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Tag: career development

  • Then and Now

    Then and Now

    then-and-now

  • Best of 2021 – Why DevOps Will Cease to Exist

    Best of 2021 – Why DevOps Will Cease to Exist

    As we close out 2021, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the twelfth in our series of the Best of 2021.

    Nowadays I feel like there is no need to explain why DevOps as a methodology exists, as it is widely understood and accepted.

    But the reason DevOps engineers exist is not to ensure the success of its namesake methodology, nor, if we’re being honest, is the practice evolving into a role that’s viable for future progress. Rather, it’s on the verge of becoming obsolete.

    Surprisingly, in many cases having a DevOps engineer can actually get you further from the DevOps methodology objectives, rather than closer.

    How Does One Become a DevOps Engineer?

    I only recently stumbled upon DevOps courses in high-tech academies.

    Before it was an actual field of study, I’m pretty sure no one’s first step into the software development world was in a DevOps role.

    I personally started as a NOC engineer and later became a Linux administrator – developing a passion for the cloud and automation. Only years later did I dive into my first DevOps position. Others have made even lengthier journeys, starting from helpdesk support roles managing organizations’ PCs, printers and networks.

    The thing is, the starting point for people who choose a software development career starts exactly there: developing software.

    Typically, they either go to college or university or learn development online or via a bootcamp, where Linux, networking, virtualization, high availability and scaling are barely taught. And, of course, some extraordinary senior developers become infrastructure experts, but personally, I would call those folks architects and not DevOps engineers. This is probably the reason why almost every organization is in need of someone who’ll take on those responsibilities as a DevOps engineer.

    Signs of the End

    The number of cloud solutions is steadily growing every year, with cloud services becoming the dominant method of consuming business services. Gartner estimated a 40% increase in cloud services business revenue from 2020 to 2022.

    “Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $104.7 billion in 2020 (see table, below). The continued shift from on-premises license software to subscription-based SaaS models,” according to the firm.

    Worldwide Public Cloud Service Revenue Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

    New PaaS, SaaS and IaaS products are launched every year to make the development and maintenance of other applications easy and effortless.

    Hell, some SaaS products go as far as making it unnecessary, with platforms like WIX, Shopify, and Auth0, resulting in fewer developers being required to develop those kinds of applications. On top of that, there are already products that run almost entirely on Serverless services. Recently the term Storageless was coined and started to pop up here and there.

    At the same time, the number of developers is increasing every year. According to Statista between the years 2018 and 2019 the number of developers grew by almost a million. So, while the number of developers is growing, a big part of their responsibilities are being automated.

    This gradually frees up more time for developers to deal with DevOps challenges, which are also being automated by services like Coralogix, Datadog, JFrog, CircleCI, Gitlab and many more.

    Some companies, like Monday.com, have already acknowledged that it is not optimal to have a separate team or a single person in charge of all of the operations and maintenance of applications and that it is better to have developers responsible for their application stack from end to end.

    Although I opened by saying there is no need to explain why DevOps as a methodology exists, sometimes what gets forgotten is that DevOps evolved as a way to break down the silos between development and operations. But many organizations don’t recognize the irony of then having a separate team in charge of all operations and maintenance – that just defeats the purpose.

    Hopefully, as this trend grows, universities and coding courses will acknowledge these issues as core challenges in software development and include these subjects and principles in their curriculum.

    The Future As I See It

    This could be wishful thinking on my part, but I believe sometime in the future we will reach a point where all developers will be required to understand and practice DevOps. A developer who understands the cost of running their application, how Kubernetes assures it is always available and resilient and how to build more scalable and more secure application stacks will simply be better at their job and more valuable to their company. The opposite is also true; a DevOps engineer will be able to build better CI/CD pipelines, better monitoring solutions and cloud architectures if they are taking an active role in development and actually knows the application stack and his team’s pains and needs.

    Even if I’m wrong – and I do hope I am – I would argue that if you are a DevOps engineer or a tech lead of any sort, promoting the idea that DevOps is a part of every developer’s job is in your best interest.

    The developers who understand how to support their own environments, run internal services on private networks and understand the solutions that are available to them will simply be better at their job, enabling companies to let automated processes do their thing and focusing talent where it’s needed most to make the best use of our skill sets. Thankfully, this standard of excellence is becoming easier to reach every day; and (Do I dare say it?) perhaps, in the near future, DevOps will become less of a role and more of a service waiting for its eventual, unpreventable automation.

    Reading this, you might think that I am a self-loathing DevOps engineer who wishes to become a developer. Nothing could be further from the truth. Development Operations is my field, and I believe it’s full of talented individuals who I’m proud to call colleagues and friends. However, at the end of the day, we need to be realistic. Now that the “Operations” part of the work is mostly automated, we must focus our skills on the “Development” part.

  • How to Build Healthy Engineering Teams

    How to Build Healthy Engineering Teams

    A common challenge today for engineering teams is the increasing complexity of their jobs and figuring out how to make it both productive and enjoyable without burning out.

    Over the last 10 years, the role of a software engineer has evolved drastically. Software continues to reach unprecedented scale, it is becoming more complex and customer expectations are higher than ever. Organizations from all industries are now becoming software companies and, with the pandemic, everyone is feeling the effects of burnout.

    There are close to a million unfilled IT jobs in the United States. To ensure organizations are able to continue innovating, the industry needs the tools, state of mind and reliable practices to make this career sustainable.

    Creating an industry with healthy productivity is paramount. But too much of a focus on going faster without addressing burnout is a recipe for disaster. Engineering managers need to constantly balance both. Here are some things they should keep in mind:

    Invest in Engineering Productivity

    Companies are increasingly hiring for roles focused on engineering productivity—there are currently hundreds of open job postings from organizations looking for these skills. These jobs are aimed at making developers and engineers’ lives and work easier by focusing on streamlining how things are done within the engineering organization—including improving developer workflow processes, execution efficiency and product quality. They are often responsible for building internal tools that support cross-functional and developer workflows. Even with a relatively small engineering team, organizations can start thinking about bringing on a team member dedicated to making engineers’ roles within the company easier.

    Focusing on Healthy Productivity

    Productivity is, and will always be, extremely important, but potential burnout should also be seriously considered in the process. Remote work during the quarantine and the pandemic has brought this front and center. When people don’t have enough deep work time, they often work longer hours which can eventually lead to burnout. An average employee has 11 minutes to focus between distractions at work and then, after an interruption, it can take around 23 minutes to return to the original task. In addition, the average worker attends 15 meetings per week.

    There are many questions about how workers’ productivity has been impacted since early 2020, and research has found that developer productivity isn’t a problem—but burnout is. From March to December 2020 the study found:

    • Deep work time—a two-hour period of uninterrupted work—decreased by 22% between March and December 2020.
    • Average time in meetings went up by 67% from March to December 2020.
    • Pre-pandemic, 10% of developers were showing “always-on” behaviors at work, but that percentage went up to 15% and then to 20% by the end of the year.

    Focusing on driving healthy productivity—where developers are productive but not overworked—is key to keeping your employees.

    Strengthening Engineering Managers

    Managers play a key role in keeping engineering burnout in check. Ensuring that managers ‘manage well’ is not a new idea, but today there are particular complexities that make the engineering manager role both uniquely challenging and especially important.

    It is now widely acknowledged that culture is a considerable part of what gets employees to stick around. But culture isn’t only employee benefits like trendy offices, great snacks and other relatively superficial—though still important—benefits. What really matters is identifying and building teams that really care about one another on a personal level and making sure that incoming employees feel the same.

    With engineering teams, there is a tendency to focus primarily on the technology being created rather than the people who are creating it. While this approach can absolutely result in successful products, it is often the default management style for managers who don’t have the tools to do otherwise. Moving from software engineer to manager requires a whole new skill set that involves different communication styles, time management, organization, tools and software, scoping work, learning how to effectively delegate and identifying the right people to complete the team.

    As challenges continue to evolve, organizations need to ensure that engineering managers are able to support each individual on their team. It is so important to make sure that people feel aligned with a mission they care about and that their career interests and goals are being met. Not all of those can be measured with data, so managers have an all-important role in keeping up with the pulse of the team.

    Building Helpful Tools and Growing Developer Communities

    In the last decade, the speed of innovation in enterprise technology has skyrocketed and the amount of code and tools developers need to master has increased. At the same time, the number of unfilled job openings continues to grow. There are a lot of great trends that are helping to close this gap including low-code and no-code tools as well as a massive increase in community resources.

    No-code/low-code tools: As both technical and non-technical organizations hire an increasing number of developers, low-code and no-code have become more prevalent. With frameworks that allow even those without a technical background to deploy software, no-code tools open development capabilities to an increasingly diverse subset of people. While these tools will not replace developers, they will make it possible for more people to enter the field of software development and help companies continue to innovate.

    Developer community: The amount of resources available to new and existing developers has also skyrocketed in the last several years from open source communities to Stack Overflow to the ability to simply Google how to do something in code. The Linux Foundation’s extensive training catalog is one example; even Medium has a wealth of basic technical info, how-tos and deep dives available. If you’re looking to adopt a new tool, one of your main priorities should be to look at the size of the community so that you can easily troubleshoot problems if they arise. Having access to resources from community members that have gone through the exact same problems you encounter is priceless.

    The above are all just a start. Teams can go even further by finding and adopting analytics tools to dive deeper into specific productivity metrics. These can give managers and executive teams the hard data they need to make educated decisions that will help them keep their teams and drive innovation. It is worth investing the time and the tools to maintain your engineering resources. By doing these things, organizations can reach and maintain healthy productivity.

  • How to Promote Your Career

    How to Promote Your Career

  • Global SKILup Festival: Not Your Ordinary Conference

    Global SKILup Festival: Not Your Ordinary Conference

    Global SKILup festival offers the Humans of DevOps a career fair, numerous upskilling opportunities, and a full-day conference, featuring keynote speakers Mirco Hering and Patrick Debois and many more

    2020 has been the year focused on the human. As the pandemic unfolded, the Humans of DevOps worldwide did their part to help mitigate the many challenges we faced. We are grateful to the tech community for their tireless efforts in helping individuals and organizations adapt to the new ways of working in different and non-traditional ways.

    After a long year, DevOps Institute wants to honor our member community and partners by coming together like never before. We’re hosting a weeklong celebration 100% dedicated to advancing the Humans of DevOps, Dec. 7-11: Global SKILup Festival 2020!

    The premier DevOps upskilling event and celebration is not your traditional conference. The agenda will include a variety of different activities that focus on social, professional and educational experiences. It also features a deep-dive into technology trends and presents career advancement opportunities. The world’s first such festival will take place virtually, and is sponsored by industry leaders Rancher, AppDynamics part of Cisco, CircleCI, Moogsoft, CloudHealth by VMware, Harness and Epsagon.

    Want to Learn More About DevOps?

    Whether you are well-versed in DevOps or just starting out, this premier DevOps upskilling event is for you. The festival runs continuously worldwide and includes a career fair, certification opportunities, courses, hackathons, our ever-popular Global SKILup Day conference and more! The 2020 event also features keynote speakers Mirco Hering, Global DevOps Practice Lead/ANZ Modern Engineering Practice (Managing Director) at Accenture, and Patrick Debois, Director of DevOps Relations at Snyk.

    Check out the rest of our speaker lineup.

    Workshops, Hackathons and Certifications

    Many of our partners, sponsors, and DevOps Institute Ambassadors are running seminars, hackathons and certifications throughout the week. We recommend attendees start planning their schedule and save their spot by checking the agenda and signing up in advance.

    SKILup Careers Fair

    Network with HR and hiring representatives and discover DevOps career paths at leading organizations worldwide. Hear from the hiring leaders themselves which skill sets are most important. Explore emerging and available DevOps roles.

    Get SKIL’d Up Days

    Enjoy learnings on gamification, LEGO Serious Play, Kubernetes, Relationship Agility and more! You’ll also have an opportunity to learn more about DevOps and get certified with one of our education partners (advanced registration is required).

    On Wednesday, Dec. 9, join us for the Global SKILup Festival DJ Party—send us your song requests and celebrate with us!

    Global SKILup Day

    We’ll end the week with this one-day conference where you can listen and interact with speakers worldwide as they share their stories and experiences with you. You will have the opportunity to ask questions in the “meet the speaker” sessions and join in some great discussions.

    Download your festival pass and share it with your social networks today. Join the discussion by using the tag #SKILupFest and tell your friends and colleagues: “I’m going to Global #SKILupFest!”

    We look forward to celebrating with you soon!

    Continue to advance your IT career. Join our FREE Professional Membership.

  • Lifespans in Technology: Lazlo the Software Developer

    Lifespans in Technology: Lazlo the Software Developer

  • Career Development in Trying Times

    Career Development in Trying Times

  • A Professional Dilemma

    A Professional Dilemma

    — ROELBOB

    — ROELBOB

    — ROELBOB

  • Three Ways You Can Embrace Curiosity to Climb the Career Ladder

    Three Ways You Can Embrace Curiosity to Climb the Career Ladder

    As the product manager of a high-growth startup, my role has evolved quickly over the past four years. When we started the company, in a garage along one of the many Amsterdam canals, I found myself doing everything from writing code to taking out the trash and ordering dinner for the late nights in the office. Since then, our team has grown rapidly and we are now in a beautiful office where we are proud to host global brands—something we didn’t do in the garage.

    When I joined MessageBird, it was a small company so we each wore many hats and shared responsibilities. Regardless of the hat we wore at any given time, each person stepped up and took the opportunity to learn new skills to help the company reach the next level of success. As the company has grown, I’ve grown along with it. I started as a developer and now, four years later, I am managing product development for our platform of communications solutions.

    As I think back to how I got here, there were three key practices that paved the way.  In addition to never saying no to a job—even if it wasn’t in my job description—I’ve found that nurturing these three practices can go a long way to building a career.

    Ask the Long-Term Questions Early and Often

    When asked to select from a list of 34 attributes that represent their top strengths, 76% of product managers chose “always learning,” and 64% selected “curiosity.” When coupled with a long-term focus, a learner’s attitude is a strong asset for personal growth. At a startup, prioritization of efforts at any time can mean the difference between success and failure. Part of my success was born from simply asking why. Why are we building this now? What customer pain are we solving? Why this focus over that one? Asking why early and often forces a team to slow down and think through whether they are focusing on the right outcomes. And, it’s helped me prioritize my time to have the most impact.  

    Be a Dreamer, but a Critical One

    Whether working as a developer or as a product lead, rallying the team around our mission and potential is critical to success. One of the most effective ways to do this is to dream big—and encourage the team to do the same. Imagining what could be is not only fun, but it helps us aim high. While we dream big, we remain critical of our ideas and open to the input and criticism of others. As we take in new input and ideas, we adjust our thinking but remain persistent on the end goal. To make an impact in a growing company, it’s important to keep one foot planted in solving current customer challenges. But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on the future and dream big.

    Acknowledge that You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

    Growth and leadership are recognizing when you don’t have all the answers and having the confidence to admit it. I’ve learned that the best ideas don’t typically come from one brilliant mind, but rather from the collaboration of several minds. MessageBird was founded in the Netherlands which is a very small country. In fact, two hours in any direction and you’re in a different country with a different language and a different culture. As such, we’re fortunate to have over 30 nationalities represented. Naturally, different backgrounds bring different perspectives and different sets of knowledge. It’s a culture that has given us an edge because the diversity of thought enables us to see challenges from very different viewpoints.

    I’ve come to learn that not knowing something is OK as long as you stick to the pursuit of knowledge and validation. You will make some mistakes along the way, but don’t get stuck on what you don’t know. Let not knowing drive you to learn.

    Embracing curiosity, dreaming big and working together toward solutions are the best ways I’ve found to solve customer challenges and move your career forward at the same time. Hopefully, these tips help you drive yours forward, too.

    — Joey van Ommen