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5d • 💬 General discussion
The Skill That Separates $50K Admins From $200K Engineers
I’ve interviewed DevOps candidates who couldn’t rename 30 files at once.
They had AWS certifications. They had Kubernetes experience. They had years on their resume.
But when I asked them to automate a simple task without Google, they froze.
Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you:
Many "DevOps engineers" today are just professional button clickers.
They know where the buttons are in the AWS console.
They can copy-paste commands from Stack Overflow.
But they don't know how to use Bash properly.
They are not able to write shell scripts.
This single weakness is keeping them stuck at $80K while others make $200K doing the same job title.
You Are Using Your Computer Wrong
Think about how you interact with your computer right now.
You point. You click. You drag. You drop.
You repeat the same 47-step process every time you need to do something.
Computers were invented to free humans from repetitive labor.
Instead, we’ve turned them into elaborate pointing-and-clicking machines.
Every time you click something, you’re doing a computer’s job for it.
Every time you manually repeat a task, you’re trading your time for laziness.
Every time you can’t automate something, you reveal a fundamental gap in your skill set.
And hiring managers see it immediately.
The Power That Cannot Be Faked
When I was a Junior DevOps Engineer, I watched a senior solve in 10 seconds what took me 2 hours.
He didn’t install a special tool.
He didn’t use a fancy GUI application.
He typed a single line of bash.
My jaw dropped. I asked him immediately if he could teach me.
That moment changed my career.
The command line provides capabilities that no graphical interface can match.
Rename 500 files based on patterns? One line.
Find every log file containing a specific error across 20 servers? One line.
Transform data, filter it, and pipe it to another tool? One line.
Automate a deployment that takes 45 minutes by hand? One script.
This kind of power cannot be replicated in a GUI. Ever.
Once you experience it, you can never go back to clicking.
The Universal Tool That Never Dies
Here’s something most DevOps engineers don’t understand:
Modern tools come and go. VS Code extensions recreate functionality that has existed for 30 years.
People spend weeks learning specialized tools that only work in specific environments.
They install fuzzy finders and terminal prettifiers and productivity plugins.
Then they have to log in to a server where they don't have all of these crutches.
And they tank completely.
They have no idea where to start or how to find their way.
Don't be that guy.
I'm not that guy.
I use Bash because Bash is on everything.
Every Linux distribution. Every Mac. Every cloud server. Every container. Every system I will ever SSH into.
The scripts I wrote for my homelab work identically on production servers at Fortune 500 companies.
This is why I didn't use zsh for the first 3 years of my career.
Zsh isn’t on everything. Bash is.
Universal beats specialized. Every time.
Pipelines Are Functional Programming
I’m going to reveal something that will change how you think about the shell.
Unix pipelines are functional programming.
When you pipe commands together, you’re doing the same thing JavaScript developers do with map, filter, and reduce.
- grep is a filter: removes lines that don’t match
- sed and awk are maps: transform each line
- wc is a reduce: aggregates data into a count
The difference?
Shell pipelines have worked this way since the 1970s.
They work identically across every Unix-like system on the planet.
The shell isn’t old technology. It’s timeless technology.
Everything modern is just catching up to what Unix figured out 50 years ago.
The 6-Month Reality Check
I’ve seen what happens when engineers avoid shell scripting.
They stay stuck at junior-level salaries for years.
They can’t automate their way out of repetitive work.
They remain dependent on GUIs that change every software update.
They watch others get promoted past them.
The Investment That Pays Forever
Learning bash scripting is not about learning one tool.
It’s about learning a philosophy that makes every other tool more powerful.
- Your cloud skills become deeper because you understand what the GUI abstracts
- Your Kubernetes troubleshooting improves because you can inspect anything
- Your automation capabilities become unlimited because everything composes
- Your career trajectory accelerates because you can solve problems others can’t
The time you invest now pays dividends for 30+ years.
The scripts you write today will still work in 2055.
Can you say that about any other technology you’re learning?
Start learning Bash today.
If you need some help with that, keep a close eye on the coming newsletter. I have something new coming up.
But I can't tell you about it yet. All I can say is that KubeCraft members already have access to it, but I'm
working on doing something special for my newsletter subscribers.
Mischa
P.S. We are now opening spots for the January cohort for KubeCraft. We landed 5 jobs in December! CLICK HERE to claim your spot now, we'll only allow 10 new members in January.
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The Skill That Separates $50K Admins From $200K Engineers
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