Creativity in the Ops

#devops #sre

Why a career in cloud engineering?

I recently asked the following question to my LinkedIn network.

Platform engineers / SRE folk / Ops people

What is it that brings us into those careers/interests? What gets us out of bed each day?

For me it's the diversity of tech alongside being on the operational frontline

Or maybe it's just because of #kubernetes right?

Some of the community thoughts

Personally, the ability to provide a foundation for other people to create amazing things always pushes me to get out of bed in the morning.

and

....there is a lot of team work involved and adapting and overcoming any obstacles that are faced.

and

On the platform side, I'm all about elegance, and security. Building and maintaining the infrastructure that makes thing hyper-secure, enables hyper-scale, and is simple to understand, yet elegant in its design.

and

The drive ultimately became the metrics; measuring and optimising the KPIs, tweaking and tweaking until the graphs represented perfection.

Now it’s just the people.

Why share this?

Those answers show the passion that people have for DevOps. Each of those leaders are really passionate for their craft and will encourage even more people with diverse background into DevOps based environments. And wow do we need it....

In the latest DORA State of DevOps report only 10% of individuals identified as female (of over 1000 surveyed).

And compare that to last year where it was 12%.

If we look at Women in Tech as a whole, it currently sits around 18% as an industry wide average.

We quite clearly have an even bigger gender diversity issue within DevOps.

It doesn't stop there.

What can we do

Over the past few years working with our Tech Returners I always ask what brings people to return to their technical careers or even what brought them to tech in the first place.

The majority of answers fall under two camps:

Creativity
Working in a team to create things (or solve problems) for people

As a DevOps community, I believe that we can do more to encourage people to return or enter platform/cloud/SRE based roles.

We often focus on the complexities of architectures or massage our own egos around our operational skills/war stories. We've all been to a meetup where the speaker asks for any questions, only to receive some rhetoric about how they should have done something differently.

If we focus on the creativity of ops roles paired with those human connections I believe we can build a more inclusive DevOps community.

In turn we'll be so much more productive because of being able to leverage all of that diverse thinking!