Then again, I keep interviewing people with 5-10 years of experience, who will go something like this:
> How would you manage a server? (leaving out a ton of context about what it means to "manage a server")
> Very easy, SSH connection is very fast, reliable, ...
> Awesome, love me some SSH, how about 5 servers?
> Hmm, probably write shell scripts.
> How about 50 servers?
> Shell scripts?
> Even with 500 servers?
> Hire more people..?
And I keep feeling that these people don't have 10 YoE, they have 1-2 YoE times some coefficient.
I feel like if you're in a "successful rut", that's what it will do to you. You feel like you're successful, but in fact, you have fallen horribly behind, without even knowing it.
Your quality of life is probably fine, until you're laid off one day.
I recently came off a project that was technically using "GitOps" but where every deployment involved copying and pasting dozens of files across 3 or 4 repos, and the whole thing was very error prone, and if you didn't change exactly the right things your service would just silently fail to deploy, or be unreachable, with zero feedback.
I've worked at a company with a bespoke CI/CD system hacked together with PHP scripts and Jenkins servers, but where every single process was ruthlessly automated, reversible, with multiple layers of fallback, failure recovery, garrulous feedback, and built-in approvals that you could automate, or if you didn't remember, you'd get a helpful reminder in email and a link to a page to fill in the required information. People could, and did, know how to do a deployment on it their first or second day.
Guess which one was more pleasant to deploy with?
It's the automation mindset that's important. You can find people with the right mindset who haven't had a chance yet to play with ansible or terraform, and you can find people who manage to create nightmarish complexities of manual processes out of ansible and terraform. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found this to correlate much with years of experience.
Not sure what answer you expect here? Just because you have 10 years of experience doesn’t mean you’ve ever worked with more than 25 servers at a time (at least I haven’t).
I consider it a source of pride, I think. You absolutely don’t need mega scale for most things (or maybe mega scale, but still not many servers)
Some people get complacent once they get a job and stop learning. The trick is to keep on learning. I have worked for a company like Amazon with aggressive schedules where we used to work for 12 hrs/day. One time I didnt go home for 3 days. I can say I learnt a lot, but there are better companies with mature planning where you would still learn the same amount.
How different ppl react to toxic environments is also different. Some people may thrive, while some may wither.
I say it is a random walk searching for the best place (for you) to work. You keep iterating until you find what you want.
They ask for a VM or a DB to the DevOps / SRE team, wait a bit days and get a URL. If a team uses CI/CD and K8s, they will write a yaml file from a template, wait a few minutes and app will be deployed.
