DevOps Engineer Review

As a DevOps engineer working in an agile environment, I spend my day working to develop our product by writing code, investigating the approaches we can take, and testing our solutions, as well as carrying out operations work which involves deploying and maintaining our systems in a live production environment.

I have learnt many new skills in my role, particularly around the technologies and languages we use on my project. As a DevOps developer, I have developed strong skills in linux administration and ansible, and with an effort to promote containerisation I have become familar with docker, podman, and kubernetes.

I genuinely enjoy my role because I find it interesting, meaningful, and feel that it is taking my career in the right direction. I don't enjoy the university aspect, however, as I feel the course is not applicable to the skills I need to carry out my responsibilities effectively and that the time could be spent on something more useful.

From the company perspective, there doesn't seem to be much structure. When we are on boarded, we are assigned to a project and essentially left to ourselves by the early careers team. We have regular catch ups where we can raise any issues, however all opportunities such as team building, further training, and support primarily come from project based staff as with any other employee.

I receive a good level of support from my employer. I am given a day a week to complete my university studies, with room to have more time if needed. I am given opportunities to work with and learn from more experienced members of the team. If I have any major issues, then I can raise them with my line management and they are good at addressing these.

I am given one day a week to travel to university and complete my studies. We are also given 30 days of paid leave in our final year to complete our dissertation, which helps greatly alleviate the time pressure when trying to complete this alongside normal work and other university modules.

I do not feel that the qualification I am completing has much relevance at all to my role, and thus does not help me perform it better. As a software engineer, I would benefit from a degree covering primarily these skills, whereas the majority of content in my qualification is geared towards business aspects which have no relevance to me.

We have sports and social clubs at each of our offices for members to get involved with and take part in activities which is good fun. We also do project based activities to help team building. A number of our networks also run events, such as our BAME, LGBT+, and Young Professionals groups.

Yes

CGI is a good company to work for. They take the well-being of staff seriously and expose you to some really interesting, meaningful, and rewarding environments in which you can build a really strong skill set that builds you up for the future. Any big company has issues, but it is a healthy workplace environment.

Make sure to enquire in the interview about what job you would be placed in if successful, as there is an element of luck and I did not find out until the day I started. Generally though, it is a smooth process and the assessment centre staff are really relaxed which puts you at ease. As long as you come in prepared you will be fine.