I've had the opportunity lately to speak to a lot of DevOps engineers at startups around Europe. Some come from a more traditional infrastructure background, beginning their careers in network administration or system administration. Most are coming from either frontend or backend teams, choosing to focus more on the infrastructure work (which hey, that's great, different perspectives are always appreciated).

However, a pretty alarming trend has emerged through these conversations. They seem to start with the existing sys admin or devops person leaving and suddenly they are dropped into the role with almost no experience or training. Left to their own devices with root access to the AWS account, they often have no idea what to even start. Learning on the job is one thing, but being responsible for the critical functioning of an entire companies infrastructure with no time to ramp up is crazy and frankly terrifying.