Typically we have shortening 5-year cycles in tech that cause clamoring for new skills. First it was the internet (“HTML! Perl! PHP!”) then mobile apps (“Android! Objective C! React Native! Flutter!”) and now cloud (“AWS Certification! DevOps! SecOps!”). IoT and machine learning are probably next. The technology itself doesn’t really matter — companies just want an army of tactical workers to build this stuff tirelessly.
It's Kubernetes and microservices! Even though Kubernetes is what, four years old, where I am, numerous employers are chomping at the bit and demanding that you be an expert at these. Now, I'm a crusty old Linux sysadmin/programmer who puts "SRE" and "DevOps" on his resume, and I'm noticeably getting spurned because I don't have "5 years experience" with "containers".
At first I was worried that my skills were obsoleted, having worked in large enterprise environments doing infrastructure engineering for over 15 years. I worried that I was too "systemsy" and not enough "cloud-y". Oh, and even though I spent years using TeamCity and Jenkins, I was also spurned because I didn't use the right lingo within "CI/CD pipelines" and demonstrate a Docker deployment system exactly like they used.
Then I realized something.
The job descriptions are asking for five years experience total, number one, and the second red flag: the salaries and contract rates are lower than the rates for large enterprise-y type jobs (minus management).
Conclusion: hipster tech coincides with youth and coincides with companies following trends and buzzwords over wisdom and experience.
Back to the point. Someone with a strong basis in the core disciplines of systems design, infrastructure automation, perimeter security and so forth are going to be able to adapt to AWS knowledge, as I have (for the record I have two AWS Associate certs and didn't find them hard). And as the author points out, there are these 5 year cycles where all we look for is experience in certain tech. Is it any wonder that there are horror stories about fragile and insecure cloud environments?
It goes back to the incompetence of the hiring process which we see again and again discussed on HN.
It's Kubernetes and microservices! Even though Kubernetes is what, four years old, where I am, numerous employers are chomping at the bit and demanding that you be an expert at these. Now, I'm a crusty old Linux sysadmin/programmer who puts "SRE" and "DevOps" on his resume, and I'm noticeably getting spurned because I don't have "5 years experience" with "containers".
At first I was worried that my skills were obsoleted, having worked in large enterprise environments doing infrastructure engineering for over 15 years. I worried that I was too "systemsy" and not enough "cloud-y". Oh, and even though I spent years using TeamCity and Jenkins, I was also spurned because I didn't use the right lingo within "CI/CD pipelines" and demonstrate a Docker deployment system exactly like they used.
Then I realized something.
The job descriptions are asking for five years experience total, number one, and the second red flag: the salaries and contract rates are lower than the rates for large enterprise-y type jobs (minus management).
Conclusion: hipster tech coincides with youth and coincides with companies following trends and buzzwords over wisdom and experience.
Back to the point. Someone with a strong basis in the core disciplines of systems design, infrastructure automation, perimeter security and so forth are going to be able to adapt to AWS knowledge, as I have (for the record I have two AWS Associate certs and didn't find them hard). And as the author points out, there are these 5 year cycles where all we look for is experience in certain tech. Is it any wonder that there are horror stories about fragile and insecure cloud environments?
It goes back to the incompetence of the hiring process which we see again and again discussed on HN.