you're not behind

Hey {{first name | there}}. I had a call yesterday with a Senior DevOps Engineer based in Toronto, Canada, who used to be active in the community. 

Back when the DevOps scene was mostly a handful of people figuring it out in public. 

In today's career notes, I will share: 

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Early in her career, she was active, visible, and known. Then life did what life does, priorities reshuffled, and her community stuff went quiet. 

Not abandoned, just deprioritised, the way most things get deprioritised.

6 years later she's senior, working on bank-scale infrastructure, and quietly convinced she's behind.

She isn't, but I understand why it feels that way, because what she can see is other people's output. 

Conference talks, posts, panels, names that keep appearing in the same places. 

And when you compare your private competence to somebody else's public record, the only conclusion available is that you must be missing something technical. 

So you go and fix the technical thing. 

Another cert, another course, another lab, another six months of preparing to be ready. 

Meanwhile the actual gap sits somewhere else entirely, untouched, because nobody ever named it out loud.

Her skills didn't decay. 

Production infrastructure experience at that scale is hard to fake and harder to replace, and none of it evaporated during the years she wasn't posting about it.

What decayed is the part that was never on her CV in the first place, the reason a stranger would have to call her. 

Networks don't hold their value when you stop maintaining them, and the rooms she used to be in kept meeting without her, filling up with people who weren't there in 2020. 

That's the gap. Not capability, just no reason for the market to know she exists.

The useful thing about naming it correctly is that a visibility gap closes much faster than a skills gap ever would. 

Two moves, both unglamorous. 

Move 1: Apply to speak, because most conferences are short on experienced speakers rather than short on applicants. 

Move 2: Then show up in the rooms where the conversations already happen.

She took both. 

By the end of the call, she'd written down the KubeCon scholarship deadline and picked her first CFP. 6 years of quiet, restarted in thirty minutes of deciding.

The only thing holding the gap open was the assumption that coming back required some readiness she didn't have yet. 

She had it in 2020. She has more of it now.

Name the one thing you stopped doing when life got busy. 

Not the habit, the visible thing. The talks, the posts, the community work. 

Then find one deadline in the next 30 days that would force you to restart it, and put it in your calendar today.

Stay sharp. Stay visible.

Divine Odazie
CEO, EverythingDevOps