What are some effective questions to ask someone who is considering me as their DevOps person?

Question

So these days, DevOps has been reduced to the guy who uses Puppet, tick, he uses Jenkins, tick and so on.

What effective questions can I ask to ensure the client and I would be on the same page as to what I would be doing as opposed to just looking for the guy who does Puppet/Jenkins and/or Kibana/Logstash, etcetera.

In other words, on paper they will not see "DevOps" anywhere. I do have some "DevOps" accomplishments on paper, the work that was done, but my title was still that of a Developer. To many of you, that makes perfect sense, but to the business world, its like if you don't have "customer service" as a past title, then you don't have "customer service" experience. Your resume wont appear on Indeed for the person looking for that.

How do most of you navigate those waters in terms of a presentation? What do you say?

Answer 1

In my opinion since the DevOps culture is derived from, or you could say appeared because of, the Agile software development methods

• I would ask if the company is following any agile software methods or else you would be just the release guy

• Also I would ask how I will be working as part of the dev team like I will be assigned to one project team or I will be working with all the teams

• Also it would be great to know the current situation like they are currently facing urgent problem and need fix now , what's their current stack , and also ask about their current workflows in git and in development and try to find a way to solve the issue to make everything go smoothly

• Also what really appears on paper is the workflows like git workflows, how often you release cause automating parts like delivery, and integrations,......etc really means less time and better quality and that will appears on paper even for the business guys

But at the end if the day every company is different than any other and every situation is different than the other so it's all back to your judgement to be comfortable in your daily job.

Answer 2

• Ask if they track DevOps time to know the amount of work
• Ask how many external services do they have and if you need to manage them
• Ask how many technologies do they own and use daily and what you need to manage
• Ask how big is their server infrastructure and how do they monitor it
• Ask who teaches people how to work with ssh and git rebase
• Ask if they need you to optimize DB queries

Ask them to cross out any two things from the menu above. )