Tag: professional development
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Communication Skills Matter in DevOps
While the precise definition of DevOps is an evolving matter, a simple way to describe it is this: DevOps is a change of mindset toward an agile and inclusive approach to IT. DevOps enables IT professionals to think and work beyond technology silos, thereby deriving meaningful results at a faster rate than with more traditional methodologies.
This involves going outside of our comfort zones and collaborating outside the confines of our own cliques. By working across operational boundaries, DevOps will require an understanding of technical, operational and service aspects of the business. This means the heart of DevOps lies not in technology, methodology nor administration: The heart of DevOps lies in communication, which brings all these together.
DevOps professionals seem to agree. In Incapsula’s DevOps Salary Survey conducted in 2015, the California-based cybersecurity firm identified communication skills as one of the highest priorities for DevOps professionals, almost as much as operational skills.
In other words, effective communication across the organization is considered as important as actually building the product, and it is integral to building the product itself. This means when you’re in the field of DevOps, a smart investment in communication skills will pay off for both individuals and the team.
Communication Fosters Teamwork
There usually exists a disjoint between technical and non-technical departments, particularly in technology companies. Engineers, for example, might be fascinated by an elegant piece of code, an algorithm that automatically governs a process or an infrastructure that does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But to the rest of the organization, those things take place purely in the background and work best when they aren’t noticed at all.
Tech people take pride in the technology, while operations people take pride in business results. The two often find themselves at odds due to a lack of communication about what is really needed, and how to get there. Successful communication in DevOps focuses on finding common ground and working toward achieving this.
For communication to be effective, the emphasis should be on the user of your message. You’ll need to have a deeper understanding of where they’re coming from. No amount of expertise matters if you can’t convey it properly. You can’t gain any growth or value for your career or organization if there is always a unidirectional disconnect.
Bottom line is, you need to correctly identify your intended recipients and find a common ground to better engage.
You Can Increase Your Value as a DevOps Pro
Trust is an essential component of teamwork, which is also important in the development life cycle and in decision-making processes. Being a communicator enables you to better establish trust among your colleagues—something that, unfortunately, is lacking in many IT project life cycles.
This is why pure technologists don’t necessarily make good DevOps professionals—an observation highlighted by the Incapsula survey, which shows that a mix of general and technical skills are essential for a successful DevOps career. In fact, general skills are usually more important in securing higher-paying jobs in this field. These include understanding business operations, developing communication skills and remaining flexible and open to change. In addition, the rising trend in outsourcing DevOps pros across a global talent pool means your communication skills have to transcend languages and contexts.
A good DevOps professional knows that value is not just about the technology, but rather about the product. Even the best technologies in the world are just abstract concepts until you translate them into a product people can actually use and enjoy. Thus, going beyond technical capabilities, you will need to know how to collaborate to transform technologies into useful and marketable products.
You Can Advance Your Career Faster
Chatting up the project managers, glad-handing the operational staff and picking the brains of departmental leaders may not come naturally to pure technologists. However, for DevOps professionals increasingly engaged in conversations across the enterprise, knowing the language unique to the organizational culture—verbal and nonverbal—can make all the difference in terms of career advancement.
Such organizational language can be considered as its own kind of coding. This facilitates everything from a working knowledge of financial reporting, to the listening skills needed to understand the technology goals meaningful to each business unit. It’s also how unwritten rules about business priorities or hierarchies are communicated.
After all, the career survey cites at least 26 job descriptions among DevOps professionals, including project manager and operations manager, among others. This means you don’t necessarily have to get stuck in one position or job description. In an organization that fosters the DevOps culture, your value goes well beyond your technical capabilities, but rather the focus is more on organizational skills.
The Takeaway
Since DevOps involves cross-functional teams instead of compartmentalized departments, everyone will need to be more involved in business operations, product development and support. Being an effective communicator is at the heart of all this, and it can spell the difference between success and failure in a DevOps environment.
It’s easy to think that there is little more to learn in terms of communication, especially if your DevOps integration is already mature and your team is functioning optimally. However, your investment in becoming a better DevOps communicator begins with learning the language and culture of the organization. This also includes a continuous reassessment of skills and the ability to build connections from each and every encounter with colleagues, partners and other stakeholders.
About the Author / Laureen Fagan
A senior PR counsel and thought leader, Laureen Fagan has 15 years experience as a media and PR professional, which includes her stint at CBS and Fox broadcast affiliates in the United States, and in print and wire-service newsrooms in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Jerusalem. Laureen received her MSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and completed additional graduate study at University of Notre Dame in Theology / Hebrew Bible that includes French, Arabic and Hebrew study. In addition to tech and business, Laureen creates informed content and deep analysis on international affairs, health care, culture and religion. -
3 Skills Developers Should Master in 2016
The era of mobile and web is upon us, which has caused nearly every business decision-maker to ask the question, Is now the time to hire a developer to build our app or website? In 2016, businesses are going to be looking for the best developers to join their team and help scale their business. We’ve already started to see this trend, as a recent Harvey Nash Technology Survey 2016 found that developers are the most sought-after of all technology personnel.
To stand out from the pack, developers must master the critical skills businesses are looking for. The most valuable developers will be those who can adapt to the changing technology landscape and further hone their craft to help companies scale and solve specific business challenges.
To stay competitive in today’s market, developers need to invest in these three skills to be relevant in 2016 and beyond.
Master the Skills to Scale a Product or Service
Startups increasingly are evolving from early stage concepts to building a growth model to take their business to the next level. To be an asset today, developers need to master and specialize in scaling technologies that are key for businesses looking to expand their customer base and focus on technological innovation.
There is a demand for developers that have not only a breadth of experience in bringing an organization up to scale but also depth in their technical skill set. Having the ability to work on major systems, support large amounts of traffic and customers and maintain the system for several years are critical competencies that companies will be looking for.
Also, having a data model or database experience is very important—NoSQL solutions such as Cassandra, CouchDB or Riak, as well as traditional data sources such as MySQL, are in high demand. Middleware languages such as Java and Golang also are an important part of a developer skill set when building services and APIs.
Understand the Customer Perspective
When building a technology solution, an engineer must be able to look at the product from a customer’s perspective to understand what problem the product is fixing. While technical skills in developing a product and user experience (UX) are very important, the ability for a developer to understand and create a product that solves a customer challenge far outweighs the focus on building the most elegant software.
Engineers who are able to demonstrate project management skills and have experience around scaling infrastructure and ensuring the platform is robust will be in high demand. Businesses increasingly are seeing a need to support growing customer bases and traffic with utmost end-user reliability.
Become a Subject Matter Expert
There is a gradual shift in the developer community, in which engineers are focusing on specializations and becoming subject matter experts. There is an opportunity for developers to create career highlights by merging their talent and passion with opportunities.
Developers are encouraged to identify an area they are passionate about and focus on refining those skills. By being able to find these opportunities that build on their passion, these developers can demonstrate they are able to solve a challenging problem for a large number of users—a competitive skill in high demand across the industry.
The overarching strategy of a successful developer career is to invest in learning how to scale a product or service, understanding the customer perspective and becoming a subject matter expert. Investing in your skills as a developer in 2016 can lead to a longer, more fulfilling career.
About the Author/Sha Ma
Sha Ma is the senior director, Software Engineering at SendGrid. She led development teams at both startups and Fortune 500 companies prior to joining SendGrid. In her current role, she drives strategic planning, development and management of large scale projects. Ma is a graduate of MIT where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. -
Putting People Before Software
Software development teams typically are focused on a single goal: delivering new, killer features that users love. Driving revenue and usage is core to Agile and DevOps. Yet without motivated, productive people, you can forget about building good software.
Heightened competition requires companies to go the extra mile to develop and retain employees. Here are several ideas for team-building and personal development, while still pushing an awesome product out the door quickly.
Focus on high performers first
Struggling employees often receive the most attention and oversight from managers, but it’s really the top performers who should get the majority of the attention and development opportunities. While modern learning and development methods can be less costly than traditional conferences and seminars, the same philosophy rules: spend the most time and investment on those individuals with the highest potential. Don’t underestimate green developers who are eager to grow; they may not have shown their colors yet, but you can typically see early on if they will with a little push.
Ditch the annual performance review
Over the last few years, companies of all sizes are starting to move away from traditional generic performance review metrics and processes. The annual review is nearly obsolete, given the pace of change in business and the fact that employees change companies so frequently. Goals set forth a year earlier may no longer be relevant after six months. Performance review planning is also too time-consuming for busy managers these days.
Instead, consider a more organic process where the employee and manager visit quarterly, developing mutual agreements and goals for the coming months. The customized approach is more meaningful and real-time for everyone. A useful reference on modern employee retention tactics is “The Alliance,” co-authored by Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn. The book’s premise: Stop thinking of employees as family or free agents and start thinking of them as allies on a tour of duty. The “tour of duty” theme is highly relevant in software development, where tactics and objectives are constantly changing and the pressure can be intense. As long as the employer and employee are constantly seeking to get the most mutual value out of the relationship, employee retention should not be an issue.
Offer diverse experiences
Younger employees, including those of the Millennial generation, typically enjoy working in a flat organization where they can take ownership of projects and feel they’re advancing within the organization. Take advantage of that independent ambition by creating smaller teams and giving leadership roles to those who are ready. Younger employees also covet change, so rotational roles can be an excellent way to give them that diversity in experience while also monitoring their progress for long-term career growth. Mid-level employees often feel the highest level of stagnation due to the typically long process of promotion into senior management, so it’s critical to have a strategy for developing and retaining those positions as well.
Motivate and grow senior developers
Organizations often go to great lengths to bring in promising young talent and grow them into senior developers. However, the path beyond for a senior developer often provides a fork in the road, with options to either focus deeper on the technical side as an architect or on the people side as a manager. Executives should support senior developers early in this transition and identify key candidates for each role, and then help them to prepare accordingly.
Make collaboration fun
Developers today should be groomed and evaluated for their collaboration skills. There’s no right way to do this, but a good start is by making collaboration easy and even fun for those highly independent people who haven’t had to communicate much with coworkers in the past. Offer simple chat and social media tools for real-time, online collaboration or feedback tools such as TINYpulse, which can mask someone’s identity if they are too shy to share feedback otherwise. Requiring team members to demo their work in progress for colleagues can encourage collaboration and sharin, and boost product quality through timely feedback. Offer perks or bonuses for those team members who show initiative in teamwork and cross-team collaboration. Needless to say, FACs (happy hours) and other offsite opportunities for the team to unwind together also can break down barriers.
Make innovation a cultural trait
Measuring innovation isn’t straightforward, but making room for it within your organization is a powerful way to both motivate and retain employees and, ultimately, generate business value. Google grabbed headlines a few years ago when it shared its policy of giving technical employees 20 percent of their hours every month to work on independent research projects. Granting employees free time to work on new ideas is smart, but works best if developers are passionate for the business and will reinvest that time in areas that add business value.
More importantly, recognize that innovation is not a program but a cultural value that can only be communicated from the top. Senior-level support for innovation, along with free sharing of ideas, should be baked into team processes and communications. Finally, time is a finite asset. If you’re going to give your team some time off for creative brainstorming, don’t penalize them for lower output or require them to work weekends to make up for it.
Push the soft skills
This is a no-brainer. Modern development teams increasingly are linked hand in hand with business goals and customer outcomes. Therefore, developers must be able to work effectively with business counterparts and understand the language of the business. Give your developers frequent opportunities to present in front of their co-workers for practice, and whenever possible, the chance to work directly with business units on projects.
Look to the community
The days of structured career paths and employee development programs are largely over. Employees want and benefit most by self-learning and exploration with their external communities. This entails giving people leeway to attend meetups, participate in developer contests or attend half-day workshops where developers can interact with others in their field. MOOCs, online degrees and certifications are gaining favor as flexible ways to quickly gain new skills. These informal learning opportunities are much more cost-effective than formal training programs of the past and more relevant. They help employees gain general marketplace knowledge on new development trends and tools, rather than company-specific knowledge and processes.
Investing in technical skills is imperative, yet developers also to want to feel part of a team and work with someone looking out for their career potential. By paying more attention to developers’ personal goals and the needs of the team, software development organizations gain more stability to do what they do best: develop great products.
About the Author/Kevin Dunne
Kevin Dunne is VP of Strategy & Business Development at QASymphony.