This is about people in the first place

The past few weeks, the news has been littered with tech-industry lay-offs and the apparent need to “battening down the hatches” for the looming recession. My first thoughts are with the people involved and I’d like to express my sympathy for those who’ve been layed off. Especially those who’ve lost their job without consideration for the value they add, which seems random, unfair and a mistake from the leadership involved. That’s harsh and inconsiderate. The damage that will do to the people involved and those who remain behind should not be underestimated. In short, it sucks for all involved.

No more safe bets

In the olden days there was a saying in our industry stating something along the lines of: “You don’t get fired for buying IBM”. This pointed to the then well established compute services IBM had on offer that provided a good fit for the compute problems at that time. Since most software originated from one vendor, integration was fairly straight forward or even by default provided, although proprietary standards were used. In the currently diverse compute landscape in our industry, such a “solid choice” doesn’t exist any longer. We continuously see new standards emerging, tech stacks maturing and seemingly good bets being super-seeded rapidly by new waves of innovation. So given this, what should a CTO do?

A bit of Feynman to start

Over the course of a few years, well maybe a decade or so I came to appreciate the way to learn something is to teach it. As Feynman stated: “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it”. With Wardley maps this seems to be the case as well. So to build up my understanding I had to immerse myself and dive deep into the subject matter, not just reading but doing. In parallel I have to seek reflection on my current understanding of it by explaining what I think I’ve learned and what may benefit others to get an understanding of where I’m at. With the feedback I’ve gotten so far I still feel like I’m somewhat a novice but I’m chipping away at improving.

The promise

The promise or dreamland many CTOs have alluded to is leaning on the famous quote by Donovan Brown:

“The union of people, process and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to our end users”.

There is a lot to digest here.

As I interpret this, to me it tells me about a harmonious way of working, where everyone involved in delivering high quality software at speed, aligns themselves to best serve the need of the end user.

Sidney Dekker; Scientist, aviator & story teller

A couple of years ago during the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Summit professor Sidney Dekker took the stage. I was intrigued by the title of his talk : “The pursuit of success & drifting into failure”. He unveiled himself as scientist and an engaging story teller, who’s written a lot of books and made a movie. Through his scientific understanding of the World, he is able to distill essential messages from the field of safety science and convey these in layman’s terms. Through this talk I first discovered the impact this has on DevOps teams and getting work done. Let’s dig into a few details.