The Shallow Slope Trap of DevOps Bootcamps

//Observations from many years spent interviewing DevOps candidates DevOps bootcamps feel fake/scammy and it took me a while to understand why. The people coming out of them aren’t stupid or lazy. They know the tools. They can recite workflows. But the moment you ask anything real or that isn’t already mapped, the competence collapses.

//The number of graduates that can’t explain how a URL becomes a rendered website is disheartening DevOps isn’t about using services. It’s about understanding the systems those services sit on top of. Operating systems, networks, routing, DNS, certificates, process boundaries, filesystems, data interactionss, scripting languages. What actually happens when a packet moves, when a process starts, when trust is established. Without that foundation, the abstractions don’t hold.

//I’ll take any opportunity to mention negentropy It’s also about negentropy. The job is to design systems and pipelines that minimize the surface area for human error, not just respond to failure after the fact. That only works if you understand where failure can occur, how state drifts, and which assumptions are fragile. You can’t remove disorder from a system you don’t actually understand.

Bootcamps skip that work. They teach “use this service to present a website”, not how the website gets there. Pipelines without shells. Clusters without topology. TLS without trust chains. Students learn the language required to sound confident, but not the mechanics required to find real efficiencies or failure points.

//Mentorship and real-world experience are irreplaceable //There are no shortcuts to foundational knowledge That’s the shallow slope problem. The floor is artificially raised. Early progress feels fast, but it’s built on borrowed structure. When abstractions leak there’s nothing underneath. No mental model to fall back on. No similar system knowledge to help fill the gaps. No way to reason forward. Just memorized steps in a job that depends on understanding the system well enough to simplify it safely.

In the end, the bootcamps still collect the money. Many hand graduates off to partnered short-term contracting firms where the gaps are masked just long enough to survive. So technically, they’ve fulfilled their promise. Then a real interview happens, or a real incident occurs, or the contract ends and the candidate is left exposed by a system that optimized for placement, not durability. Teaching people to avoid the foundations doesn’t protect them, it just delays the failure until it hurts more.
//Maybe I’m just a salty old engineer