Lightning Talk: Gatekeeping within DevOps: When we sound smart but get nowhere

Hi, this is me. I'm Dilja Rudolfsdottir, with a bit of a mouthful, so good luck if you try to pronounce it. And I'm going to tell you what you just need to invest in DevOps.

Well, not actually you. I'm going to tell these guys. So glad all five of you are here.

You're going to invest in DevOps. It's going to be great. It's going to have huge financial benefits, also culture benefits. DevOps, it's like development and ops, and it's together. Ops is like IT security and infrastructure and first-level support and second-level support and third-level support. I don't think there's any more. And development is development. That's cool.

And don't worry. You don't need to understand all this. I know you don't have technology backgrounds. I have a degree in AI, actually. No big deal. I think you're all probably like business degrees, so that's nice too. You don't really need to understand anything more than if we fit them together, it'll just be great benefits. We can do things more securely and quicker. I don't necessarily -- it's not guaranteeing that it'll be quicker. It might be quicker. Other things matter too. It could be cheaper, although I'm not guaranteeing that DevOps will make it cheaper either. It's totally possible.

But forget about all that. That doesn't really matter. This is what matters. We're going to continuously integrate and continuously deploy, and that's much better than doing it non-continuously, because it's continuous, so it's all the time.

Then we're also going to test automation, and we're going to automate our testing. We're not going to do it 100%, obviously, because that would be diminishing returns. So we're going to aim for 80%. Don't worry, it would take so long explaining that to you, and so I'm not just going to do it. Stay with me, guys. I get the last bit, that 80% is better than 100%, maybe it doesn't make any sense. But just stay with me. You don't need to understand. Just trust me. It'll be so good.

And so this is the list, really, what I want you to invest in: better tooling; security up front; I want to hire some SREs, or maybe just change some job titles; and I want to do machine learning, AI in the right places. Yeah, that's pretty much what I want to do. The benefits will be huge, although I can't really explain to you how they will be huge. So can I have money?

Yes? No?

Can't have money for DevOps. You don't understand it? I'm sorry. I work with a dinosaur company. We obviously just don't get it.

And we'll be right.

A lot of our senior leaders and executives don't get DevOps, the thing that we all love, because we have made absolutely no effort to help them understand it. We have made no effort to help reach out to them. Instead, we do this: we gatekeep. We use overcomplicated language to make sure no one knows what we're talking about.

And if you like the Reddit sub Explain Like I'm Five, we don't do that. Instead, something that actually took us quite a long time to understand and read a lot of books and attend conferences and actually do it for work, we just expect them to understand it straight away, and then invest lots of money and allow us to hire a lot of people based on that.

And this is why I think we do it. I think we do it because of our egos. This was the best description I found of my own ego. I think it looks something like this. I think we like to sound smart. I think we don't like to be challenged, so we just make things quite complicated so no one will ever challenge us, in the process making DevOps sound like a pyramid scheme, where just invest now and reap huge benefits later, never work again.

Which is a shame, because actually what we want to do is we want to bring our non-IT colleagues with us. We actually really believe in the benefit of this. It's a real shame that we can't tell them exactly how it will benefit them, because then the changes actually could be great for them and for us.

So let's bring them on board, and let's help them on the journey with us. And just remember, our non-IT colleagues are actually super smart, so maybe we should talk to them like we actually know that.

Thank you.