DevOps is one of the hottest skills in demand today. DevOps efficiently automates the software delivery and infrastructure change processes within an organization. Due to the ever-growing competition and digital transformation needs, businesses today are pressed to build high-quality applications fast to address business challenges in a quick and continuous manner.
Finding this holy grail DevOps is incredibly hard.
According to a Fortune magazine article, salaries of $200K or more are not unusual for experienced DevOps engineers, but companies struggle to fulfill these positions because the supply is not even close to the least expected. Fresh grads generally don’t have experience with DevOps tools like Puppet, Ansible, Docker, etc. and because this experience is so critical, it creates a shortage of DevOps talent.
Furthermore, even if you manage to find a pool of candidates, figuring out who fits the bill best isn’t an easy task. A decent level of experience and a handful of certifications on the resume may not necessarily be enough to judge a DevOps’s fit for your needs.
Since identifying a candidate without any unconscious bias can be another arduous task, we have decided to write this article and make it a bit easier for recruiters and hiring managers. Below in this article, we’ll walk through some of the best practices for hiring excellent DevOps Engineers by putting them through a skill assessment process.
Skills that you must test for the DevOps Engineer position
This newstack.io piece finely talks about why it is difficult to hire DevOps skills and how to judge one, and we couldn’t agree more. Here’s what we suggest:
Understanding about QA Processes: QA helps plan and control the development process in a way that prevents severe issues during the project and in times of any outages. A skilled DevOps engineer must know how to make the analysis, what impacts it, and where it affects based on the scenarios.
Competent Generalist Sysadmins: DevOps candidates need to understand the common software behavior in order to deploy and troubleshoot problems. Knowing several programming languages is an added bonus and helps greatly in scripting or automation of routine tasks.
Skilled Programming: They must know how to develop large & robust applications, how to write quality code, what tools to use, what frameworks to follow, what libraries to use, and most importantly they must know how to overcome obstacles efficiently.
Understand SDLC: It is imperative for DevOps candidates to have end-to-end knowledge of the software development lifecycle (SDLC ). They must understand the different models, differences between each model, and the advantages and disadvantages of each model.
Technical Expertise: They should have the necessary awareness and technical expertise to architect DevOps-friendly infrastructure.
Soft Skills: They should also have the needed soft skills to drive widespread adoption in the business, at all levels, from technical to management.
Be up to date with cutting-edge technologies: DevOps should be up to date on all the latest happenings in tech. Exposure to trends like artificial intelligence and machine learning is an added advantage as these technologies are set to have a huge impact on the future of DevOps in the coming years.
How to assess DevOps skills correctly?
Judging DevOps skills comprehensively is a tricky task. Due to the dependency on multiple third-party tools, it might not be practically possible to judge every required DevOps skill in a candidate using a testing tool. However, there are measurable DevOps skills that build a great talent. Using a planned evaluation map helps. We recommend following the below SkillMap while evaluating candidates for the DevOps Engineer role.
During the screening round, we ask candidates to perform a DevOps task live on an interactive production server inside a Virtual Machine. We also ask them to write a couple of scripts that DevOps do in their day-to-day work roles. This follows a set of MCQ questions depicting real-world scenarios for DevOps. We further recommend a video interview round with the shortlisted candidates to check their technical communication along with some whiteboarding, if necessary.
How can WeCP help?
WeCP offers ready to customize tests for 1000+ developer skills along with their SkillMaps. SkillMaps are a proven way of assessing essential developer skills. Create a skills-based test or interview to try it for yourself.
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