New DevOps Job? Do This to Exceed Expectations

Here's something interesting that most of you don't realize before starting your first DevOps job. There are two types of engineers. Once we immediately start suggesting we should migrate to Kubernetes or rewrite all our pipelines or let's write all our infrastructure in Terraform right away. Why aren't we doing that already? And the second type who spends the first days or weeks really understanding how the existing system actually works talking to the team to learn what problems they are facing. what bottlenecks they're currently having and finding small improvements that genuinely help people without disturbing their work. That's the type of engineer who becomes really appreciated and valued by the team. And I've seen this pattern many times both in my own career and working with our boot camp graduates who've lended their first DevOps roles. So, I have hundreds of examples of this. And in this video, I want to show you exactly what you should do in your first three days and what you should not do in order to exceed expectations, build trust with your team, and set yourself up for long-term success in your new role. Now, we also created a practical guide with over 20 specific small wins that you can implement in your first 30 days as a DevOps engineer. and each one shows you how to spot the problem and exactly how to fix it. It's completely free and extremely valuable. So, grab it from the link in the description. So, let's dive right in.

The first one is the mindset shift. Before you even start, you need to understand something important about your DevOps role first. Your job is not to introduce the latest tools you've learned or rewrite CI/CD pipelines because they look messy or outdated or replace Terraform with another infrastructures code tool because it's better or migrate everything to Kubernetes. Your actual job is to understand how the system really works. Reduce risk not create it. Make the team's life easier instead of harder. and most importantly enable engineers to ship code fast and reliably. Here's a real picture. The fastest way to lose trust as a new DevOps engineer is to change things before understanding them. And I learned this the hard way myself early in my career. So I joined this company and looked at their Jenkin setup and thought this looks outdated and messy. We should modernize it. I started suggesting and even making changes immediately. I extracted snippets into shared library for reusability. I wrote cleaner pipeline script. I made certain jobs in the pipeline. I optimized the speed of the pipeline to make it faster. I tried to change the deployment to different environments and how it was happening and even proposed the change of their complete git workflow because I was enthusiastic and I had tool expertise. I knew how to do these things. But what I didn't have was enough experience in the role. And you know what happened? The team shut down. They stopped listening to my ideas and started resisting my changes because I hadn't earned the right to suggest changes yet because I didn't understand back then that messy Jenkins setup had evolved over 3 years to handle some very specific edge cases they had. So those weird scripts that I wanted to remove or refactor, they were solving some real issues that I didn't know existed yet. They just looked wrong and messy for me. And most importantly, it looked a bit arrogant and disrespectful for the team to say, "You're doing everything wrong. Let's change things right away. " So the first mindset shift is this. Be a student first, not a teacher. Because every system is different. Assume the current system exists for reasons that you don't understand yet because you're new. So your job is to learn those reasons before you propose changes. So understand the entire system with all the edge cases, all the history so you can start thinking about changes with full context instead of half information. Now this doesn't mean you can't eventually improve things and make changes. It just means that you earn the credibility to improve things by first understanding them deeply.

The second one is to map the infrastructure quietly. Here's your first practical task. Create a diagram of the system. Not a perfect comprehensive diagram. Just a simple map that helps you understand how things connect. A big picture view of everything. You can start with these basics. What applications exist and what do they do? Where does the CI/CD pipeline run? What are the pipeline steps and why have they been added? or which cloud provider and services are being used, where are the databases running, how are they managed, how is monitoring set up, what's the complete deployment workflow from code commit to production. And you don't need fancy tools for this. I literally just draw this on paper whenever I start mapping out a system or you can use something simple like draw. io. Then once you have this, start asking questions. What runs where? Which systems are most critical to the business? What breaks the most often? Where do we spend the most money? And here's why this matters. Even a rough diagram already puts you way ahead of many engineers who just start touching things without understanding the full picture. I remember one of our boot camp graduates, Gregory. He told me that this exact approach helped him stand out in his first job. He spent his first week just mapping out the infrastructure, asking questions, taking notes. And in his second week, when a deployment issue happened, he was the one who could quickly identify the problem because he understood how everything connected through visualizing it. So his manager later told him that this was one of the reasons they knew they made a great hire. And here's the thing, this diagram will keep evolving. It will start basic and every week you will learn something new. You're going to add to it. But having that initial map gives you context for everything else you do. Also bonus point is share this diagram with your team once you've refined it a little bit. They will appreciate having a visual reference and it shows that you are taking initiative to understand the system.

Next one is learn from incidents, not documentation. Here's something most new engineers don't do, but absolutely should. Specifically, ask these questions. What broke in the last 6 to 12 months? What causes alerts at 3:00 a. m.? What incidents do we never want to repeat? Or ask them, are there any postmortems that you can read? And this is gold because this tells you real system weaknesses, not just theoretical ones that you have to assume. It literally shows you where things break the most. It shows you team pain points that keep people up at night, literally. And it shows you where your DevOps expertise can actually add the most value. So documentation tells you how things should work, but incidents will tell you how things actually work and where they fail. When you understand the failure patterns, you understand the systems vulnerabilities. And that's where you can add real value. For example, maybe you learn that the database backup process fails silently without anyone noticing every few weeks or that a specific micros service causes cascading failures when it goes down or that deployments frequently break because of a configuration drift issue. These are real problems worth solving, not some hypothetical improvements or nice to haves, but real pain that the team experiences regularly. So don't just read the wiki pages, read the incident reports. That's where the real learning can happen. That's where you can contribute the most right from the beginning.

The next one is find small lowrisk wins. Now, at some point, obviously, you want to start making improvements, right? So, let's talk about how to actually do that in your first 30 days. The key rule here is small improvements that help people right now are better than big refactorings that might help people in 6 months. Even worse is big refactoring that disrupts existing workflows. So, engineers can't actually work properly because of your changes. So, don't do that. But let me give you examples of what to do, what to actually do, which are small, low-risk wins that you can achieve early. For example, you can improve logging clarity. Maybe error messages are cryptic and engineers waste a lot of time figuring out what actually broke. So you could improve logging to be more helpful and descriptive for troubleshooting. Or add missing alerts. Maybe there's a common failure that does not trigger an alert, so issues get discovered too late. Getting that alert is going to be quick and extremely valuable. Another one is document a confusing process. Maybe there is a deployment step that everyone does differently because it's not documented, so there's no standard guide. Writing clear documentation is going to help everyone. Another great one is speeding up a slow pipeline stage. Maybe tests run sequentially when they could run in parallel. A simple optimization that saves everyone time every single day. Or create a runbook. Maybe when something breaks at 2:00 a. m. in the system, there is no clear guide on how to fix it. So writing that runbook helps whoever is on the call. So you notice a pattern here. These are not some sexy, impressive projects. They are practical, small improvements that make people's lives easier immediately. And here's why this matters. Every time you deliver something that helps the team, you build credibility. And credibility is what allows you to eventually suggest and make bigger projects with support from the team. So I always tell our DevOps boot camp students, don't try to be a hero in your first month. Just be helpful instead with small but valuable fixes. The engineer who fixes 10 small annoying things is often more valuable and appreciated than the engineer who proposes one massive refactoring that looks impressive but that would not ship for 6 months. So nobody actually sees the results in the first 6 months. And the beauty of this approach is that it's low risk. You're not touching critical infrastructure. You're not rewriting core systems. You're making incremental improvements that worst case do not help much, but the best case they save the team hours every week. Now, talking about removing friction, a lot of them come down to deployment complexity and infrastructure headaches. And that's where Railway, the sponsor of this video, actually helps. Railway is an all-in-one intelligent cloud platform that hosts production ready deployments, but is very easy to use. So, here's what makes it different. You can deploy any part of your application from databases to frontends to servers from a single visual canvas or through direct AI integrations via their MCP or agent skills. So everything you need to ship is in one place and you only pay for what you actually use. So active CPU and memory, not what you provision. So you don't need to worry about overpaying for idle resources that are just sitting around. But you know what the best part is? Your services scale vertically as traffic increases. And you can spin up replicas for horizontal scaling when you need it. Plus you get built-in logging and observability without setting up separate monitoring infrastructure. You just get it out of the box. So, if you want to try it out, you can use my link in the description to get $20 in railway credits, which is basically a free month on the pro tier. So, make sure to check it out.

This next one is very important and often overlooked, which is understand how deployments and incidents work in your company. As soon as you join the team, ask them how do deployments happen here? What's the release process? Who approves what before code goes into production? How do rollbacks work if something breaks? What happens when things break at 2:00 a. m.? Who's on call? And how does the rotation work? What are the runbooks for common incidents? And this is where trust is built fast as a DevOps engineer. The reason is because when you understand the release process, which is literally the backbone of DevOps, you can help improve it. When you understand the on call process, you can help make it less painful. So, here's a practical tip. If possible, shadow someone during a deployment to production. Watch how they do it. Understand the steps. Ask questions. Take notes. The same way, shadow someone who's on call. See what a typical on call shift looks like. what alerts fire, how are they handled? So, this hands-on learning is incredibly valuable because it shows you the reality of how your system operates under pressure. And here's a bonus. When you volunteer to help with releases offer to join on call rotation early, even if you're just observing at first, it shows your team that you are serious about understanding the full scope of work instead of just observing them from afar.

Now let's talk about what not to do in your first 30 days. So the common mistakes that I see new DevOps engineers make, some of which I have made myself of course and how to avoid them. First of all, don't propose tool replacements immediately. Do not go in there and say we should migrate from Jenkins to GitHub actions because it's modern and it's cooler and that's what we need. Well, maybe eventually, but not in the week two because you don't understand the context yet. You don't know why Jenkins was chosen. You don't know what specific requirements it fulfills. Second one is do not optimize without understanding impact. Maybe that Terraform code looks inefficient to you, but maybe it's written that way because it needs to handle specific edge cases that you don't know about. So don't fix it until you understand why it exists because there must be a reason for it, right? And if you find out that the reason is just technical incompetence, then you can suggest a change. Third one is don't touch production without explicit guidance at the beginning. This should be obvious, but I've seen new engineers accidentally break production because they just assumed that they understood something they didn't. So always ask before making changes to production, especially while you are in the learning phase. This one is interesting. Do not assume things are bad because they're old. Old does not mean wrong. Sometimes older tools are actually more stable, better understood by the team, and just more appropriate for the specific use case that the team has than newer alternatives. And most importantly, don't criticize previous decisions. Even if something is genuinely poorly designed, criticizing the people who built it is a terrible way to start. They probably did the best they could with the limited knowledge or constraints they had at the time. So instead of saying, "Why did you build it this way? This is completely wrong and against the best practices. " Instead of that, just tell them, "Help me understand the reasoning behind this approach. " So it's going to be a discussion instead of you just teaching them with an arrogant tone. So the difference in tone matters extremely. If you want to get team on your side and I've seen talented engineers struggle in their first DevOps role not because they lacked technical skills but because they came across as arrogant or dismissive and nobody likes that. So don't be that person. So instead be humble, be curious, be respectful of the work that came before you. And you can actually see some more specific examples from the free quick wins playbook that we created for this video specifically. It's got 20 plus specific improvements that you can implement right away with exactly how to spot each problem and fix it. So grab it from the link below.

And now let me wrap this up with what actually makes a DevOps engineer valuable. Senior DevOps engineers succeed because they understand systems deeply. Not just how individual tools work, but how everything connects and why it's designed that way. They reduce risk. So they make deployments safer and systems more reliable which eventually leads to fewer incidents and happy teams. They enable others which means they make developers more productive with the processes they built. They make the on call less painful and overall the entire team more effective. That's why I mentioned at the beginning that DevOps engineers are force multipliers. By doing their work properly, they actually enable and make everyone else's work more efficient and faster. And finally, they solve real problems, not just hypothetical improvements with coolest, newest tools, but actual friction that people experience daily. And they are great at identifying those most important bottlenecks and issues and prioritizing them. So, it's not about knowing more tools than anyone else. And it's not about having more certifications for sure. It's also not about being the person who can write Kubernetes manifest files from memory. It's about making the system better and the team's work easier. If you help your team sleep better at night because systems are more stable and deployments are less scary and incidents are handled smoothly, you are doing DevOps right. That should be your measure. And that starts in your first 30 days by being a student, asking good questions, understanding the system before changing it. and delivering small wins that actually help people. So, let me leave you with one final thought. Of course, the foundation of all of this is that you actually know what you're doing, that you have strong DevOps skills and big picture understanding of how everything's connected. Otherwise, you cannot understand the systems and obviously you cannot make improvements because you need that expertise as well. But here's what I see most often. Engineers have knowledge gaps because they learned tools in isolation. They know Docker from one course, Terraform from another, AWS from a third course, or even job experience, or even worse, they've learned everything in sandbox environments and playgrounds, which feel nice and safe when you're learning, but then they go and feel insecure when starting to work because they've never done it on real infrastructure. And that's the problem. When you start your job, you are expected to integrate multiple technologies and set up real infrastructure to solve real problems, not just know individual tools separately. But if you have knowledge gaps, then contributing meaningfully becomes really difficult. And more importantly, you feel like an impostor, like you don't belong in that role. So if you recognize these knowledge gaps in your own learning, that's exactly what we address in our DevOps boot camp. We teach you how to combine tools, how to understand the concepts behind and wise behind every single concept, how everything works together, how to make architecture decisions, how to build complete production grade workflows. So our graduates go into their first DevOps jobs with confidence and know exactly what they're doing from day one. And this is the biggest value that we can deliver to you. So if this resonates and you want to know more then obviously all the information will be in the description but whether you learn with us or on your own I still want you to remember this your first 30 days set the tone for your entire time at the company. So use them wisely which means be curious be helpful and focus on understanding before improving. So that's the main message I want to leave you with. If this was helpful and you know someone who will also get extreme value from this video, please share it with them. And as always, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next