our jobs are changing. can we keep up?

Our Jobs Are ChangingMandi WallsLISA 2013

November 6, 2013

Thursday, November 14, 13

whoami

• Mandi Walls

• Technical Practice Manager at Opscode

• Sysadmin

• @lnxchk


Nope

• What I’m not going to talk about:

• Chef. It’s awesome. I talk about Chef all the time.

• DevOps. Some of this will start to sound a little DevvyOpsy though.

• Gender and diversity. It’s a thing, and other folks have the science.


Yep

• What I am going to talk about

• The future. Yours, mine, ours together.

• The world. It’s big and changing.


Why I Care

• Truth is, I work for a vendor

• I talk to our customers and community every day

• What I see in the industry worries me


Evolution of the Field


Legacies

• Protect expensive, specially-purchased systems

• Run stuff

• Fix things


Monetary Investment

• Gear costs money: machines, networks, storage, electricity, cooling

• The higher those costs, the greater the risk of failure for new products, services, and features

• Cost impacts attitude, behavior, creates a culture of “no”


The Generation of “No”

• Sysadmins rewarded for protecting investments

• Hoarders of information

• BOFHs


Shoulders of Giants

Progress in a field doesn’t happen when everyone has to start from scratch


Specialization

• Over time, complexity bred specialties

• Networking, storage, datacenter operations, web operations, IT

• Federation of tasks can create positive outcomes and negative outcomes


Evolution of Practice

• Three stages of the evolution of a field

• craft

• commercial

• engineering

• Mary Shaw at CMU “Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software”


Craft Stage

• Talented amateurs

• Use of intuition, what “feels like it will work this time”

• Early tools built mostly for their own use


Commercial Stage

• Market expansion, greater demand

• Standard procedures start to emerge

• Practitioners are more carefully selected and have some training


Engineering Stage

• Practitioners begin to apply scientific principles

• Principles emerge

• Experimentation becomes more sophisticated


Where Are We?


Challenges to Moving Forward

• Unskilled workers hold organizations back

• Investing in training and professional development


Bringing individuals up to speed is a tough job


In the meantime, the ground under our feet is changing

We have to continue learning as well


Why Does it Even Matter?


Digital Economy

• Increasing: more of day-to-day life is lived, or augmented, online

• Expanding reach: more non-technical people engaging with tech

• Globalization: developing economies without technical legacy


Reach of Technology

• In many countries, connectedness is near constant

• The systems behind these services are increasingly complex and interconnected

• Users expect all services to perform at a certain level


Engagement of Non-Specialists

• Barrier to entry lowered to engage more consumers

• They’re not “muggles”, they’re users, customers

• Change the way we engage with others


Globalizing

• Emerging economies leapfrog over legacy infrastructure requirements

• Individuals find new ways to use technology to better their lives


Ubiquity

• Escaping technology takes work

• The growth of technology mean more opportunity for more people

• Unlikely uses for technology fuels improvements in quality of life


What Do We Enable?

• Projects like Nano Ganesh from Tata Indicom

• Indian farmers use mobile technology to water crops


What Do We Enable?

• Companies like Cemex


What Do We Enable?

• Changes to education, healthcare, safety


There is No Place for BOFHs in this New Technological World


How Do We Enable Ourselves?

• Self awareness

• Organizational awareness

• Participation in the field


New Skills

Borrowing practices from software engineering


Learn To Touch Type

• Dude.

• Seriously.


Version Control

• PTSD from that one time you checked something in with RCS and forgot to leave a local copy

• Modern tools like git integrate with other systems, deployment tools

• It’s important to have history - not just for code, but for your config files on your systems

• Create a single workflow for everyone, including dev if you have it

• Pull early, push often


Learn To Code

• Scariest slide in this talk

• Pick a language, learn it. bash counts. PowerShell is awesome.

• Increase efficiency, repeatability of your work - the maturation of tools brings the whole profession forward

• It’s a skill that you can learn, it’s not magic, and it can’t be limited to people who have “software engineer” in their job title


Working in the Cloud

• The cloud is our fault. Say “no” enough times, your organization will stop asking you for things

• The commoditization of the hardware layer will catch up with us

• Utility computing brings new challenges and shines light on the “what ifs” we’ve been talking to others about for years

• Use the cloud to learn new things you might need in your job


Document Systems

• Foster transparency and trust by documenting your processes

• If your team doesn’t have (or like) wikis, use something like sphinx

• Give everyone access, no hiding and hoarding


Testing and Code Review

• A set of still emerging tools, like serverspec

• Builds trust in your processes when you know your change works

• If you have multiple people on a team, check each other’s work, formalize the process with a tool like garrett


Common Thread

• Be proactive

• Say Yes

• If you can’t say Yes, ask questions before saying No


Where Do We Go

• Cost of systems

• Now mitigated by the cloud and other services


• Cost of bad behaviors

• We can work on getting to Yes


• Cost of information hoarding and reinventing the wheel - the opportunity cost of repeating work

• We can be open and share our knowledge


We can build amazing things, but not by ourselves


Our future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed


Next Steps

• Changing our first principles

• Rejecting the pull of the BOFH

• Refocusing systems work on enabling the organization to do great things

• Finding our value proposition when we aren’t the guardians of large expensive systems - we’re the facilitators of large amazing ideas


Why?

Because some day we are going to be running the O2 systems on starships
