DevOps Intern Program – Keri Barnett-Howell, Mission Cloud

This is Techstrong tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. I'm here with Carrie Barnett Howell, and she is director of Talent Development for Mission Cloud.

And we're talking about what does it take to kind of train these people to learn DevOps these days? Cause you know, there's not enough folks. It's a challenge and it's not as easy as it should be.

Carrie, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

So walk us through what you guys have been doing. What exactly is your approach and what makes it kind of different since we've all been trying to do this for the better part of a decade. We've been trying to do this for a long time.

Yes. Um, I think one thing we did is create a really, really, really robust internship and program, which is going to turn into an apprenticeship program, which is gonna be a full-time, 40 hour a week with benefits program that's paid. Uh, so we can help people who are students and career changers get into the cloud.

So our apprenticeship program goes farther than any other companies goes. Most companies get their participants to the level of an aws, you know, solutions architect associate. So they know stuff about the cloud, they know some basic, uh, they can do basic cloud engineering and basic cloud troubleshooting, but they don't do the breadth of technical training that we do.

And the reason it's so hard to train a DevOps engineer is because they need to know so many things. It's just such a vast array of technical problems that we have to teach 'em how to solve. So our training program, yes, we absolutely get them to the level of a w s solutions architect associate, but we also train them in Terraform.

We train them in Python. We've added containers to our training program. Um, and most importantly, we actually have a module where we train them how to think about how to solve the problems.

Because what we've seen is when interns go into full-time positions, uh, one thing they really struggle with is breaking down the technical problems into its component parts. So they actually have the technical skill. They can do it if it's phrased in the right way, but training them to see, hey, this is the problem you're seeing, this is when you apply these technical skills.

That's a huge gap as well in a lot of other programs. Mm-hmm. So are you getting kids outta college per se and turning them into DevOps professionals?

Or do you not care exactly where they are in their life journey? We do not care. We do not care.

We call it mission thought evolution because, well, I mean, you know, for the obvious reasons, right? Change, development, growth, but also because career paths are really messy. And you know, my own was messy.

Nothing is straightforward. And I think we have this idea that you're 18 or you're 22, you get outta college and you get your job and you get your next job. It's just kind of a straight path.

But the truth is that it's not like that. And a lot of people wake up one day and they're like, I don't really like what I'm doing and I wanna do something else. And so a lot of the people that we bring in on our program are career changers and they do really, really well.

So we've had one person who was a chef for many years and he just decided that he didn't wanna do that anymore and that cloud was the way he wanted to go. So he's now a successful DevOps engineer at Mission. Mm-hmm.

Are there types of backgrounds or patterns you've seen where some folks may be more naturally gifted towards DevOps? Or is everybody pretty much equal? I wouldn't say gifted, but it's definitely a mindset that we look for.

So DevOps engineers, I mean, cloud engineers in general are a different type of engineer, right? Than you'd see in your typical like software or application development. Um, you have to really care about infrastructure, you have to really care about problem solving.

And in some ways it's less, it can be less flashy, right? Like you build your software, you build your app, you can show it off, you can, you know, kind of show it off at a party, whatever you want. But when you build infrastructure, you have to really have a mindset of curiosity and thinking like, well, what is the best, what is the best option between the different trade-offs?

You know, do I want, do I want the high availability or do I want, you know, the scalability or whatever, whatever the options may be. And so it's, we, we look for interns and apprentices who have that mindset of always wanting to dig deeper, always wanting to learn more. Um, and some people really enjoy that, and other people are kind of like, I just want a problem I can solve and have the right answer and be done with it.

And usually that doesn't make a great DevOps engineer. What do you think is our challenge with increasing the overall size of the community? We see a lot of times that is a developer here or there and they're using a DevOps tool for something, but they're not, per se, full boat DevOps engineers.

They are not using every, um, tool available. And they're certainly not deploying applications and building them and testing them using everything that's available end to end. So how do we get to that level of maturity?

Yeah, it's kinda an interesting thing, right? Because like you said, cloud's been going on for a decade, right? At least.

So we, so the industry's been there, but I think the development programs and educational programs have never caught onto it. Um, we don't see kids coming out of school with the necessary knowledge. Like you can learn coding in college, like you can do that now.

Pretty much any college has a coding class or a software engineering class, but you can't learn all the skills you need to be a successful infrastructure engineer, uh, in school. Like you just can't. And so we've kind of seen the program's not really developed and then we've seen like a smattering of boot camps come up and things like that, but nothing really has bridged that gap between learning the skills and then being able to apply them on a client site or at your job or anything.

So it's that last mile problem, which I think is the, you know, it's just this big gap and why it's not been solved. I think part of it is just the incredible spread of issues that they have to face. So I did a, a project with our engineering teams to build a skills matrix, and I wanted to see how many skills were there, and then for each role we had, what are the expectations of what they can do with that skill?

And we had over 200 skills. I mean, heard 200 things on that skills matrix, and it was like, and we couldn't really pair it down. It was sort of like, well, they, they do kind of need to know this, you know, maybe they don't need to be a super, super expert, but like, they need to know it.

They need to know it exists. They need to know it's available. They need to know somewhat about how to use it.

And how do you, how do you learn that? How do you do that? How do you keep all of those skills in your head at the same time?

It's really, really, really hard. Uh, and I think we haven't, I think our program gets a lot closer than other programs, but certainly we haven't cracked the code on knowing how we continuously maintain all of these skills. There are some DevOps certifications and some people love them and some people hate them.

What's your sense of, uh, the value of a certification these days? So we require everyone at mission to have, uh, AWS certification, and we have over 75% of our company AWS certified, of course for our business roles. That's the cloud foundation, you know, cloud practitioner, just the foundational level is fine.

Just understanding the basics of the cloud, that's what I have. Um, for our technical roles, we do want them to have the more technical certifications. Yeah, I, I know everyone likes to say like, certifications are garbage and nobody likes 'em, nobody cares.

But, but the truth is like, they do give, they do give a, a sense of expertise there. And, and it's not like our engineers can just go and get them and just, it's easy peasy and it's just check the box. Like they have to work at it, they have to study, they have to know the, the stuff.

And, and I have seen that our engineers and especially our senior engineers who go for the professional or specialty levels, they do get a lot out of it. Like, it's not, it's not an easy job. They have to learn a lot.

They learn skills and they see a breadth of things that they hadn't necessarily seen before. So I think it can be a really valuable tool. I think it can never, it's not a good tool to use to for any sort of like punishment of what you didn't get your cert, so therefore you're bad.

But it's a really good tool to use to say, have you continued to upscale? Are you, are you making sure that every, you know, you're, you understand the breadth of what's out there. I think that's where that can really come in handy.

Do you think ultimately the reward is high enough for folks to make all this effort because, you know, our DevOps engineer is making enough money relative to how much, um, time and skills are required to attain the level of expertise? You mean for certifications or just in general? Just in general.

Salary rewards. I mean, you know, we see salaries that are all over the place with something we keep track of every week. And you know, depending on where people live, it could be, you know, $80,000 to $300,000.

Yeah, it's definitely spread. I mean, at mission we try to keep ours. Our salaries are, um, location agnostic.

So we have one salary ban for the role, which is the average of sort of comp, uh, countrywide salaries and usually ends up on the higher end. So it kind of depends how companies do things. I think that yes, it's worth it.

I mean, the salaries are what they are. I think that we're not gonna see the astronomical salaries continue. I don't think that's sustainable.

But cloud is huge. It's only going to get bigger. And I think that, you know, nobody still knows how to do it.

Great. Like we have lots of different consulting companies. We have lots of different ways that you, you know, companies can migrate to cloud or improve their cloud or all that kind of thing.

So I think it's an industry that's at this point feels pretty bulletproof. And if you want longevity in your career and you want safety in your career, DevOps engineer is a really good way to go. So you don't think AI is gonna come and obsolete all these folks.

I know everybody asked that as soon as chat GBT came, it was like, everyone's gonna get fired. We don't need marketing departments anymore. We don't need anything anymore.

No, I just, because AI at this point can't make the kind of calls that, that humans can make, because at the end of the day, it's, it's always a balancing act and it's sort of like, is this better or is that better? And it's always a choice and there's always better or worse. And sometimes you're choosing from a lot of bad options and AI is not at the point, and I don't think it'll be for a long time, um, until the robots come and take all of us over that, that it can really do that kind of thing.

I think humans are pretty essential. I hope AI can take over some of the really boring parts of the job. You know, the repetitive code, writing, that kind of thing, that and, and free people up just to be able to make more of those in-depth decisions because a lot of our time is taken up by pretty boring stuff.

But, um, but no, I don't, I mean, I don't think AI is gonna take anything anytime soon. Hmm. As you look around the landscape, of course more folks are working from home.

Do you think that that impacts their ability to do the job? Or are people looking for places where they can work remotely? Or do they want to be in the office?

What's your sense of the, the prevailing mood of the community? I think everybody wants to work from home. I think it's kind of weird that companies are dragging people back to the office.

We're totally remote when Covid hit. We had two offices, we shut them both down and we've been remote ever since and we've done really well. I mean, it just, it takes intentionality.

Like we as a company have to intentionally set time for teams to bond, make sure that there's company-wide events, make sure that people feel like they're part of a company. Cuz it is easy at home to kind of get lost and feel like who's out there. And I haven't talked to anyone all day, um, but most of the engineers I know hated going into offices.

Um, any amount of noise bothered them. They didn't want the chaos. Like, I love chaos.

When I was in the office, I loved it. I would go bother everyone all day, every day. And I'm sure they all hated it, so I'm sure they're happy to be away at home.

But I, I think that most people would wanna work from home. Um, it gives you just an extraordinary amount of flexibility that you don't otherwise have. So what's that one thing you wish you could see in somebody who's gonna be a candidate to be an intern with you?

Is there some characteristic that leaps out at you more than others? What's kind of the, what's gonna make somebody stand up? A lot of it is background research on the cloud.

Like, I don't wanna talk to a candidate who doesn't really know what the cloud is. Like, even if they have their cloud practitioner, we see sometimes see candidates come in saying like, they just don't know what AWS is, or they don't know what the big cloud providers are. And it's so easy to just do a basic Google search and, and understand some of the background on the cloud.

So because it's such a, in some ways it's such a niche field and it's so different from a lot of the other engineering roles. I really worry when I see people coming in and trying to get into the industry that haven't really done due diligence around how this career would differ than other tech careers. Um, and I think they, I think they, knowing that someone has, is coming in wide eyes, wide open is much more reassuring than someone who's kind of just like, this seems cool.

I'll try it. You know, I've seen some high salaries, let me do it. It's not really that compelling.

All right folks. You're heard in here. Do the homework no matter what you're gonna do in life, do the homework.

Carrie, thanks for being on the show. Great. Thank you so much, Mike.

Appreciate it. All right, back to you guys in the studio.