9 Tips on how to Avoid IT Midcareer Slump

(click image for larger view)

The latest rage in IT hiring is the DevOps engineer. Quick searches on LinkedIn and Dice.com show openings for roughly 250 such jobs, often for positions on a “DevOps team.” The flaw during this thinking is that the DevOps competency is something that may be hired or crafted by individuals or teams.

If you’ve followed the DevOps movement, by now that it’s about building collaboration and cooperation between software developers and other IT pros. Thus, in hiring a DevOps engineer, you’re trying to usher in an interloper to make sweeping cultural changes throughout your company. Read that last sentence again, and view how well most organizations will reply to an interloper trying to institute sweeping changes.

In the event you must hire for this critical position, so be it, but I highly recommend which you instead identify someone from within your company — preferably a goat. Let me explain.

Essentially the mostsome of the most interesting characteristics of goats is their high level of intelligence coupled with their high level of curiosity. As a consequence, goats are notorious for breaking out in their pens. They constantly test the boundaries in their surroundings, in quest of weaknesses to milk.

[ A career sponsor is greater than a mentor. Read more: IT Career Sponsors: 5 Tips on how to Find Yours. ]

That is precisely the mindset you will need for somebody in a DevOps role. She or he should be extremely intelligent, but additionally should be curious enough to push and prod on and get away of the organization’s conventional thinking.

Goats Will Eat Almost Anything

In an episode of the old Tex Avery cartoon, Tex finds a child goat left on his doorstep. He lets the goat in and it proceeds to eat everything in its path, including railroad tracks and a car engine, as Tex tries to forestall it. Although goats don’t actually eat things which are inedible, they’re browsing animals that may stick absolutely anything of their mouths to peer if it’s consumable.

When seeking an employee who may also help drive DevOps, find someone who’s a browser, a person who will try many various ideas and software solutions. At some companies, these folks are said to join “shadow IT” or “skunk works,” but they’re really just attempting to drive the organization forward.

Goats also serve many purposes. They are often used for milk, fiber, manure, land clearing, meat, hide and catgut. Combat medics use goats for training, as their anatomy is analogous to humans. In lots of ways, goats are the polymaths of the animal kingdom.

Although specialists have their place in a company, generalists are getting increasingly important as converged infrastructure, automation and cloud computing blur the lines between traditional IT silos. What you wish in a DevOps position is a multipurpose individual who can span those silos.

In case you are inquisitive about hearing more in this subject, i will be giving a presentation on Oct. 22 at Cloud Connect Chicago called “The Goat and the Silo: What an Old Calculus Problem Can Teach Us About Instilling the Culture of DevOps.” i’m hoping to work out you there.

Cloud Connect, happening Oct. 21-23, 2013, offers three days of in-depth boot camps, panel discussions and access to a bunch of industry experts, all designed that will help you weigh your cloud options and transform your corporation. Register for Cloud Connect now.