Easy Reads #2 - Why DevOps skills get 'special' treatment ?
Ramki Sitaraman
Engineering Partner at Thoughtworks | Healthcare, Energy Portfolio, Growth Enablement
Before the #EasyReads series, the last article I wrote in LinkedIn was in June and felt it is high time that I break the laziness/writer's block or whatever crap that paused my writing. So I came up with this short Easy Reads format.
This happened many years back. There was this person, whom I will call as Mr.Bird. He was a very pushy guy, treats his team like shit, bull dozes people, lacked clarity & articulation skills. He used to be the point of discussion during water cooler conversation, especially how he lacks the skill to be a leader. After many years, he was made the Unit head and his peers were dumbstuck and lamented how the culture changed in the organisation and that merit was least recognised.
Wrong. What his peers missed to notice was his penchant to have complete outcomes. His flexibility with clients, working on even trivial aspects to again customer confidence, hard work, ability to iterate hundred times and most importantly persisting until things are done was overlooked - to them, strategy was important and these don't represent skills of a leader. They missed the point. Achieving outcomes is the most important thing for enterprises and in short term trumps everything.
I wonder if DevOps skills was given second degree treatment by devs. For a long time, developers refused to consider DevOps skills as a part of the full stack skills and as a result it came as a premimum skill now. A lack of perspective may be , most developers missed to see the power of Digital Infrastructure and how it can reduce the time to market, scale - to them , it was a skill that doesn't come under a functional/oops paradigm or even an algorithmic paradigm. This is one reason, developers should consider Tech@core and not just Tech as backbone**
It is probably a big shift for the developers - algorithms/Enterprise architecture/High Performance applications attract adrenaline in them, but somewhere the ownership of business outcomes should shape their contour of what they learn & innovate.
**( Thanks to my colleague Boojapathy for this term)