How do I pivot more towards DevOps career-wise?

Hi experts,

I had a few years of experience as a BI developer (ETL + Dashboarding mostly) and moved into a new job 9 months ago which is sort of BI-Ops.

I dabbled into three focuses:

  1. ETL: Mostly Python + Airflow + BigQuery
  2. Internal Doc site: Think a static site generator running on Google Cloud Run with GitHub Action as CICD
  3. BI workflow: Think a large BI team that needs a proper git workflow + a lot of GitHub Actions for linting/automatic approving/etc.

I actually led all three projects but the reason I said "dabbled" is because either the project got shelved or I only got to complete a PoC and then it was good enough so nothing complicated (read: good for resume) was needed. After all all three are internal so there is no need to "scale" for production.

From project 2 and 3 I learned a lot about Cloud click ops and CICD stuffs including Terraform, docker and GitHub Actions. However I don't know how to go further down the DevOps road. I'll establish the reasons:

  1. My team actually is not supposed to do a lot of Ops, but we do it anyway because the company is ill structured
  2. As mentioned all Ops are internal so there is no need to scale
  3. We kind of use a lot of tools say Terraform but we never need to set them up. Someone else set it up for us (the real DevOps team I guess) and we simply plugin our code

How can I grow from here and pivot more towards DevOps? I'm missing a lot of skills, e.g. as mentioned I actually don't know how to setup things. Neither do I do any real Dev (Dev in our team simply means writing ETL code in Python and SQL, which I'm already good at). I guess I can learn some of the skills by setting up a home lab (I do have a 32GB server so surely I can learn basic K8S) but is that going to be enough for resume? TBH I don't really have need of those things for myself (at home I mostly dabble with system programming, either low level C or quick Python), so the best I can learn is going to be superficial.

Or maybe I should find a way to move to the DevOps team? It's a bit tricky because the whole team is in another time zone and the company seems to prefer to dismantle and outsource it, so I might need to actually leave and join a new company - and again here comes the uncertainty - is my resume good enough?

What do you think? Thanks in advance.

Posted Nov 4, 2022, 1:29 AM UTC

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