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Tag: specialists

Why We Still Need Specialists

A few years back, I wrote here that specialists—particularly infrastructure specialists—were not going anywhere.

I think it is worth updating that prediction and reminding you all that specialists across the bulk of DevOps subdomains are still necessary—even if you have broken down their silos.

Spend time in any of the variety of places that DevOps folks hang out and listen to/read what they actually say. When they express their sentiments as a real-time activity, the idea that we made one team responsible for most, if not all, of an application’s life cycle seems rather brutal.

In most industries, we have increasing specialization as complexity increases. Even if it was allowed, most carpenters are not qualified to do plumbing or electrical work. Oh, most know the basics and could do it in a pinch, but they aren’t the expert that the plumber or electrician is. IT, for the last many years, has tried to do the opposite, with a decent rate of success. But practicality wins out over rigidity to make that success.

We still have specialists. And you should ignore people that suggest they need to go away. The situation is already bad enough without having a person you can turn to for help with a harsh issue in this language, or on that piece of networking gear. While some of this—language specialists are the easy example—is merged into a DevOps team, some of them—network admins, for instance—only partially are. The networking within/between containers is often handled by the DevOps team (using one set of specialties), while the networking that allows all of the organization to run is still handled by operations. But I can’t think of an org I deal with regularly that doesn’t house these specializations somewhere.

This is one of the things that has traditionally held back low-code/no-code solutions—they assume these specializations and will require specialists in whatever the underlying technologies are when things inevitably go wrong. The same is true (to a lesser extent) of DevOps, AI and automation. Someone has to know what is going on underneath—they must have specialized knowledge—in order to fix it when things go wrong.

Remember, you are asking your DevOps teams to be both Jack of all trades and master of some. That is a recipe for failure, but DevOps is designed to withstand or overcome failure in short order, so I only mention this so you understand why new hires seem wild-eyed at times and old hands seem jaded—there is a lot going on that they’re mastering and remastering.

So, stand up if you’re one of the “sailing against the wind” crowd. Be proud you’ve managed to thrive in an environment with a ton of specialist parts and make sure you know who to ask for help when something goes wrong and you end up out of your depth. Even if the answer to “Who can I ask for help?” ends up being “Learn it for yourself and then be prepared to help others,” you’ll rock it either way and the rest of us who have struggled through it feel your pain and respect your work. So, thanks—for those who’ve never experienced it, but rely upon your work.

May 4, 2022
DevOps Hiring: What Do You Need?

IT has long had a problem with hiring. I’m not certain where it started; most of us blame HR, and that’s probably incorrect, but gives us someone to blame. It’s that we post jobs with insane requirements. Sometimes this is done to keep the applicant pool down, but most of the time it is a simple case of throwing in the kitchen sink. We have laughed at advertisements that wanted applicants to have more years in a given technology than the technology has existed. The laughter was because someone quipped, “So what we really want is only liars to apply.”

But it doesn’t stop there. How many advertisements have you seen for a person to join an already good-sized team of developers, and the requirements include experience in every single language/tool the person might encounter—and sometimes ones the organization might use in a year or so? And DevOps, with its increase in toolsets and broadening complexity, make this problem worse.

If you want good DevOps team members, you have to focus your search. We’d all love to have unicorns who could do it all on day one, but those people don’t really exist. Even with experience in every single tool in your chain, they still have to learn apps and environment. Try to craft job requirements that focus on the couple of core tools, and then filter for ability to learn and adapt. Because the only certainty about IT at this point is that technology will be shifting, so focusing on the tools you are using today is pretty limited.

Role plays a part in this also. While we like to pretend DevOps is one thing, it is a rare application or portfolio for which there are not specializations on the team. If you are looking for someone who will lean more toward the DEVops side, do you really need them to be operational wizards with three years each in storage, networking and container management? Conversely, if you are hiring someone more for the devOPS side, do you need them to have expansive experience in Javascript, or do they just need to know who to call if it gets beyond their ability?

Maybe your company is one of those shops where everyone on team X is expected to be an expert at everything. Kudos for you, but there aren’t a ton of those people out there. There is a different mindset to DEVops versus devOPS, and even if unofficial, most employees lean one way or have a more proficient side. If a candidate fits the bill in an area you are weakest, consider training them on the job in the area you are strongest, rather than waiting for who knows how long for the perfect person to fill the open req.

And we still have a need for hardware specialists. I’ve said it before, but do you want your EMC (or Cisco or whomever) person to be a generalist, or do you want that person to make the infrastructure that underlies a huge chunk of your applications hum? Hire specialists for specialized skills, hire broad knowledge for app-spanning needs.

It’s been a problem for years, and only you can fix it. Call out overambitious job postings and make managers ponder what they’re actually looking for. You know you have a need, you know what the position will do. Help hone down postings so that they fit the actual requirements, not some blue-sky version of potential requirements.

And get the best people for the job. After all, you are going to have to work with them.

— Don Macvittie

January 17, 2019
Get Ready to Become a Full-Spectrum Engineer
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In software development, change has been a constant. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years and have had to morph, pivot and learn new things to remain current and in demand. Plus, the industry swings like a pendulum between the need for specialists and generalists and that cannot be ignored: The advent of new architectures, methodologies and disciplines drives the need for specialists. Once assimilated, the market drifts back toward generalists.

Back in the day, it was not uncommon to have 50+-person teams building applications using the Waterfall methodology. From a technology perspective, development was kept in silos for each specialty. It was uncommon for a developer to straddle specialties such as GUI, business logic, database and quality assurance.

The swing back to generalists was driven by the shift to Agile. When the Agile methodology became prevalent, we saw the teams of 50 reduced to teams of six to 12. The reduced team size also reduced the number of specialist you could have on a team. Developers needed to know more and do more. Today, most companies are looking for generalists who can do it all—otherwise known as the full-stack engineer. These developers work on web applications and can operate in any vertical tier of the application. They write HTML, CSS and JavaScript for high-performing and functional UI for the front end. They can also work from the server side to develop the business logic to support the UI. Behind that are the database schema and queries they write to move data in and out of the application.

Enter the Full-Spectrum Engineer

DevOps has ushered in a new trend. Teams are moving from batched releases of functionality to single-piece flow. In other words, we no longer think about collecting the work of multiple engineers over multiple sprints into a release. Our ability to bring value to the customer as soon as possible and out-innovate the competition will be driven by releasing the work of a single engineer as soon as it is ready. This typically is accomplished through a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline directly from the source repository through automated testing and finally deployment into production, preferably without any human intervention.

What does this mean for developers? Plenty. Here’s a look at the major capabilities needed by software engineers who want to thrive as full-spectrum engineers (FSEs.)
1. Be a good software engineer. That means keeping up with the latest trends in design and implementation. You need to assimilate new frameworks and open-source libraries into your first party code to build software quickly. Furthermore, you must understand scale and performance of the system under load. Creating services that scale out and back based on demand will enhance the user experience.
2. Have an eye toward quality. This means testing both the functional and non-functional aspects of the application. Well-written unit tests are just the beginning. An FSE must think about how to create automated regression tests that can run in a staging environment to assure that the entire system will not be negatively impacted by their deployment. Testing for non-functional aspects such as performance are a must as well.
3. Understand the complexities of deployment. Whether that be containers, cloud or infrastructure as code, you need to know where and how the software runs and be able to create those environments from scratch. Using stable, version controlled configurations for the running environment will ensure that Dev, QA, Staging and Production all look and behave the same. That makes testing repeatable and operations more straightforward.
4. Don’t forget about operating the software. As part of a DevOps team, you will be expected to take part in pager duty. When writing new functionality, consider how to debug it remotely and whether your teammates will be able to do the same. That means logging and other telemetry are critical but insufficient. Turn that data into information that can be consumed by both people and machines. Can the software detect that it is not running properly? Can it heal itself? Can it call for help?
5. Make security a priority. The fast pace of software development means that there is no longer time to wait for a security analysis or pen test when your release candidate is ready to deploy. Security standards should be part of the acceptance criteria and security scanning must be added to your definition of done. Use tools that can provide quick feedback and diagnosis of security vulnerabilities while writing code as well as identify vulnerabilities in your open-source components. This preventative scanning will not only train you to write secure code, but it will also allow the software to run successfully through the assurance scans that are part of any good CI/CD pipeline.
DevOps is turning the concept of a full-stack engineer on its side. Now the vertical tiers of technology and architecture are secondary to the horizontal disciplines that must be mastered to create software at the speed of DevOps. While I am eager to tell you that the future of software development is generalist, it does not mean that we should get rid of our specialists. What it does mean is that we will need fewer of them—the skills and capabilities of a full-spectrum engineer are the future of software development. DevOps has smashed the velocity barrier but to reach the full potential will require a new breed of multi-disciplined generalists—Full-Spectrum Engineers.

About the Author / Peter Chestna

As Director of Developer Engagement at Veracode, Pete provides customers with practical advice on how to successfully roll out developer-centric application security programs. Relying on more than 10 years of direct AppSec experience as both a developer and development leader, Pete provides information on best practices amassed from working with Veracode’s 1,000+ customers. Pete joined Veracode in 2006 as a platform developer and was instrumental in delivering the first version of Veracode’s service to customers. Later, as Director of Platform Engineering, Pete managed the Agile teams responsible for delivering Veracode’s SaaS platform and built the first DevOps team. Follow him on Twitter @PeteChestna.
May 9, 2017