Admitting that hard problems are hard - Ghent 2019
A presentation at DevOpsDays Ghent 2019 in in Ghent, Belgium by Sasha Rosenbaum
Admitting that hard problems are hard SASHA ROSENBAUM
You have been tasked with building a website
Imagine your CTO, Bob
Bob has an idea
- Hey, Bob, I don’t understand… - Why do we need all this?!
Are you saying that YOU don’t understand this?
Resume driven development
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” ― Albert Einstein
We should stop pretending that ❖Distributed systems are easy ❖People can be available 24/7 ❖Unicorn companies don’t have technical debt ❖That new product will solve all of your problems
The intro slide Sasha Rosenbaum Sr. Program Manager @Microsoft @DivineOps
Computer Science Top 20 CS department in the world • • • • System Administrator for IAF R&D Software Engineer Azure Consultant Cloud Solution Architect https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-rosenbaum/
You must be marketing!
We use heuristics to navigate the world
Stereotypes are self-perpetuating
Studies in 2012 and 2015 Same resume with a male (vs female) name was 6-14% more likely to get an interview. The resumes with white-sounding names spurred 50% more callbacks than the ones with black-sounding names.
Why am I telling you this?
The cost is much higher for ❖Women ❖People of color ❖Junior Engineers
Why speak up?
Complexity isn’t free
Costs of complexity https://abstrusegoose.com/432 ❖Time to learn ❖Time to build ❖Cost of Maintenance ❖Chances of failure
Money
Productivity
Building Effective Teams (Google Study) Background? Personality types? Skills?
Building Effective Teams (Google Study) Background Personality types Skills => Psychological Safety
Psychological safety A belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive.
Psychological Safety Feeling confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.
How many of you have that?
How many of you remember not having that?
Psychological safety doesn’t just happen
As a leader, remember
Make it safe to express opinions
Make it safe to admit mistakes
You don’t know everything
You are here to IMPROVE not to PROVE yourself
None of this is easy
But it is worth it!
Thank You! @DivineOps
Resources https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/careers/the-same-resume-with-differentnames-nets-different-results/news-story/a2a182fb4570e948c27ce63139ee66b1 https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/jalen-ross/blackname-resume-50-percent-less-likely-get-respo/ https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2016/08/technion-ranked-top-in-israel-69thworldwide/ https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-New-Psychology-Success-dpB07N48NM33/dp/B07N48NM33/ http://projects.wsj.com/buzzwords2014
In my 14 years in the industry, I watched the technology landscape become more and more complex, with new tools and methodologies emerging and fading away every year. Yet I see “thought leaders” get up on stage every day, promising they can teach you the 3 easy steps to:
- Achieve full software testability (a subset of the Halting Problem, which is undecidable)
- Remediate 20 years of legacy code
- Migrate your entire data center to the cloud
- Adopt the new architectural pattern that is going to solve all of your problems
Beyond fostering imposter syndrome and burnout, this isn’t good for business. In a room full of people embarrassed to admit that the emperor has no clothes, decisions are made without exploring their full implications. In this talk, we will discuss why we should get better at admitting that hard problems are hard, and how this approach can help us build more resilient companies.
for free. You
can too.
Buzz and feedback
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