Spent the last few years hiring and mentoring for DevOps/Cloud/SRE roles. Here's the truth nobody tells self-taught engineers:

What interviewers actually check:

• Can you debug a broken CI/CD pipeline live, under pressure?

• Do you understand why a container restarts, not just how to restart it?

• Have you actually provisioned infra with Terraform/IaC, or just followed a tutorial?

• Can you read logs and metrics to find root cause, or do you just restart the service and hope?

What they don't check:

• Where you went to school

• Whether you have a CS degree

• Whether you did a $15k bootcamp

If you're self-taught and trying to break in, stop chasing certificates and start building real systems that break — and fixing them. That's the entire game.

What's the hardest part of breaking in for you right now? Drop it below 👇