier to connect distributed teams. Each team member understands their role and is accountable for their deliverables. No modern tech company can afford to work in silos; it’s not practical or profitable.
Improving the customer experience:
Improving the customer experience: The goal of a software deployment is to make the customer happy. You do that by having fewer failures and enhancing product readiness. Organizations taking a DevOps approach experience failures 60 times less often and recover much faster. Automating the product delivery workflow creates more reliability, which contributes to an enhanced customer experience.
Early detections:
With automation in use to monitor and test software, you’ll find defects quicker. Teams share feedback on errors, creating a more sustainable deployment.
Unleashed innovation:
DevOps cultivates innovation, mostly due to the fact that it streamlines many processes. Your team isn’t constantly in the weeds on deployments. Instead, it’s thinking beyond the current state.
What Is the Role of DevOps in Tech Companies
DevOps is instrumental to tech companies. It bridges the space between development and operations while focusing on specific principles. DevOps professionals use these principles to solve big-picture issues, including application deployment workflows, the standardization of tech stacks, and the integration of feedback loops, instead of playing the game plan.
These are the DevOps principles that empower organizations:
Customer centricity:
DevOps cultures put the customer at the heart of the project, seeking to incorporate feedback and deliver reliable deployments.
End-to-end accountability:
A DevOps organization brings development and operations together while focusing on responsibility and transparency from concept to grave.
Continuous improvement:
Core to DevOps is continuous improvement. Teams strive to minimize waste and optimize product readiness. They don’t fear change, and they embrace experimentation to make things better.
Focus on working products:
A DevOps-minded organization emphasizes delivering working and sellable products. The waterfall model and other process models are no longer viable.
Empowered cross-functional team:
DevOps cultures build teams that are independent yet also integrated. These teams have varied skills and are always striving to learn and grow.
Automation as the standard:
To live continuous improvement and be customer-centric, DevOps-minded organizations should automate everything possible. Automation should touch the entire infrastructure of development and operations.
What Tech Brands Are Looking for in DevOps Professionals and SREs
Professionals need more than technical skills to thrive in a DevOps environment. Your hires need to possess both hard and soft skills to succeed. Let’s look at the expectations for these two sets of skills.
Hard skills:
Technically speaking, DevOps positions require a variety of attributes. Recall that DevOps teams are cross-functional, and team members often wear a few hats. So the more technical knowledge they have, the better.
At a minimum, tech companies are looking for:
- Programming, coding, and scripting (multiple languages are crucial)
- Testing skills and acumen
- Experience with DevOps tools across all aspects: source control, continuous integration, configuration management, deployment automation, containers, orchestration, and the cloud
- Software security skills
- Command of automation tactics
- Container experience and the ability to adopt container-first strategies
Soft skills:
Beyond technical expertise, DevOps teams require soft skills. These soft skills ensure the permeation of DevOps principles. Such teams should feature excellent communicators, who should be able to talk about the business side of how a product works, not just the technical description.
Another critical soft skill is collaboration. This is a team, and everyone needs to work together effectively. As they collaborate, team members become creative problem-solvers who are able to see outside of their own mindset.
Having a user-centric mindset is vital, too. A DevOps culture cares deeply about the user experience, so those within it should as well.
Finally, there are two more things to seek out: curiosity and empathy. To be curious is to want to find the root cause of challenges and develop ways to overcome them. Empathetic DevOps professionals value the user experience and genuinely want to enhance it.
Although these skill sets may seem a little broad, that doesn’t mean every resume with all the buzzwords is a winner. There are red flags to avoid in DevOps recruiting.
Work with the experts at Harrison Clarke
Harrison Clarke is a specialized recruitment firm that focuses purely on the DevOps/SRE space. We understand that building a DevOps culture requires time and a commitment. Let our experts be your partner.
We are committed to delivering an exceptional experience for both employers and candidates. Helping our clients meet their hiring goals is how we define success.
Get to know us and learn about our recruiting solutions by booking a complimentary consultation.
