You've got Kubernetes flashcards, three certs framed above your desk, and a GitHub full of tutorial repos you forgot you even cloned. Congratulations — you've assembled a drawer full of Allen keys for furniture you don't even know you need to build yet

DevOps is sitting in the top five most-wanted tech jobs right now, and recruiters are still drowning in applicants who look ready on paper and fall apart in the room. That means there's a whole generation of candidates collecting hardware before they've got something to make with it.

Dan Ford, a former Principal SDE at AWS with 15 years interviewing and mentoring engineers, has sat on both sides of that hiring table. He knows exactly which drawer people are overstuffing, and what the frame is actually supposed to look like underneath it.

What we get into:

• The real order to learn networking, OS fundamentals, scripting, and cloud — before you touch a single logo on the roadmap

• What hiring managers are quietly checking for in your projects that most self-taught candidates never think to add

• The one tool everyone over-prepares with that barely comes up in real interviews

• Whether 6 to 12 months is actually realistic when DevOps isn't your day job yet

Build the frame first. The Allen keys can wait.