You think DevOps is about infrastructure? About CI/CD pipelines, observability, cloud costs, and uptime? Sure, on paper it is. But in reality, I spend half my time playing part-time therapist.
Let me explain this more clearly.
So many times, developers come to me frustrated because their deploys are failing. QA blames the environment. Product is upset that a feature is delayed. And management?? They want the number, graphs, and a promise that whatever went wrong will never ever happen again.
In the middle of all this, you’ll find me, the DevOps engineer. Translating complaints into configurations, turning chaos into systems, and listening, debugging, and, sometimes, just letting people vent. I’ve learned that the real job isn’t just building infrastructure, it’s building trust. Trust that these mishaps are not going to break the production. Trust that when something fails, it will recover fast. Trust that they were not just duct-taping things together but actually working towards fixing it. And building that sense of trust takes more than good tools; it takes empathy.
I’ve sat through retros where everyone was quietly pointing fingers, and I had to step in to say, “It’s okay. This is fixable. Let’s breathe.” I have had to teach junior devs that a broken build isn’t the end of the world. Shown PMs that you can’t “just push it live” without testing in staging. I’ve even had to coach other engineers on writing calmer, less panic-inducing Slack messages during incidents.
It’s not that I mind. Honestly, I love this job because it sits at the intersection of systems and people. I love automating things that used to be painful. I love the elegance of infrastructure as code. But I also love the soft skills it forces me to develop, such as patience, clarity, and calm under pressure.
So yes, I still write Terraform and Bash. I still tweak Prometheus alerts and babysit flaky staging environments. . But most of the times, my most valuable tool is not my terminal. It’s a calm tone, a screen share and “lets fix this together” attitude.
Because if you think DevOps is only about servers, you’re missing the real heart of it, the people those servers are meant to serve.