Trained a bunch of DevOps freshers this year — the gap between what courses teach and what the job actually is, is bigger than I expected

[u/RedYellowTechnology]

I teach DevOps to career switchers and freshers, and I keep noticing the same pattern: people come out of a course expecting to "automate everything" and walk into a job that's mostly debugging pipelines someone else built, negotiating between dev speed and ops stability, and a LOT of reading logs.

Nobody tells you upfront that the job is way more about judgment and communication than tool mastery. Docker/K8s/Jenkins are the easy part — knowing when NOT to automate something, or how to explain a tradeoff to a non-technical PM, is the actual skill gap I see in new hires.

Curious if this matches what people already working in DevOps roles have experienced — did your first job look anything like what your course/bootcamp made it seem like?