On reflection, I think I was fortunate to begin my career in a small organisation (80 employees with 2 IT techs and 4 developers at our biggest). I began my career converting Word documents into HTML in Dreamweaver to burn onto CDs for our clients. Then, I started building sites in Classic ASP and SQL Server, then I had to take on the role of SysAdmin. A year or so after that, we took on our first developer, and we became an ISV. A few months later, we had dedicated IT techs.

We never even knew there could be a split between dev and ops. We were developing the software, and we ran the servers. We scripted deployments (not entirely, but in large part), we wrote monitoring scripts, we set up production environments, we wrote scripts to replicate the production environment on our workstations.

We never reached the ideal of continuous, automated deployment but, on the other hand, we could (and did) make changes to internal and external systems with a few hours’ notice. The developers often spoke directly to clients and end-users, and we were often in a position to prototype change requests whilst the client was still in the meeting.

Moving from that environment to ones with a more traditional split between development and operations was an eye-opener, to say the least. Battling change control, ticket management and miscommunications taught me a whole raft of skills that I never even thought I’d need.

So if you want to hire people with a devops state of mind, recruit from SMEs – you might be pleasantly surprised.