Hi readers,
There are times when we make huge decisions in our lives. These may not be easy to make due to several reasons. Like the decision I made to quit DevOps completely.
You may feel that I quit suddenly, but I took this decision years ago.
It started in 2020 during the pandemic. I decided to take a Simplilearn course that promised placement support. But they just left us at the mercy of another company called Hirist. It was exactly like being pushed to a job platform after completing the course! We students were left high and dry and were fuming at Simplilearn. We students then formed a Whatsapp group and started self-learning. The group still exists today.
I soon realized that the amount of stuff to learn was way too much. There are several categories with skills under them - each skill is a separate course! Also, I had preferences and dislikes for some technologies. I liked AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes and disliked Ansible, Terraform, and Python. From the dislike list, I found that I had an aversion to coding and scripting.
I joined Internet Leads Training (Kochi) in 2021. The course went well but without placement. My job hunt ended with a job in the twenty-twenty party.
But something was nagging me - the pain of leaving a field that had been my passion since the beginning of my working life. IT Ops. It made me come back to the DevOps field and land a few gigs as a freelancer.
After the contracts were over, I hustled through the pain and made it as a DevOps Engineer in TokenMetrics. This went on for 6 months till they gave me a huge Cloud migration project - from AWS to GCP using Cloud Buckets, CDN, Load Balancers, Kubernetes (GKE), GitHub Actions, and Argo CD. And I had to integrate everything within a few weeks.
I did not know GCP and was scolded for spending time "learning" it. I deployed their backend on GKE but was getting errors that I could not troubleshoot. Also, I did not know how to proceed with the project. The lack of cooperation from the devs was a significant roadblock. It was foolish to continue with the project without being able to draw an architecture diagram! That's when I put in my papers. I value work-life balance and sustainable employment over all else.
I went back to self-learning and working as a freelancer. Joined several Discord servers. Did community projects successfully and posted them to my blog. Attended community days of AWS and GCP. But the job market became bad to worse (2024). Realised that most companies are going to move to platform engineering where I do not have any role as a non-developer. I could not land a job, no matter what I did. I revamped my resume style and content. I kept learning under a mentor and doing several projects - but to no avail.
I finally decided to quit DevOps for good after seeing a LinkedIn post that said "DevOps is not for those who don't want to code". No turning back. As of yesterday, I paid the course fee and attended the first class of a renowned Digital Marketing institute in Kochi, Kerala. It is a great experience; to attend their live classes.
