DevOps—where “development” meets “operations”—remains one of the most misunderstood roles in the software industry. Even experienced engineers in adjacent fields sometimes struggle to define it precisely. That’s partly because DevOps is less a fixed set of tools or technologies and more a culture and philosophy: one that prizes inter-departmental collaboration, continuous feedback, and relentless improvement throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
Because of this culture-first nature, technical ability is necessary but not sufficient. Engineers who prefer extended periods of solo, heads-down work can find the constant feedback loops frustrating. The practitioners who thrive in DevOps environments tend to share a recognizable set of soft skills that complement their technical knowledge. Below are seven of the most important ones.
1. Self-Directed Learning
DevOps tooling and practices evolve faster than almost any other area of IT. CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, observability platforms—all of these disciplines have matured dramatically in just a few years, and the pace shows no sign of slowing. If you rely solely on formal training to keep up, you will fall behind.
Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, puts it this way: “It’s hard to learn something that seems to evolve as quickly as the lessons are taught. Self-learners are the perfect candidates for embracing and pursuing DevOps adoption, as it requires a roll-up-your-sleeves, trial-and-error, do-it-yourself, continuous learning approach.”
Lisa Phillips, VP of Site Reliability Engineering at Fastly, adds an important dimension: “Being a DevOps professional means knowing 1,000 things pretty well, not being a specialist in just one. To be successful, you have to be open and willing to learn every step of the way, and re-learn things that have proven to be wrong—or become wrong over time.”
In practice, this means building habits around reading release notes, following post-mortems published by other engineering teams, experimenting in lab environments, and treating every incident as a learning opportunity.
2. Collaboration
The foundational premise of DevOps is that development and operations are not adversaries but partners working toward a shared goal: reliable, rapid software delivery. That premise only holds if the people involved genuinely embrace a team-first mindset.
Agarwal notes: “DevOps combines both development and operations, and therefore it’s imperative that all team members are able to adopt a team-first mindset.”
Omri Gazitt, Chief Product Officer at Puppet, takes it further: “Any problem is everyone’s problem, and a great engineer always makes those around them better.”
Collaboration in DevOps is not just about attending stand-ups. It means proactively sharing context, reviewing each other’s infrastructure code, pairing on incidents, and being genuinely invested in the outcomes of teammates—not just your own tickets.
3. Communication
DevOps engineers regularly interact with a wide range of stakeholders—developers, product managers, security teams, customer-facing support staff, and sometimes executives. Each audience has a different level of technical fluency, and the ability to tailor your message accordingly is essential.
Ben Porterfield, cofounder and VP of Engineering at Looker, is direct about the cultural shift this represents: “Long gone are the days of the grumpy cave-dwelling Ops persona. DevOps folks need to be able to work with the entire engineering department, with product, and often with a host of other departments that use internal tools. DevOps engineers regularly communicate with people of all levels of technical background and need to be able to adjust their communication level to make sure there is understanding.”
Agarwal connects communication directly to collaboration: “Setbacks and successes, as well as what the team learns each step of the way, must be transparently and immediately communicated across the entire organization. Also, the big-picture end-goal of a DevOps adoption needs to be clearly communicated across the organization—from even before day one.”
Written communication matters just as much as verbal. Runbooks, incident reports, architecture decision records (ADRs), and pull request descriptions are all forms of communication that outlast any single meeting.
4. Resilience
Production systems break. Deployments fail. Architectural decisions that seemed sound last year turn out to be bottlenecks today. DevOps practitioners operate in an environment of constant change, and with change comes failure. The ability to absorb setbacks, adjust course quickly, and keep moving is non-negotiable.
Agarwal frames this as an inherent characteristic of the discipline: “Working in such a fast-moving area of IT demands a lot of work and trial-and-error. DevOps demands new ways of critical thinking and skillsets that are not ingrained in the standard day-to-day responsibilities of business professionals.”
Resilience is also organizational: teams that respond to failures with blame rather than curiosity create environments where engineers hide problems instead of surfacing them early. A resilient DevOps practitioner models the blameless post-mortem culture that keeps systems healthy over time.
5. Big-Picture, Systems Thinking
DevOps practitioners are generalists by nature. But breadth of knowledge only has value if you can see how the pieces connect—how a database configuration change ripples into application latency, how a Kubernetes node autoscaling policy affects downstream services, or how a deployment pipeline bottleneck slows the entire engineering organization.
Gazitt describes this as caring about outcomes rather than just one’s own contribution: “DevOps requires a generalist mindset. Specialized skills are important, but it’s even more important to be able to understand and assist in removing bottlenecks in the overall system. By caring about the outcome as opposed to merely their part in the overall ‘supply chain,’ they will have the right instincts around how to best optimize for end-to-end success.”
Greg Warden, VP of Engineering at DigitalOcean, uses a specific term for this capability: “I think it’s important for people working in DevOps to be good ‘systems thinkers.’ By that I mean you need to be able to think in terms of dependencies and potential failure modes. You have to understand who might be impacted by any changes to the system or application you are working on, and how your system might be impacted by changes or failures in another person’s system or infrastructure. It is also important to understand the resources your systems use, and how those change as your system scales over time.”
6. Prioritization
A DevOps engineer’s backlog is never empty. On any given day you might face a production alert, a security patch that needs rolling out, a developer asking for a new environment, a performance regression to investigate, and a platform migration that’s been blocked for three sprints. The ability to triage effectively—distinguishing between urgent and important, and between noise and signal—directly determines how much value you deliver.
Eli Flesher, Engineering Manager at Lyft, articulates the central tension: “The ability to prioritize is extremely important in DevOps. There is an ongoing tension between developing for the future and operating what’s right in front of you. Some of the best DevOps people I’ve seen have the ability to stay focused on the broader goal of operations and the things they need to build for the future, while also prioritizing the timely, more short-term pressing tasks at hand.”
Practical prioritization frameworks—such as impact-versus-effort matrices, SLO-based alerting policies, or simply a clearly maintained team backlog—help make this skill concrete and visible rather than leaving it to intuition alone.
7. Empathy
Close collaboration inevitably means working through mistakes, miscommunications, and missed deadlines—together. The DevOps professionals who build the most effective teams are those who can put themselves in a colleague’s position before reacting, especially during stressful incidents.
Phillips captures this well: “Things will break—failure is part of the game and blaming others never helps. A strong DevOps professional will put him/herself in the shoes of their team members and act accordingly.”
Empathy also extends beyond the immediate team. Understanding the pressures that developers face when a deployment pipeline blocks them, or that a product manager faces when a release slips, allows DevOps engineers to design better processes and communicate with more genuine support rather than friction.
Putting It All Together
Technical skills—scripting, CI/CD tooling, cloud infrastructure, containerization, monitoring—remain the foundation of any DevOps career. But the practitioners who advance fastest and have the greatest impact tend to be those who pair their technical depth with the seven qualities above: self-directed learning, collaboration, communication, resilience, systems thinking, prioritization, and empathy.
If you’re evaluating your own readiness for a DevOps role—or building a DevOps team—this list is a useful starting point for honest self-assessment and structured interviews alike.
Quotes in this article were originally published by Forbes.