I was extremely fortunate to be able to attend the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) again in 2018, and this time the event was in Las Vegas. It is incredible to spend 3 days listening to talks from thought leaders in the field, meeting people from different organizations, industries, and backgrounds and hearing about their challenges and successes in the DevOps space.
Not every presentation is a winner, but I did still take 23+ pages of notes, and got a lot of good ideas and information. It really is a re-energizing event, to be there with "my people” - other agilists, technologists, and DevOps practitioners who really get what we’re trying to accomplish and how we want to change companies, technology, and software delivery for the better.
A few of the talks really stood out to me and I wanted to share what I learned and took away.
Digital Transformation: Thriving through the Transition - Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHxkcndCQoI
Jeffrey Snover gave a fantastic presentation about digital transformations and ensuring your career can thrive through them. Transition means disruption, and when things are changing so rapidly it does not matter if you are excellent at your job if your job no longer matters. Transitions can bring some people down, but they can also be the wind in your sails and have a substantial positive impact to your career. Most career pathing is made up of Stair Jobs - you have to move up one step at a time. During times of disruption and transition you have the potential to find your Elevator Job, the position that will move you up the ladder much more quickly.
There’s been this idea that with digital transformations it is a sign that software is eating traditional business, but this is the wrong way of looking at it. All businesses are now technology companies, every company is a software company. No matter what industry you work in, nothing gets done without software and technology, and therefore all organizations need to seriously look at how they treat their IT department - gone are the days of worker bees just doing what the business asks, now it needs to be a partnership and technology should be considered from the first step instead of brought in and tacked on later on.
Organizations often focus on too many things instead of their core, the thing that differentiates them from their competitors in the market. Those things that are mission critical and failure means big, deep trouble - those are your core. Everything else is context, and helps to enable the mission critical but is not what should be focused on. Organizations should only build the things that differentiate them from their competitors, everything else can and should be purchased - why spend tons of time and money and energy on something that isn’t a differentiator, doesn’t give a competitive advantage, or isn’t something you are competing on?
This transition requires new heroes, and changes to how we think about moving forward.
STOP clicking next, START automating
STOP crafting no-value add solutions, START leveraging SaaS to free up talent
STOP building snowflake servers & clouds, START DevOps
STOP low leverage architectures, START leveraging Cloud (public and on-prem)
STOP dialing it in , START investing in your career
Uncomfortable is the new normal. So step outside of your comfort zone and learn, and try new things, and challenge the status quo. Be one of the key people who are moving the business forward, one of the people who are securing the future. BE THE HERO!
Understanding Job Burnout - Dr. Christina Maslach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPBkCW0R5E
Dr. Christina Maslach is one of the foremost researchers on occupational burnout and her talk about understanding this really hit home with me. She notes that there are some specific occupations that experience this more than others including health care, human services, social activism, customer service, and technology industries. People who have a passion for solving problems seem to be hit with this - the feeling of no matter how hard we work, we don’t seem to get anything done.
Some of the key contributors to burn out are that many employers seem to have less concern and commitment to their employees in various ways, there is destructive competition between co-workers, an divisive tactics reward “talent” but not everyone.
There are no metrics of the human costs which include:
long-term stress and health problems
physical exhaustion
sleep deprivation
disruptions of personal life
loss of self-worth and meaningful achievements
burnout
depression, anxiety
suicide
And there is a horrible underlying assumption from employers that employees who burn out are not the best ones, so they are expendable and disposable - in reality the highest performers and those who care the most are often the ones who wind out burning out fastest and first.
The problem of unhealthy jobs includes
Various job conditions that are highly stressful and toxic
long working hours and high demands
job insecurity and lack of control
low social support and work-family conflict
These job conditions (stressors) pose a danger to the worker’s well-being
Increase in annual unnecessary deaths and healthcare costs
lower worker life expectancy and more working years lost
greater risk of burnout and depression
And these job conditions do NOT enhance productivity or the bottom line
The match between a job and the person is critical in 6 strategic areas:
Workload
control - how much autonomy you have
reward - can be salary/benefits, but research shows social reward is more important
community - relationships you have with others at work
fairness - is whatever the policy/practices are fairly administered
values - why am I doing this, why am I hear, what are we trying to accomplish?
So burnout is not just about working too hard and being exhausted and tired, but having the passion, meaning, and drive beaten out of you instead of being allowed to grow and thrive.
If your idea of a good day is “nothing bad happened” and you don’t respond with specific positive things, that is a sign of impending burnout.
When there is high Job-Person mismatch we see:
Demand Overload
Lack of Control
Insufficient Reward
Breakdown of Community (socially toxic workplaces)
Absence of fairness
value conflicts (being asked to do things that go against their values)
The more mismatches, the more burnout. People can tolerate some mismatches as long as the ones that match are powerful.
Burnout is a stress phenomenon and is a prolonged response to chronic situational stressors on the job with 3 dimensions:
Exhaustion - individual stress, feeling of “can’t take it anymore”
Cynicism - negative response to the job (“socially toxic workplace”)
Professional inefficacy - negative self evaluation (“erosion of who I am”, “no future for me”, “I’m stuck”)