DevOps, Culture and Engineer

Once upon a time there were two teams in charge of creating great software: Dev and Ops. Though they worked on the same product, their goals were diametrically opposed to each other. On one hand there was the Dev team pushing for feature changes, and on the other hand was the Ops team striving for stability.

Since the advent of the personal computer in the 80’s these teams have been siloed and burdened with dysfunctional communication during a product lifecycle that has historically led to delays and broken code. It was a sad tale to tell to end users everywhere.

Today, things have changed, radically. An entire movement was formed by new technology like cloud infrastructure and virtual machines. This cultural change in perspective combines the two teams into one lean mean rapid deployment machine, leveraging code to manage the infrastructure. It is called DevOps. And an engineer who is doing such tasks called DevOps Engineer following only one mantra, “Infrastructure as a Code”.

Transparency, collaboration and cross-functional teams with polyglot skills are breaking down the walls with automation and rapid deployment. Software gets shipped quickly, more often, code failures are detected and corrected faster and the product runs smoother. This speed up process allows innovation to flourish and companies to do more in less time.

In short, DevOps is the marrying of process, infrastructure, and product. I pretty much agree with most of people's views about DevOps job title. In regards to DevOps title. Yes, I have seen individuals working under the title of DevOps and I have seen organizations hiring DevOps roles.

To be frank I was not looking at "DevOps Engineer" job title. I guess I am coming from an organizations perspective as to how to get the team to be trained up or if there is anything that we should look at.

The first and foremost important aspect of DevOps in my perspective is mindset of individuals. Attitude of applying the right skills to deliver to business. That's where we take the handle of agile methodology of "individuals and interactions".

When we have right set of people delivering to the current business need, there comes an opportunity to look further down the chain as to what are the essential skills that we need so that going forward we are adopting and delivering.

“Systems Engineer” and “DevOps Engineer” titles been showed up in DevOps Department, IT Operations, Development and Engineering Departments. Job satisfaction also highly correlates with DevOps practices and culture. Just as some suggest that happy cows make better cheese, DevOps practices increase employee satisfaction, which leads to better business outcomes. Instead of managing tasks, people get to make decisions, employing their skills, experience and judgment.

We all know how job satisfaction feels: It’s about doing work that’s challenging and meaningful, and being empowered to exercise our skills and judgment. We also know that where there’s job satisfaction, employees bring the best of themselves to work: their engagement, their creativity and their strongest thinking. That makes for more innovation in any area of the business, including IT.

Being said that, just love what you’re doing and keep going. It’s really that simple, isn’t it!