I disagree that there is no place for a junior role. I can spec out tons of projects a reasonably junior person could handle that would take away a lot of "busy

I disagree that there is no place for a junior role. I can spec out tons of projects a reasonably junior person could handle that would take away a lot of "busy" work for me. The problem is this - very few people actively choose DevOps. I've heard it said that DevOps (I started calling it just "ops" because many devops jobs have very little dev) isn't something someone chooses, it's something that just happens to you. For me, one minute I'm volunteering to help out with the builds at a small startup, blink and then 5 years later I'm a DevOps engineer. I would give juniors this advice: Do not pigeonhole yourself into a particular role. The best "DevOps" I've seen are generalists that can fit in on SRE, Systems/platform engineering, network, security types of teams, etc. Same goes with technology. If you find yourself early on spending 2 years working on nothing but Jenkins and CI/CD pipelines, guess what your next job is gonna be about. Challenge yourself, always be learning a new thing. If you don't like learning, or can't learn fast, this isn't the job for you. If you don't like potentially brutal on-call schedules, this isn't the job for you. If you don't like mostly thankless work that is invisible if you are doing it correctly, this isn't the job for you. Also look at job postings frequently and see what companies are asking for proficiency in and make sure you at least are somewhat competent in those areas. Also I wish more DevOps had more of a CS background. I can't tell you how many times I've seen multiple senior DevOps looking at a machine that is clearly and very obviously thrashing and have no idea what they're looking at.