DevOps - Empathy, People, & Stress in IT

Hope everyone is well this morning.

I'm having a reading day, and I'll probably do a bunch of reading over the weekend.

I picked up the kindle version of The Kubernetes Book: Version 2.2, it basically goes over all the basics of Kubernetes. To be honest I was hoping it would have more content ... but if you want a really quick over-view you can read quickly it's a good book to pick up.

I'm on page 73 of 141 right now, which is kind of disappointing given I only picked it up after my morning coffee. This page references an interesting conference talk on YouTube called A Strong Belief, Loosely Held: Bringing Empathy to IT.

It's really interesting because it talks about the politics and incentives of IT organizations from a game theory perspective. This is probably one of the most important topics in DevOps. Since it will be impossible for you to improve development work-flow if you don't have developers (humans) on your side. Here are some of the points emphasized:

You have to realize that employees, contractors, suppliers, ect., ect have motives beyond just increasing the bottom line of the organization. You have to figure out how to implement changes and improvements by incentivizing the people in your organization.

It's nice to consider the human aspects of IT and DevOps. If you want to drive change you need to win people over. That means being open to others, looking for win-win situations, and considering the politics of code ownership. This slide sums up the fear and politics aspect, which we can all feel when a task we are responsible may no longer exist as a needed unit of work:

Don't seek to eliminate work directly, close departments, or displace people. Of course those things can and do happen often in IT by the very nature of the industry. But helping people get behind change and grow with it will empower them in their own careers. It's all about win-win situations. DevOps is systems, often these systems are hardware, and software based but that infrastructure runs on top of a psychological, cultural, and business system.

• Think outside the matrix,
• Consider all aspects and variables
• Work with existing systems not against them (with the intention of evolving them of course)

I came across another topic mentioned within the presentation linked above. It is specifically on the topic of burnout. I've run into this problem myself recently, but it's definitely not the first time, so this time I at least have the fore-site to recognize that and try to make preemptive moves to deal with it.

John Willis speaks about this in depth here, or if you'd prefer you can read the original blog post that inspired the talk.

I'll probably end up buying a few more books on Kindle over the weekend. I've scheduled a train trip to Quebec City tomorrow and I plan to read and explore the city for most of the day.

Can anyone recommend some books related to Kubernetes or DevOps philosophy in general?