patternMinor
Recipe for hiring a winning DevOps empowered team?
Viewed 0 times
hiringempoweredteamrecipewinningfordevops
Problem
The comparison of a software delivery team to a football team (all can kick the ball but only some will become an excellent goalkeeper or a forward) can be a nice input for further thought regarding division of labour and specialists vs. generalists.
So, it seems more to me than just "you should never try to hire a DevOps team" - because if you hire "a football team" you do not just want "somebody kick the ball in the FIFA World Cup", but you possibly want to have an idea what makes the team having chances to win.
So, winning teams can be a product themselves (can't find the reference for that but there are enough startup acquisions, I'm sure it is not always just about the product) - what is the recipe for success?
For sure there is a lot of soft skills/cultural related context, but this would be true for virtually every team.
What are mandatory DevOps specific requirements to skill sets for a winning team setup? Will be there a relationship between numbers of CI/CD experts and those who focus on development, or operations?
Note: this question is not a duplicate of "why you shouldn't try to hire a DevOps Engineer" as a specific question is after required skills setup. E.g. would you have a CI-focused profile or expect developers to include pipelines as code to their projects? Clearly, just hiring somebody with the DevOps claim does not answer this question.
So, it seems more to me than just "you should never try to hire a DevOps team" - because if you hire "a football team" you do not just want "somebody kick the ball in the FIFA World Cup", but you possibly want to have an idea what makes the team having chances to win.
So, winning teams can be a product themselves (can't find the reference for that but there are enough startup acquisions, I'm sure it is not always just about the product) - what is the recipe for success?
For sure there is a lot of soft skills/cultural related context, but this would be true for virtually every team.
What are mandatory DevOps specific requirements to skill sets for a winning team setup? Will be there a relationship between numbers of CI/CD experts and those who focus on development, or operations?
Note: this question is not a duplicate of "why you shouldn't try to hire a DevOps Engineer" as a specific question is after required skills setup. E.g. would you have a CI-focused profile or expect developers to include pipelines as code to their projects? Clearly, just hiring somebody with the DevOps claim does not answer this question.
Solution
I believe DevOps is orthogonal to your question, i.e., it changes nothing compared to a "classical" approach (or to hiring any team at all, not only for software development). You identify what your key needs are (for example, an "architect" who is able to structure large software systems; some "hacker" who is able to fix a Kernel driver if needed; a "tester" who likes to test and such; and finally maybe a "DevOps engineer" who excels in creating good CI/CD tooling).
But all of them need, to stay with your image, to be able to kick the ball. I.e., they all need to work together in the context that the team is working in. They all need at least some basic understanding of what the other team members are doing; if you have a strict CI/CD pipeline, then they all need to be able to develop in that frame; and so on.
But all of them need, to stay with your image, to be able to kick the ball. I.e., they all need to work together in the context that the team is working in. They all need at least some basic understanding of what the other team members are doing; if you have a strict CI/CD pipeline, then they all need to be able to develop in that frame; and so on.
Context
StackExchange DevOps Q#2714, answer score: 8
Revisions (0)
No revisions yet.