“At one point, I even agreed to work for sandwiches.” The story of a Vinnytsia resident who got into IT on his fourth try: now he’s a DevOps and doesn’t regret it

First round

Bohdan, a native of Vinnytsia, studied at Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University (DonNU) in specialty 122 «Computer Science» and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in this specialty. And it was with his admission to the university that the young man’s epic journey in IT began.

He recalls that he liked the technosphere, but later the fire died down a bit, he abandoned this idea and studied simply because it was necessary. «I worked on construction sites in the summer, and at some point I realized that I never want to work physically again in my life,» adds Bohdan, recalling this unsuccessful experience.

Then he realized that IT could help with this. That’s where his first attempts to get into this field began. «I just sat down and started watching YouTube, how to choose a specialty, who does what, etc.,» says the IT expert.

In his third year of university, he chose his first courses in Front-end, but only because everyone said that you could get into it quickly and the entry threshold was quite low. On this wave of motivation, he started studying, but later dropped out.

In the end, he tried to return to studying Front-end, but it ended in nothing, the young man dropped out of the courses again.

Circle No. 2

After a considerable amount of time, about 1.5 years later, at some point Bohdan decided that he still wanted to become a Python Dev. He had studied this programming language at the university and already partially understood it. This is what prompted the young man to buy a course on Udemy. Bohdan began to master Python, practice, and even started to get something out of it, but he never reached the end.

A little more time passed and he returned to the course to finish it, but the attempts were in vain, everything ended before reaching the end. «Every time I quit my studies, I scolded myself terribly, this pressure from myself was unbearable, but studying was also unbearable, because I was afraid of failure and generally that I would not be able to complete this path,» added Bohdan.

All these attempts to enter IT lasted for about 4 years. He studied and quit, studied again and quit, and so on in a circle. And he wanted to give up, abandon attempts to study and become an IT professional.

On the way to DevOps, or circle four

On one of his regular days, Bohdan recalls going for a walk with a friend, and the friend invited him to take a DevOps course on THE GAME EDUCATION platform from two Senior DevOps Engineer mentors. After thinking for a few days, the young man decided to give it a try and agreed.

Within two days, Bohdan was added to the chat with five other students on the stream, and his studies began. But even there, the young man faced problems.

He immediately liked that there were two mentors on the course: one was responsible for technical skills, and the other for mentality. And it was with him that Bohdan managed to work through his difficulties and change his perspective on learning. «I realized that if it’s difficult, it means you’re growing. And mistakes are just part of your experience, you don’t need to focus on it,» he adds.

The mentor also taught Bohdan how to set goals correctly and understand what he really wants.

It was after the young man, with the help of a mentor, was able to formulate his own goal: «To become a Junior DevOps in 3 months with a salary of $600,» that his view of study and work changed. And despite the fact that Bohdan was quite skeptical about all the previous courses, he was delighted with the DevOps courses. This was reflected in his attitude: Bohdan always tried to be proactive, take responsibility, and ask about everything that was interesting. «Here I was always among the top three students in terms of learning speed,» he recalls.

The result was not long in coming. And within three months, the newly-minted IT professional had completed the course and gotten a job.

And he remembers with gratitude the mentors who believed in him and passed on their experience, as well as himself, who then took advantage of the opportunity.

What about money?

Like everyone else, Bohdan always thought that IT paid very well. «And it actually does: it’s a field that really pays a lot,» he says. As a graphic assistant, the IT guy earned about $200 a month, working part-time because he combined work and university.

Every time Bohdan started learning, he aimed for the salary that was stated on the market for beginners.

Bohdan’s first salary after officially entering IT was $600, and it turned out that he increased his income three times. Now Bohdan receives a market salary relevant to Strong Junior, and has ambitious plans to increase his income to $2000–2500 for the current year.

Speaking of the maximum that one can expect in DevOps in Ukraine, these are Senior positions, which require more than five years of experience and offer from $4,000 to $6,500. True, there may be vacancies where they offer to pay more, but they are rare.

Life hacks for IT beginners

Given his difficult path, Bohdan highlighted several nuances that he advises those interested in conquering the IT field to pay attention to, in particular:

1. Set clear goals. This helps a lot. You will no longer be going into the unknown, but will know where you want to go. When I was studying, I set a clear priority goal: «Become a Junior DevOps in three months with a salary of over $600.» And I achieved it because I understood what I wanted. Before that, I was just going into the unknown, and I think that’s why I quit, because I didn’t understand where I was going.
2. Learn by analogy. My mentor taught me this. Just tie some new knowledge to analogies — it’s a really cool skill, and you learn much faster that way. When I taught AWS, I used this very method.
3. If you don’t understand something, try to visualize it. I always try to draw when I don’t understand something. For example, when I have to build infrastructure in AWS, I draw it to understand what should work with what. When I was studying, I also did this all the time.
4. Use ChatGPT. You can automate a lot with it, but you shouldn’t delegate tasks and solutions to it. It’s not a robot that will do everything for you. When I was studying, I asked it to explain complex things in a simple way, like for a first-grader, for example. That way I learned even faster. Use it as a mentor, but not as a replacement for you in your studies or work.
5. Meet people with similar interests or find a community that has the same goals as you. When I got into a circle of people who wanted the same thing, we boosted each other, helped each other, supported each other when it was difficult, shared new experiences. This increases your chances of becoming a specialist by a huge percentage.

What should every DevOps know?

Bohdan says that he studied a certain list of technologies, and according to him, they are more than enough to enter DevOps. He shared this list:

• AWS;
• Linux;
• Docker & Docker-compose;
• Git;
• GitHub Actions & GitLab Pipeline CI/CD;
• Terraform;
• Kubernetes.

All the courses that Bohdan took were paid on Udemy in English. They were provided by the mentors on the course. He practiced simply through ChatGPT: he asked for certain tasks and simply performed them. The mentors also provided labs for practice. And they helped create a pet project in which the IT guy put all the technologies he studied into practice.

Among the free resources, Bohdan highlighted practical tasks for AWS. In particular, for him it was a game from Amazon in which he practiced various technologies: AWS Cloud Quest: Recertify Cloud Practitioner.

About plans and development options

Currently, Bogdan is actively developing in DevOps and plans to get AWS certification, as well as expand his stack and delve deeper into the technologies he already knows.

Thinking about the future, he is interested in two areas: Senior/Lead DevOps Engineer or Cloud Architect.

Now, for example, he has started his own blog on LinkedIn, learn to write, because he believes that in the new realities everyone should do it, and helps beginners in DevOps a little with mentorship and courses.

There are many areas in DevOps that you can delve into:

• Senior/Lead DevOps Engineer — you expand your knowledge and take on more responsibility for architecture, security, process optimization, and team mentoring.
• Cloud Architect — specializes in building scalable infrastructure in the cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure). You delve deeper into the design of high-load systems.
• Platform Engineer — focus on creating internal platforms for developers that simplify CI/CD, observability, and security.
• SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) — more emphasis on reliability, monitoring, performance tuning, and automation.
• Security Engineer (DevSecOps) — deepening into security: creating policies, identifying vulnerabilities, integrating security practices into CI/CD.
• Kubernetes Engineer — work on Kubernetes clusters, operators, Helm, GitOps, multi-cluster management.
• DataOps/MLOps — optimization and automation of work with big data or ML models.

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