How do you build, manage and fund your systems? Today’s episode is about talent, staffing and hiring the right people to do the job for you.
How you make hiring decisions is inexorably linked to how you think about solving, funding, and structuring solutions around those problems. You cannot hire people without also having straightforward answers for those questions.
We have a fantastic conversation about staffing, that we find to actually be about building the foundations for your hiring.
How do we help junior people build the right skills to do advanced automation system administration, and actually build systems that are resilient and robust? Then, after understanding that that is a learned skill that’s predominantly learned by doing the work, troubleshooting.
We started the conversation talking through how to teach troubleshooting and find opportunities for that. But we transformed the discussion into the challenge of teaching people skills that they then walk away with, that, as you’re mentoring people, you’re increasing their value, and potentially giving them the keys to leave and find a better job.
We talked about this as an industry trend, and some expectations on what you can do about it, and how you can approach that situation. Overall a very robust conversation about building great teams, through junior engineers, and what it takes to be thorough and complete in a process like that. Both from what you can do, and what you have to watch out for.
In the September 13th Cloud2030 Podcast, Rob Hirschfeld shares insights on mentoring junior DevOps engineers, emphasizing the importance of troubleshooting for their learning process. He highlights the hands-on nature of operations and admin work, where individuals encounter challenging problems, learn on the job, and understand solutions by fixing issues. Hirschfeld stresses the need for a supportive environment that allows junior team members to learn without time pressure, fostering a culture that encourages experimentation and learning through doing.
We continue our hiring advice series in this episode. It’s a really powerful thing to have people who have established careers, think about what would have made a difference, think about what is important when we work with and mentor inexperienced and junior people who are building a career.
This episode is full of thoughtful advice on how to build subject matter expertise, and the ephemeral qualities that make somebody a good leader or a good worker, or what we were calling an executive function.
If you are building your career, or helping mentor people who are building a career, you will get a lot out of this.
How can promotion boards be hostile or hurtful to open source technology? We talk about the dynamics of corporate support in open source technology, and if being rewarded for internal work at companies translates into challenges for open source technology.
This discussion starts to peel apart what makes open source technology sustainable, and what it works for. We bring up an analogy of a lava lamp where things heat up and then cool down as part of a natural cycle, which can be a normal cycle for all software, and that led us back to how promotion boards work.
We covered a lot of ground through the dynamics of corporate software governance and open source and interweaving those together.
In the Cloud 2030 podcast on April 19th, Rob Hirschfeld discusses the challenges of sustaining open source projects and the dynamics of job review boards. The conversation highlights the common evolution of software projects, where initial excitement and rapid development give way to stabilization, increasing complexity, and less excitement. The key takeaway is the need to recognize and reward individuals contributing to the maintenance and extension of existing projects, emphasizing the importance of such work for communities, companies, and society. Join the discussion at the2030.cloud for diverse opinions and insights.
