Life in DevOps from DevOps Live Europe 2022 — (1) Strategies to overcome the shortage of skilled people
For a few years now the interest to make everyday better for people I work with keeps my live occupied. I have managed for a while now a growing team of cloud infrastructure engineers who work day in day out with Terraform, use CICD tools and principles and work with developers, architects and product owners. We achieve good things everyday. But, there are also some road blocks that I would like to see improving in the whole lifecycle of hiring, joining, teaming and growing of the person, theirs and my own. Maybe, because of this, in the DevOps Live Europe 2022 I have attended sessions that had to do with people working in technology, cloud and DevOps.
There have been a few useful pieces of information, lightbulb moments, and inspiring quotes from those sessions about a few themes. I am writing a series of articles aligned with each theme.
Facing a shortage of people to cover technical roles, stealing people from each other does not help companies in the long run. We need to actively help people to go into tech roles.
I attended three sessions which focus on lack of “talent pipeline”, this is, the fact that the amount of people already working in technology is not enough to cover the demand of skills, hence, there is a need and ambition to bring more people into the field. This is not a surprise, as nowadays, all companies are technology companies. Farms using IoT are tech companies, personal trainers and physiotherapy services are tech companies (book classes, keep a profile in social media, electronic payments, electronic programmes). If we look at a sector very present in our thoughts the past two years, pharmaceutical companies, the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry in 2022 reports data and digital skills are priorities for life sciences, being 9 out of 11 concerning skills for the industry related to those areas. Based on data from 14 countries (ICS)2 Cybersecurity Workforces Study in 2021 estimates the global Cybersecurity Workforce is 4.19 million, with a shortage of 2.72 million.
We need more people, people who normally would have not opted or have the opportunity to opt for tech roles. As one speaker from the Tech Talent Charter put it, stealing people from each other does not help companies in the long run. It inflates salaries, but does not solve the problem.
Every employee is an educator
Three sessions covered lack of people skilled to cover data center operations, cyber security and technology roles in general. One common theme was that every company is an educator contributing to growing people into the industry. Two panel sessions covered education programmes lead by organisations in UK to bring people into technology: a Data Center UTC (University Technical College) programme for 14–19 years old where companies like AWS or CyrusOne fund and actively take part, and apprentice programmes, which allow anyone to be retrained, even more experienced employees who want to move into technical roles. The (ICS)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study 2021 echos the importance of organisations investing in training to overcome the shortage of employees
The panelist shared they would like to retain the participants in programmes and get them to grow in their organisations. They can’t do it with everyone, but by having supported programme participant’s in their first step into technology, these companies are contributing to the industry as educators. Both panels shared that these programmes have helped with social mobility in some communities, however, they also warned that managers have to be aware and skilled to manage employees from complicated backgrounds.
No session covered specifically if there is also shortage of technical leaders and managers. Nonetheless, a speaker from CGI recognised that those people in management roles also need to develop technical skills and many are struggling due to the fast pace of change in technology, what is driving managers with technical leadership being bought it from outside.
Below, I list some actions that speakers cross multiple sessions indicated could help organisations tackle the shortage of people to cover roles requiring technical skills speakers based on their experience:
- Have a life long learning agenda and policies. Microsoft has a tech skills programme for employees. Another company shared in their case this may included yearly budget for a personal sandbox for hands-on practice and experiment with technologies as the employees pleased.
- Share your vision clearly, as employees are less likely to stay if they are not aware of it. Moreover, they are more likely to deliver value if they know what values is expected.
- Provide attractive conditions (e.g. the omnipresent flexible, hybrid and remote working options), as these help attract and retain employees. I will encourage employers not to make assumptions, to be curious and find out what is attractive to their existing employees and prospect candidates. I repeat, do not make assumptions, find out from the source. You might be surprised.
- Linked to working conditions, one key theme in several sessions was focusing on experience in the role, make it easy for people to do their job. With the trend to shift-left DevEx (Developer Experience) is getting more and more complex, sometimes forcing developers to use multiple tools not suited for developers. This might affect some employees’ motivation and engagement, raising levels of frustration and, ultimately, driving them to other employer. Some speakers warned against taking that tooling centric, instead of developer experience driven approach to shifting left, and discouraged to make decisions about tools to be used by developers without involving them. Microsoft and GitHub have launched a research initiative looking at Developer Velocity to discover, improve, and amplify developer work and well-being using the SPACE framework (Satisfaction and well-being, Performance, Activity, Collaboration and communication, Efficiency and Flow) which aims to help individuals, teams, and organisations measure developer productivity and well-being.
- To retain and grow employees, recognise them beyond salary and rewards. Empower them and give ownership, incentives and freedom to do things, make them feel wanted. For instance, encourage and support them becoming guild leaders, and give this community a voice that is supported by senior leadership.
- In a panel with CGI, Appvia and Microsoft employees, all recognised the importance of empathy with people in the often struggling journeys of learning new technologies as they are being implemented. For instance, in the experience of a speaker when companies are struggling to shift to microservices, they need support in this area before even targeting to optimise the applications on top. Aiming to implement too many technologies and practices at the same time may be overwhelming.
- Help to shape curriculums of training programmes, working together with universities and other entities. Make them useful for the current and future needs. Technology companies are pragmatic, they will hire people ready to hit the ground. Help training entities to make it happen, bringing awareness about what works and what doesn’t and collaborating with them.
- Be explicit in the role descriptions by including clear and differentiated goals in job descriptions for different roles. One manager at Microsoft shared that in their experience sometimes the right person is hired in the wrong role because of assumptions of what the role is about, as a role with the same name might be totally different between two companies. In my experience, this might be the case for so called DevOps engineering roles or SRE roles. These might be implemented quite differently in different companies. A Netflix speaker explained that how quality was measured varied between teams, which may lead to different goals and day to day experiences for developers.
- Rethink hiring strategy looking for candidates from multiple backgrounds, beyonds those already in technical roles and with technical degrees. The (ICS)2 study suggests Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies in the company might play a key role to contribute to closing multiple gaps by bringing more women and minorities into technology. The panelist presenting the study called out that of those who transition into cybersecurity being self-trained the majority are women.
- Also rethink your recruitment process. In a round the table discussion a few participants stated they prime hiring for learning skills instead of technical skills, and acknowledge people will learn the technology on the job. How to do this? An architect shared he normally identifies a skill the candidate does not have in their curriculum, in a first interview shares with them a problem that needs to be solved with that technology and explain that they expect the candidate to think about how to solve it and discuss about their solution and process to get to it in a second interview. I asked how successful this method was. He stated so far 3 candidates out of 20 have been hired using this method and they have been really good hire.
- Over 600 companies have joined forces in the TechTalent Charter in UK to share best practices and experience cross companies in growing talent in the industry. The UK Data Center UTC programmed also is based on inter-company cooperation. A problem at large scale might not be something your company can face on your own. Collaboration maybe an option to help us all.
I hope some of the ideas above are useful to help get a sense of the problem and options to look into. Nonetheless, I am conscious they come without background and context information, and no data is available behind some of the recommendations to give a perspective on what outcomes they have driven. I encourage you not to discarded them just yet. It might be a good opportunity to take an evidence-based management approach to decide what may work for you and your organisation. Evident-based management is essentially about making decisions using four sources of information: “Practitioner expertise and judgment, evidence from the local context, a critical evaluation of the best available research evidence, and the perspectives of those people who might be impacted” (Briner & Walshe, 2015). Pick one possible action and find out what research and practitioner evidence exists out there about it and explore how feasible and pertinent it will be for your context.
