Dave Zwieback
DevOps keeps it cool with ICE
How inclusivity, complexity, and empathy are shaping DevOps.
Over the next five years, three ideas will be central to DevOps: the need for the DevOps community to become more Inclusive; the realization that increasing Complexity of systems is the underlying reason for DevOps; and the critical role of Empathy in the growth and adoption of DevOps. Channeling John Willis, I’ll coin my own DevOps acronym, ICE, which is shorthand for Inclusivity, Complexity, Empathy.
Inclusivity
There is a major expansion of the DevOps community underway, and it’s taking DevOps far beyond its roots in agile systems administration at “unicorn” companies (e.g., Etsy or Netflix). For instance, a significant majority (80-90%) of participants at the Ghent conference were first-time attendees, and this was also the case for many of the devopsdays in 2014 (NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and others). Moreover, although areas outside development and operations were still underrepresented, there was a more even split between developers and operations folks than at previous events. It’s also not an accident that the DevOps Enterprise conference took place the week prior to the fifth anniversary devopsdays and included talks about the DevOps journeys at large “traditional” organizations like Blackboard, Disney, GE, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Raytheon, Target, UK.gov, US DHS, and many others.
The DevOps community has always been open and inclusive, and that’s one of the reasons why in the five years since the word “DevOps” was coined, no single, widely accepted definition or practice has emerged. The lack of definition is more of a blessing than a curse, as DevOps continues to be an open conversation about ways of making our organizations better. Within the DevOps community, old-time practitioners and “newbies” have much to learn from each other.
DevOps hiring
A holistic approach to hiring for in-demand positions
Traditional recruiting is broken. The biggest problem is that goals and incentives of candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters are often misaligned. For instance, taken to the extreme, a headhunter’s best candidate is one who survives at a new job just long enough to collect the finder’s fee before being placed at another company. Clearly, this puts the recruiter at odds with both the candidate and the hiring manager.
The current unemployment rate for “computer and mathematical occupations” is 2.9%. It’s been dropping, and is now lower than the 4% level that is considered “full employment.” This means that every software engineer, database administrator, and “DevOps engineer” who wants to work—and, apparently, some who don’t—are all gainfully employed. Not surprisingly, salaries are also going up.
Given this information, it’s easy to get caught up in the hysteria of the so-called “war for talent,” with its violent language of “headhunting” and “poaching.” A natural reaction to this situation might be to have more recruiters send even more unsolicited emails to candidates through LinkedIn. However, this default recruiting tactic has diminishing returns: the higher the volume of recruiter spam on LinkedIn, the more engineers will ignore it or delete their profiles altogether.
Is there another way?