Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Network neutrality is back on the FCC’s agenda, and unused London office gets Zucked. (more…)
Tag: Remote work
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80% of Bosses ‘Regret’ Stopping WFH ¦ PSA: Disable STS!
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Rethinking return-to-office mandates and a ridiculous, ancient Windows bug. (more…)
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4 Things Engineering Leaders are Thinking About Right Now
Spiderman and engineering leaders have something in common: They both have great power and great responsibility. Engineering leadership is more critical than ever, with more than 4.4 million software developers in the United States building our experiences daily.
Leaders do more than just manage the day-to-day. They are called to influence, empower and motivate their teams. For engineering leaders, this means grappling with new challenges and opportunities as the technology landscape changes and evolves. This shift impacts how humans work, where we work, what our work looks like and how we need to be supported and seen in our roles across the board.
Let’s dive into four challenges and opportunities that engineering leaders face and how they shape the future of software engineering.
Communication in Remote & Hybrid Work
It has been over three years since the way that we work shifted dramatically. Choosing the right fit between remote, hybrid and in-office is a challenge that companies across industries are still wrestling with. The hardest part? Communication.
There’s no doubt that the flexibility of remote work is beneficial for workers’ mental health. The 2022 State of Remote Engineering Report found that developers reported better work-life balance (64%) and less stress (48%) from working remotely. However, they also reported that collaboration and inclusion took much more effort. Although flexibility is good for mental health, it may hinder spontaneous interactions. And although in-office work fosters face-to-face collaboration, it may limit geographical diversity. Striking a balance is top of mind.
No matter what the office structure is, engineering leaders must establish clear communication channels, guidelines and regular check-ins with their teams. Engineering metrics are a great way to identify and address the wins, challenges, solutions and bottlenecks. They help leaders foster an environment that encourages collaboration, cross-functional teamwork, and knowledge sharing through regular team meetings, brainstorming sessions and collaborative projects to promote engagement and a sense of collective ownership no matter where teams and team members work.
Generative AI
Generative AI is top-of-mind for the whole world right now. It’s an exciting and potentially stressful time for engineering leaders to consider how generative AI may reshape the way we work. While there is a fear of AI replacing human roles, a more positive (and realistic) way to look at AI is by asking: What will this revolutionize, evolve, and enhance and what are the risks?
Developers are thinking primarily about the emergence of large language models (LLMs) for code creation. Leaders should consider how AI can integrate into workflows to increase development speed, accuracy and efficiency. This is also an opportunity to enhance and leverage AI for tedious tasks so developers can focus on creative projects.
Leaders must also consider the risks of generative AI. AI simply cannot replicate the complexity of the human experience, which will call for a layered approach to integrating AI into engineering teams. It also begs the question: What responsibilities do engineers have when working with AI? The benefits of streamlining, speed and accuracy may also alter what quality control and testing look like. It’s an exciting time for engineering leaders to embrace the future of work mindfully and strategically.
Meaningful Metrics and Outcomes
Engineering metrics are vital for measuring impact and outcomes to drive progress and inform decision-making. Engineering leaders must carefully evaluate and select metrics that align with their team’s objectives and adapt measurement practices accordingly. DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are popular, serving as a jumping-off point for engineering leaders. When leaders carefully evaluate DORA metrics as applied to their team’s specific objectives and complement them with other relevant metrics, they can ensure that they capture the desired outcomes and provide a complete picture of engineering health to drive meaningful purpose.
The added pressure to deliver results while upholding developer morale and efficiency underscores the significance of choosing appropriate evaluation methods that capture the desired outcomes. But most importantly, leaders need to consider what metric visibility means and how best to offer support.
Fostering Engineering Team Health
Besides technical aspects, engineering leaders are increasingly concerned about the health and well-being of their teams. Balancing meetings, focused work time and creating a positive work environment are vital factors that contribute to developer health and productivity. Engineering leaders should consider the individuals and team when encouraging breaks, time off and flexible working hours to prevent burnout and promote overall well-being. Some teams have implemented “No Meeting Wednesdays” and similar strategies to provide dedicated time for deep work and to minimize interruptions.
Leaders should be focused on creating a culture that prioritizes psychological safety where team members feel comfortable expressing their ideas, concerns and feedback without fear of judgment or reprisal. In this fast-paced world, a leader must remember to be human first and encourage open communication, active listening and empathy within the team. Prioritizing collaboration, work-life balance and a healthy team dynamic is critical for engineering leaders aiming to foster long-term success.
Engineering Leaders Have Great Responsibility
Engineering leaders are at the forefront of shaping the future of software engineering. Balancing communication in remote and hybrid work environments, leveraging the potential of generative AI, choosing meaningful metrics and outcomes and fostering team health and well-being are critical areas they must address. By embracing these challenges and opportunities head-on, engineering leaders have the power to drive success and create thriving, innovative teams. So, let’s step up to the plate, embrace the evolving landscape of software engineering, and lead with purpose, empathy and strategic vision. Together, we have the power to shape a brighter future for the world of technology. With great responsibility comes great opportunity. Are you ready to don your leadership cape and web-sling your way to success?
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Microsoft’s 9th Outage in 2023 ¦ RISE of RISC-V ¦ Meta Ends WFH
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Redmond SaaS keeps failing, RISC-V is RISEing, and Meta is enforcing hybrid work. (more…)
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Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
devopsy.kinsta.cloud is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted to better serve our audience.
Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.
Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.
The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.
We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:
Dice.com
ERP International
Fort Meade, Maryland
Senior DevOps Infrastructure Engineer
$150,000 to $180,000LinkedIn
Lark Health
Remote
Lead DevOps Engineer
$127,700 to $183,900Simply Hired
Shake Shack
Remote
Senior DevOps Engineer
$123,000 to $155,000Indeed.com
Peraton
Arlington, Virginia
DevSecOps Data Automation Engineer
$112,000 to $179,000CareerBuilder.com
Booz Allen Hamilton
Fort Meade, Maryland
DevOps Engineer and Release Manager
$73,100 to $166,000 -
FIDO/WebAuthn Passkeys is Inevitable: Get on the Train ¦ IBM CEO Hates WFH
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: The Passkeys authentication standard gets a huge boost, and IBM’s Arvind Krishna wants workers back in the office. (more…)
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Things We Should Acknowledge, Part Three: Remotely Good
This installment of my off-and-on “Things We Should Acknowledge” series is going to focus on an area that most DevOps teams are skirting, but increasingly will not be able to: Remote work.
For background, I have worked remotely for decades; my experience spans Fortune 100s, publishing companies and startups—and that’s just full-time work. I’ve worked for a ton of vendors and publications as a contractor, too.
I will start by making clear my stance on remote work—a stance I’ve happily talked with people about since long before COVID-19 measures made remote work a regular thing. You either thrive working remotely or you wither. There is a small group in the center that can make it work with some effort, but inevitably that effort becomes routine and those in the middle become part of one of the two groups.
Because people drift toward one of two camps, we get the currently popular stance on, well, everything, which is polarization. But we shouldn’t. Just like positions and people that should/should not be in meetings to resolve problems or people who should/should not have direct reports, we should consider positions and people that remote work is best for.
And post-pandemic, the vast majority of DevOps roles can be performed effectively in a remote position. That leaves us with the people question. Mostly. Note: There are organizations and roles that need to be local; those are not a topic of this blog. The 99% of other roles/orgs are.
This topic gets really ugly, pretty quick. If a significant portion of every organization goes remote, city centers in several metropolises will die. That is not conjecture; you can go look into commercial real estate in any information worker hub. It is in a massive slump (and calling it a ‘slump’ is being nice), with occupancy circling the drain and property values plummeting. That is largely because formerly high-demand real-estate is not needed in the volume it was.
That should not be the concern of any given corporation. It is the corporation’s responsibility to see to shareholder value, not the real estate market (unless they are invested in real estate, which many large organizations are). But if orgs are keeping any offices downtown, it becomes an issue about safety. In other words, it’s about if the collapse of the market means the offices become less safe for workers, regardless of investment. This is not a decision-making bullet point, but it does inform actions. I have a ton more to say on this topic, but it’s a side bit, so for now, this is enough.
For people who thrive working remotely—and a lot more people now know that about themselves than knew that five years ago—being forced into the office is a non-starter. I have been offered astounding positions at organizations on both coasts over the years, but the ones that came with the “…and you have to move here” demand—I immediately turned down. More people are doing that; some of them truly great employees.
So, like it or not, DevOps teams are going to have to consider whether all being in the same building is more important than hiring the most qualified co-workers. That is a team/management/corporate decision and always has been. I consider any “We all do this one thing” stance—from “We’re an X shop” to “We don’t do remote” to be a negative, but I don’t have to make these decisions for an organization.
It does need to be part of the conversation, though. Because the work environment is unlikely to return to pre-pandemic standards, no matter how much some want it to. The more organizations are willing to work with both remote and on-site employees, the more options those employees—your potential coworkers—have. That changes the dynamic, even in light of recent layoffs, because the new job hunt is not tied to “local” anymore.
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Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
devopsy.kinsta.cloud is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted to better serve our audience.
Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.
Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.
The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.
We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:
Dice.com
NerdRabbit
New York, New York
DevOps jobs
$120,000 to $150,000LinkedIn
Tata Consulting Services
Sunnyvale, California
AWS DevOps Engineer
$105,000 to $130,000Monster.com
VANET, Inc.
Irvine, California
Software Engineer
$100,000 to $300,000SimplyHired
Renaissance
Remote
DevOps Engineer 2
$100,000 to $125,000Indeed.com
GEICO
Remote
Senior DevOps Engineer
$82,000 to $185,000 -
The Economic Downturn and DevOps Hiring Trends
An analysis of more than 494,000 interview requests for software engineers coupled with a survey of more than 1,300 software engineers and 120 hiring professionals found a lot more employers prefer to hire DevOps professionals who work in the office—but resistance to working in an office (rather than working remotely) remains high.
The survey also found that, despite the preference for hiring local software engineers, more than half of hiring professionals (52%) are filling positions on fully remote teams while another 40% are focusing on hybrid teams.
The interview requests analysis conducted by Hired, a provider of a platform for vetting potential employees, found that nearly three-quarters of interview requests (72%) were for software engineers with more than six years of experience. Backend engineers received 59% of all interview requests.
Hired CEO Josh Brenner said the survey makes it clear that organizations are less inclined to hire less experienced talent. In fact, there’s a decided shift toward DevOps professionals that have degrees versus individuals that are largely self-taught, he added.
Hiring those individuals, however, remains challenging. More of them are willing to consider other employment options given the current state of the economy, but more than two-thirds of engineers (68%) said they are not worried about losing their jobs in the next six months.
However, enterprise IT organizations are now finding it easier to hire DevOps engineers because competition from startup companies and technology vendors such as Google and Microsoft slackened in the wake of a series of ongoing layoffs, noted Brenner.
Competition for software engineers is also impacted by geographic region, with the Los Angeles area seeing the largest negative impact on local salaries, decreasing by 6% to $152,000. Philadelphia had the greatest amount of growth, with local salaries increasing by 7% to $150,000. Despite demand for remote engineering talent, growth in salaries for these positions has flattened. The San Francisco Bay Area had the highest salaries for remote roles at $180,000, followed by Seattle ($175,000) and New York ($169,000). The percentage of active engineering positions “open to remote” fell to 69%, the survey found.
The highest-paying markets for in-office jobs, in contrast, were San Francisco ($180,000), Seattle ($169,000) and New York ($162,000).
Software engineers, as always, are motivated to work for organizations based on new challenges and continuous learning (69%), building products/solutions and problem-solving (66%) followed by earning potential and career stability (60%), the survey found. When learning a new skill, the survey found the biggest motivator remained the simple joy of learning new things (40%) followed by the fact that their current job required it (25%).
Regardless of the state of the economy, it’s clear that demand for DevOps expertise continues to outstrip available supply. However, software engineers may be unable to command as high a salary as they did a short while ago. Of course, no one can be sure what lies ahead, but economies do eventually rebound. In the meantime, DevOps professionals would be well-advised to continue to invest in their own skills to maximize their earning potential, no matter which direction the economic pendulum swings.
