How to Meet the Need for DevOps Skills
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“Retention is my main problem.”
“There are lots of people, but finding good people is so hard.”
“We need to do more training, but the courses out there don’t seem to cut it.”
“We don’t have enough people to build the things we want to get out!”
“The people we have don’t know DevOps!”
These are all things that we hear from CTOs.
It used to be that companies worried about efficiency and utilization. They could get all the people they needed. To be profitable, they needed to use those people well.
Today it is different. Digital companies are far more worried about getting the work done than about how efficient they are. Efficiency and keeping costs low is not the prevalent worry today: the worry tends to be market share, or at least keeping the market share that you have.
Retention is not the goal: having sufficient capacity to stay competitive is the goal.
So digital companies don’t really care about retention as their root concern: their root concern is having enough qualified and knowledgeable people to do all the work. Retention is merely one way to achieve that. Aggressive hiring is another. In-house training is still another. But capacity is the goal.
If someone leaves, it costs you. You lose their knowledge of how things work in your organization. They went through their learning curve, and a new person will have to go through that. That’s an investment on your part. No one likes to lose an investment.
But that loss pales compared to the opportunity cost of not having the people you need to get your new product features to market, and risk that a competitor will steal your customers.
That’s why today it’s not about cost: it’s about customers.
Why are companies stingy about training people? That is the fastest and most sure way to increase capacity.
So why are companies stingy about training people? That is the fastest and most sure way to increase capacity. Hire people who are smart but don’t have exactly the skills you need. Train them. Then they will. Some will leave; so what! Hire and train enough of them so that you have the capacity you need.
Worry less about the cost of someone leaving, and more about the opportunity cost of not having the capacity that you need.
And for everyone’s sake, forget buzzwords: don’t tell your HR people to find “someone who knows Azure” or “someone who has used Cucumber” or things like that. Those don’t matter! Tell them instead that you want, respectively, “someone who has built cloud-based systems” or “someone who has an interest in test automation”—and who is smart and who has a history of learning new things. Because specific tools don’t matter today. Tools are always changing. And if you can work in one cloud, the time to learn another is minimal—the concepts and patterns transfer.
Choose smarts and intellect over tool experience, hands down.
