DevOps culture is alive and well… but so are the characters you meet along the way.
Here’s a brutally honest (and painfully relatable) guide to the 7 types of DevOps engineers you’ll find in the wild — which one are you?
1. The Bash Wizard 🧙♂️
- Writes 300-line shell scripts with zero comments.
- Knows every
awkflag by heart. - Once replaced Jenkins with a cronjob “for speed.”
🛑 Deploys on Fridays: Always. Because “cron never fails.”
2. The Kube Cowboy 🤠
- Thinks YAML is a lifestyle.
- Has 3 clusters at home “just for fun.”
- Believes everything should run in Kubernetes — even Notepad.
🚫 Will never explain what Helm values do. Ever.
3. The Pipeline Prophet 🧑🔧
- Worships CI/CD as a religion.
- Builds pipelines that deploy faster than you can type
git push. - Breaks the build to make a point.
😇 Deploys before Friday… but only if 100% test coverage is reached.
4. The Terraform Purist 🏗
- Refuses to click in the AWS console. Ever.
- Treats
terraform planlike a sacred ritual. - Has been in 3 cloud wars and has opinions about every one.
🧱 Still hasn’t finished refactoring the legacy infra from 2020.
5. The SLO Sniper 🎯
- Wakes up to alerts before the pager goes off.
- Speaks in PromQL fluently.
- Lives for dashboards with just enough red.
💤 Sleeps with one eye on Grafana.
6. The Security Sentinel 🔒
- Blocks the pipeline “for your own good.”
- Doesn’t trust
latesttags. - Makes you rotate secrets weekly “because compliance.”
🔐 Paranoid, but somehow always right.
7. The Chaos Engineer 🌀
- Runs chaos tests… in prod.
- Believes failure is a feature.
- Drinks coffee from a mug that says “Did you try turning it off and on again?”
🔥 Deploys before Friday to “see what happens.”
Final Thoughts:
DevOps isn't a title. It's a mindset + culture + vibe.
💡 Great teams have a little bit of each one — but if you’re deploying on Friday, at least bring snacks.
