hands down the coolest conference i've ever attended. sure i learned some things and met some exciting people, but i wasn't expecting such a strong vibe. i might be projecting a little since i'm starting a new job next week and my head space is already a bit future-possibility oriented.
one session i attended about culture encouraged us to blog about it... so here it is:
most discussions about devops lately have pretty unanimously identified a management and cultural component. one of the afternoon "open spaces" sessions with Spike Morelli covered the topic of how we might seek to enhance an occupational culture.
he asked a provoking question, "how many of us REALLY, GENUINELY CARE about improving our culture?". it caught my interest because though i think we all agree that culture can be game changingly important, it also seems a little intangible and mysterious... particularly for technical types, who are not stereotypically known for interpersonal and social aptitude. like politics, it's always bigger than one person and so can feel kindof outside your control, and there can be a sort of apathy.
if we agree that great culture, whatever that means, is not universal, then i'd even go so far as to say apathy is a kind of survival skill... it's a natural thing for an individual instinct to guide you to do great work independent of residing in a subpar culture which you don't feel you can bend at will.
at the start of the session, spike and John Willis made an interesting observation: of all the dozens of open spaces topics, this one was virtually the only one that was not about tools and technology. it seems like a dichotomy that there has been so much devops forum discussion about management and culture, yet we don't really see anyone doing anything identifiably real about it.
as the discussion went on, a bunch of ideas flew around about how the goal culture could be defined and what tactics for closing in on it might be.
the point was made that group values are diverse and contextual... a large stable company with an established staff might be legitimately unaggressive... a culture of paycheck takers and don't-rock-the-boaters whose real passion is for the life they pursue outside of work. who can fault that? some cultures might be service oriented, some might be product oriented, some might even be devops oriented. my take away here was that although culture varies, one thing strong cultures have in common is a high level of alignment. i think for alignment to be real it needs a scope that is neither too broad nor too narrow.
as for tactics, a few that i made note of were: tech talks, attending the standups of other groups, message repitition, in depth slide sets. one interesting idea for larger orgs, where changing the entire company culture is hard, you might be able to start within your own smaller team, and you might benefit from a talented management "buffer" to allow the culture to exist while sheltering and resolving conflicting modes coming down from upper management tiers.
that about covers the material from the session. on a meta level it was interesting to learn a little about culture within an event that itself seems very culturally strong. though i've read a lot about devops values on the forums, it felt very different discussing it in person. i guess this should not be surprising, but it was striking.
the end of the day was a open bar mixer, had a few beers and munchies and hung out with some old friends i hadn't seen in awhile. there was also a little jam session, got to listen to some good bass players, and then to my delight a great funk band! i forgot to get their name... hopefully get to see them again sometime.
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