An acquaintance asked me about entering tech in today’s job market with a SRE, operations, or “devops” type role, and here’s the best response I could come up with:

The tricky bit about SRE and devops is that in any company we’re on the cost-side of the books, not the revenue side. Companies that are growing fast learn quickly that they need us to keep services available and to keep developer velocity high. Companies that are shrinking start by pulling back from cost-side groups like SRE, operations, and even security while they push resources toward feature development and sales. That’s short term thinking, and they end up with quality, reliability, and security tech-debt that they eventually need to pay down. If they survive they’ll come to understand that accutely, but it still might have been the right move at the time.

My advice is to look for B2B or B2C companies that are right at the 12 to 20 engineer mark and still in growth mode. Those are the folks actively feeling the pain and looking for relief from over-promised customers and growing pains. They usually have a mix of founders, junior developers, and a few senior developers. Those seniors have often previously worked in companies with high performing operations teams. They know that good developer and customer support operations pay for themselves in velocity and customer satisfaction – sometimes more so than do the founders, who haven’t yet seen that demonstrated elsewhere. Those folks can pressure their managers to start building great operations and customer support organizations, so that’s where you see hiring that will mix senior and junior operations folks in new hire roles.

Established companies, and of course the university [of Michigan in this context], already have substantial, though usually fragmented, developer operations, system operations, and customer operations groups. Pockets of them can be very high performing, but generally they’re middle of the road and not empowered to support substantial improvements in developer velocity. If they’re lucky they get a manager who is organizationally savvy enough to advocate for budget and headcount in terms that senior management finds persuasive, but overall they’re viewed as a necessary expense to be minimized. I fear there’s not a lot of current hiring there, especially for folks entering the field.

None of that translates into easily actionable job hunting advice, but I would suggest focusing on local and remote growth-mode early companies, probably VC backed. VC money was hard to come by for the past few years, but the floodgates have opened again – though only for AI companies. AI companies need operations people, and some of them are started by founders experienced enough to understand just how much.

Also, you almost certainly need a good answer to the “Tell me about a time you used AI to solve a problem” question during the interview process, and it should feature time savings, verification, and durable value if possible.