Don't waste 6 months on hiring DevOps, take the 10 Hours DevOps Pill

Is this article for you? If “we need DevOps” has become a vague hiring request instead of a concrete plan for safer releases, more reliable infrastructure, clearer ownership, and less operational drag, yes.

Maybe you are a CTO trying to keep delivery moving while cloud spend, flaky CI, security reviews, incident follow-ups, environment drift, and half-owned production systems keep stealing focus from the product roadmap.

Maybe you are an engineering manager whose team already touches Kubernetes, Terraform, release pipelines, observability, and on-call rotations, but the work lives in scattered tickets, stale runbooks, and the memory of whoever debugged the last outage.

If you are about to hire your first DevOps engineer but cannot name the first production reliability, delivery speed, cloud cost, or ownership problem they must fix, this article is for you.

Those 10 hours can save you from six months of interviews, false starts, overloaded job descriptions, and circular debates about whether “DevOps” means CI/CD, cloud operations, platform engineering, SRE, developer enablement, or every painful gap nobody else owns.

The idea is simple: before you publish the role, spend 10 focused hours finding the real constraints, deciding what stays with product teams versus what needs platform ownership, and defining the first 90 days of measurable outcomes instead of a wishlist of tools.

I'll share with you here exactly what to do during those 10 hours.

‍

You might know this story TOO well

~ "I need to focus on the product"

You are building your company’s product.

You start thinking about the development process and building or improving production.

Then you start reading about DevOps, recognize the symptoms, and think: “This is probably what we’re missing.”

‍

~ “DevOps is too expensive for us right now.”

You start looking for a DevOps Engineer, but you find out the standard DevOps salary - “Oh, that’s pretty expensive for our budget”.

So you decide to wait. “Hiring a developer is more important right now” you tell yourself.

‍

A month goes by, and you and your team are grinding away, building a kickass product.

The result is familiar: releases depend on manual coordination, the cloud infrastructure drifts through one-off changes, and no one can say with confidence how the system would be rebuilt after a failure.

So, you make a decision, and you post your first “DevOps Position”, congrats!

‍

~ "I'll interview some candidates"

Candidates start streaming in, and you start interviewing.

After interviewing the 3rd candidate, you think to yourself “this is not it”.

Every candidate is missing a different piece of the required knowledge.

One candidate has never run production on AWS, another has no hands-on experience with the tool your stack depends on, and a third has only worked in on-prem environments.

And so, you re-evaluate.

‍

~ "I'll do it myself"

The realization is this: You can’t hire on knowledge for this position, you have to hire on skill and character.

BUT, you feel like the knowledge is crucial, at least at this point.

So you make another decision - I’ll invest some more time in this “DevOps” thing - I’ll learn.

You watch DevOps tutorials on Youtube.

You start subscribing to DevOps newsletters, something you never felt the need to do before.

Another month goes by.

‍

~ "What do other startups do?"

After weeks spent stitching together docs, tutorials, and well-meaning advice, you may know more terms but still not know what to do first.

“Am I re-inventing the wheel and complicating the future?” you might ask yourself.

You take a step back, zoom-out, and ask other startup founders what they did at this stage.

‍

That’s when you find out you’re not alone - “Oh! So it’s tough for other founders as well!”

But, each founder tells you something different.

One founder tells you to hire a freelancer - but that seems like just another hiring model and doesn’t solve the problem.

Another founder tells you to hire a full-time DevOps engineer, but your budget is tight and every product hire you postpone has a cost.

Until one founder tells you to hire an agency: “Instead of a freelancer, get a company that’s built to get your DevOps right”.

‍

~ "Maybe an agency?"

You’re convinced, and you start looking for agencies.

You get recommendations, you search online, and you start booking calls.

‍

1st call with a DevOps agency

“Hi there! Yes we’re the solution for you! Let’s get started!”

‍

2nd call with a DevOps agency

“Yes! We’ll provide you with a strong DevOps Engineer! Let’s get started!”

‍

~ "I'll do it myself"

You choose not to go on the 3rd call and you pause the process.

Why? Because you realize: “These guys didn’t remove any uncertainty for me - how are they different from a freelancer?”

So you make another decision.

You’ll continue to do DevOps yourself, and maybe delegate some tasks to other team members.

That’s when you find out it was a trap! You got yourself into a loop!

‍

~ "Oh no! it's a loop!"

After just one month you realize it’s not sustainable, and you repeat the same process:

1. Open DevOps position
2. Realize each candidate is missing something else
3. Fear for the budget
4. Stop the hiring
5. Complete DevOps tasks yourself
6. Consider a freelancer
7. Drop the idea because it's similar hiring
8. Consider an agency
9. Interview a bunch of agencies
10. No extra certainty or confidence from an agency
11. Do DevOps work yourself
12. Repeat

‍

This loop is sometimes 2 months long, and sometimes 12 months long.

‍

Either way, it slows down your company!

It occupies your thoughts.

It takes valuable time from you.

It speeds up global warming.

‍

Maybe the global warming part was an exaggeration.

‍

It’s amazing how many founders went through this exact same process.

‍

Break the loop

I’m here to tell you:

1. You can break the DevOps hiring loop
2. You can promote DevOps efforts quickly AND accurately
3. You can save 6-12 months of stumbling around

‍

You need just 10 hours with a DevOps Expert

You need just 10 hours with a DevOps expert.

What you need most is perspective from an experienced individual.

You don’t yet have the DevOps perspective or experience? No problem.

Get a DevOps Expert to consult you on a hourly basis.

I call it "The 10 Hours DevOps Pill" 💊

‍

Requirements for the DevOps expert

Not anyone will fit as your trusted DevOps expert.

Use someone that answers these criteria:

• Helped 10+ companies with DevOps
  Brings a broad perspective on what works across teams and stacks
  ‍
• Consulted CTOs and VPs of R&D before
  Understands how culture shapes DevOps adoption
  ‍
• Has advised DevOps groups and team leads before
  Knows how to turn messy platform work into an owned, manageable plan
• Did lots of DevOps hands-on work before -
  Understands how to do the work
  ‍
• You understand them -
  They know where you stand and have simple explanations. (Run away from the buzzwords throwers)

‍

Spoiler: The contents of the 10 hours

• 2h - Share everything about your startup
• 2h - Ask what’s possible + What others did
• 2h - Set DevOps goals
• 2h - Choose a strategy
• 2h - Create a DevOps roadmap

Let’s dive into the playbook for each meeting!

‍

1st + 2nd Consultation Hours: Share, share, share

Share the state of your company with the DevOps expert.

Share your infrastructure, your code, your work process, everything!

Don’t be shy, and don’t justify - simply explain your startup’s goals and your reasoning.

(Sign an NDA first, of course)

‍

3rd + 4th Consultation Hours: Understand what’s possible + Gain perspective

Take notes or record this call!

Ask the DevOps expert: What’s possible?

• How fast can changes reach production?
• How fast can you create new environments?
• How easily can your developers collaborate?
• How safely can you change the system?
• How available does the system need to be?
• How clearly can your team see what the system is doing?

Ask the DevOps expert: What did other startups do at this stage?

• What goals did they have?
• What DevOps efforts did they promote?
• Why did they decide those DevOps efforts?
• Which startups performed best? Why?
• Are there industry-unique considerations?

‍

5th + 6th Consultation Hours: Set DevOps goals

You now know what’s possible, and what other companies do.

Time to set short-term, mid-term, and long term goals.

If you want to dive deep into useful DevOps principles, check out the CTO DevOps Handbook here 👈🏼.

‍

7th + 8th Consultation Hours: Strategize

Based on your goals, strengths, and restrictions, choose a strategy.

Discuss the following options with your DevOps expert.

‍

Possible Strengths

1. Developers with DevOps background
2. High budget
3. Available time to manage the DevOps efforts

‍

Possible Restrictions

1. No budget
2. Low budget
3. DevOps needs are temporary for now
4. No time to manage the DevOps efforts

‍

‍

The available strategies

‍

Hire a DevOps Engineer, Boost with the DevOps expert

1. Create a DevOps roadmap with the DevOps Expert before hiring
2. Get the DevOps expert to interview the candidates
3. Get advice from the DevOps expert on what to examine during your interview with the candidates
4. Prioritize the DevOps efforts with the DevOps Expert
5. Plan the onboarding of the DevOps Engineer with the DevOps expert
6. Hire the DevOps Engineer
7. Get advice on managing DevOps projects from the DevOps expert
8. Discuss the DevOps tasks implementation with the DevOps Engineer and DevOps expert
9. Occasionally or routinely consult with the DevOps expert on priorities, management, and engineering

‍

Hire a DevOps freelancer, Boost with the DevOps expert

1. Exactly as the above strategy
2. Take advantage of the hourly flexibility when needed

‍

Hire a DevOps agency, Boost with the DevOps expert

1. Create a DevOps roadmap with the DevOps Expert before choosing an agency
2. Share your requirements with the agency
3. Filter out any agency that doesn’t provide you with a plan BEFORE work starts
4. Get the plan reviewed by your DevOps expert: Does it make sense? Is the planned result desired?
5. Make sure the DevOps agency’s ability to provide support after the work is done
6. Asses the level of the DevOps agency’s DevOps Engineers with the help of the DevOps expert
7. Make sure the DevOps agency is flexible with its hourly capacity
8. Occasionally or routinely consult with the DevOps expert on priorities, management, and engineering

‍

Advantages and disadvantages of the strategies

‍

‍

9th + 10th Consultation Hours: Create a DevOps roadmap + Execute your strategy

You’re ready to create a DevOps roadmap and start executing your strategy!

Creating a DevOps roadmap is the first step of each of the strategies described above.

‍

You had to do a bunch of things first:

1. You needed a DevOps expert to help you break the vicious DevOps loop - Done.
2. You needed to set DevOps goals rooted in a deep DevOps understanding and perspective - Done.
3. You needed to get familiar with different strategies and choose the best one for you - Done!

‍

You’re left with 2 things to do:

1 - Create the DevOps roadmap based on the goals and strategy you’ve set

2 - Start executing the strategy:

1. Share the DevOps goals with the team
2. Schedule the interviews with the Engineers/Freelancers/Agencies
3. Use the DevOps expert to stay on track
4. Set the milestones for the DevOps goals
5. Create the tasks
6. Complete the tasks

‍

Prepare before starting the process

You want to do two things before jumping into the 10 hours:

1. Before the first 2 hours:
   Perfect your DevOps terminology (will support rich discussions)
2. Before the last 2 hours:
   List existing efforts that might slow down the DevOps roadmap (will help prioritizing)

‍

Ask me anything

If you’re considering the “10-hour DevOps Pill”, reach out and we can sanity-check whether it fits your team’s situation.

Drop me a message here 👈🏼

‍

Do it yourself

You now know the general process for breaking the DevOps loop.

You don’t NEED a DevOps expert.

Feel free to subscribe to my Newsletter and learn how to do it yourself here 👈🏼