DevOps Knows Better but Doesn’t Do Better (Yet?)

I haven’t said much in a while for a few reasons - some are good as we are developing cool things - a Belonging tool and a NeuroSpicy@Work platform and there are many excited product team design meetings and intense podcast conversations connected to both- and a few not that brilliant. You see, I’ve been feeling rather dejected with our “industry”. I had such great hopes for us but looking at the state of the workplace, the overall adoption of our software meant to augment the Human Work, and the mental and emotional state of tech teams drowning in Human Debt™ everywhere, I had to concede they may have been in vain. At least for now.

Of the many industries I have traversed over the past 20 years, the tech world is the only one where there is concern with human behaviour by any other employees than the HR department. Take DevOps - something that could have easily been technical only and yet it turned into an exploration of culture and arguably the most important one there is. It is what fascinated and attracted me to the Tech world in the first place and sparked my fetish for agility. Over the years I’ve met so very many so called “techies” who were more interested in human aspects than many leaders in other functions and industries and that still stands and is amazing. 

What difference does that make though?

That’s right, that’s the kicker that occurred to me a few months ago and made me take a step back from my unwavering admiration of the DevOps discourse and the Human-focused side of Tech. 

There is no real action. The exploration is entirely academic and there is a lack of willingness to “speak truth to power” and fix systemic issues. What’s worse? We don’t admit this to be the case. 

“Agilists” and “Techies” are the first ones to understand Human Debt and yet what do they really and truly do about it? Loads at an individual level, yes, but at an enterprise level? At the level where it makes a difference en masse? That’s right, not much. 

If I had a dollar for every time that a tech leader with their heart in the right place, stepped down from their efforts to better the developer’s lives -and ultimately productivity- and start a program, buy software or install a new practice of daily Human Work because they were told off by HR, I’d afford to donate our software forever. Incidentally, it has taken a lot of donating to get needles moving in this industry because of this very reason. This eventual backing off of those DevOps enthusiasts who know what’s what, when challenged (and at times threatened) by those who don’t either know, or care. 

For a long time I had thought that Agility itself is the crux and the key because once every corner of the planet would be truly Agile in their heart of hearts, there is no way they could keep being so without the human work it necessitates to breed genuine psychological safety and true communication. In my overly optimistic dreams, this is why Agile would have changed Culture at large as an unlikely agent of transformative new ways. It’s what I wrote about in “Tech-Led Culture” - a book that very (very!) few have read partly because I’m a horrid marketer of my own stuff, and partly because it’s too heavy and carries this premise of a duty for change I envisioned us all to have. 

To me, having seen the light on the topic of the importance of lowering Human Debt in enterprises, there is no way that vision wouldn’t have emboldened everyone to carry on fighting for genuine major change of culture. 

Nowadays, call it cape fatigue or bitterness, but I don’t see it that way any more. I no longer believe that techies will be the “Human Debt Fighters and HumanWork Advocates” that we desperately need to apply all they know and feel to change workplace culture.. What I mistook for a combination of slow awareness building combined with an intense period of workplace changes, is in fact something else entirely that will stop most techies or DevOps enthusiasts from boldly pushing large scale cultural change that they have proof is needed at an organisational level. That something else is likely a combination between intense Impostor Syndrome on these topics and sheer self-preservation in a world ever-more-driven by dread and control.

Instead, if we’re honest, it’s much more likely they’ll stay thinking of things at an exclusively theoretical level and navel-gaze about frameworks and systems that explain human behaviour, whilst still applying whatever concrete human action they can at a small level themselves, and yet never fighting to shake HR or Leadership into comprehending these deep truths about healthy, generative cultures. If you want examples look around and ask yourself how many of these people deeply understand concepts such as Radical Candor, Psychological Safety or even Continuous Human Improvement, and then watch how much of that understanding ever translated into working practices of the enterprise. 

Or consider how many DevOps conferences and events lyricise waxly about culture and the people aspect yet everyone goes back to their offices or their machines, and none of these topics make their way into the every-day lives of developers. 

Even worse, think about how little is being said about the concrete behaviours and feelings that come with the work practices we need to create modern software from TDD to pair-programming. How little is translated to education and daily practice. How unheard of it is to discuss emotions in tech teams, when they go through so many. How unlikely to be intensely emotional or human or even call out and debate behaviours we witness in close-knit circles of trust we create. How unheard of to have any trace of “Human Work” on a regular basis beyond the odd webinar or talk of theoretical models and how the space and allowance for it are never being made in backlogs. 

I remember the day that one of the 8000 CTOs at an event I was presenting a keynote to, first challenged me when I confidently plastered my piece de resistance slide of “Human Debt is like Tech Debt but for your people” that continued with “You don’t let the tech one linger, you must do something about the former too!!!”. He practically hackled me with an eye roll and a loud scoff “Ha! We don’t do anything about Tech Debt either Miss, we just say so!”. It stopped me in my tracks because I wanted it to be wrong and him to be mistaken, but I eventually had to concede he was right once I looked closer into it. For the most part, Tech Debt is not tackled at all. And this was a couple of years back, prior to AI, I shudder to think what playing with GenAI on a bed of lack of pairing and testing (and even communicating!) has done to that amount of debt, but I know it can’t be good and it’s likely growing by the day. 

As is the other kind of debt. Pandemics, disastrous wars and elections, and an ever-more ignored crisis of mental health coupled with insane RTO demands, are all making Human Debt exponentially grow in every sector but even more so in the tech industry. 

If you look at the latest State of the Employees surveys and recoil at the 59% who are disengaged and actively disengaged keep in mind the data covers all industries and all types of jobs including the vocational ones where engagement will always be insanely high, so the number must be much higher than that in technology. So what’s that? 6 our of 10 humans in every team you have, are disconnected, unhappy and severely under-performing. That’s what the Human Debt looks like. That’s the 8.8 USD Trillion cost. That's what we're letting stand.

Makes me wonder how we get anything done at all. Let’s face it, with the job market being as it is, with masse lay-offs, fake job ads, and doing away with legions of coaches, fear-based performance and extreme command and control may be the only mechanisms still squeezing some productivity out of our dev teams but if we’re honest, they are nowhere near where they should be because we’ve let this much debt amass. 

What’s the answer? Is this article just a random whipping of Tech and DevOps leaders who ought to have done more for their people and have instead contented themselves with assuaging their conscience by being empathic and vulnerable themselves and agreeing with the big people topics at the occasional industry gathering? 

It isn’t. 

As ever, it’s meant to be a call for action. One that is mainly appealing to the new guard. The younger new tech leaders, the accidental people leaders, the fresh-faced CTOs, the Agile. Scrum or project management strategists and gurus still around (or newly around) and anyone else that has any ounce of actionable influence in the organisation - speak the truth of what tech culture needs to be high performing to power. School your HR, guide your leadership if you must. For the good of the whole company and all your other colleagues from no matter what department. If you can’t, at least ask for budget to do your own learning and development and buy your own people tools then apply what you know in your tech teams directly, away from the general broad strokes policies and lack of deep understanding of the rest of the organisation at least.  

If you’re fresh-faced, you’ve sadly come into this workplace where us the old guard are locked in moaning and deploring the Human Debt on long LinkedIn posts and on the corridors of conferences, but doing nothing concrete to change it. You can though. Not only are you not as driven by fear as the rest of us are, but you have a completely different lens on what human emotions and behaviours are, and you already think flexibly and with enormous self-awareness and empathy! These are attributes of the new generations entering the workplace that will make it better for everyone.

So I have great faith you’ll be the ones presiding over a future where the Tech and Operational Work is no more revered, supported or encouraged than the Human Work and where the debt is diminishing - I see amazing examples of courageous and intelligent action to make this happen all the time!

As for the rest of us - there’s still time to be like the cool kids and aim for genuine actionable massive cultural change and every day Human Work not empty rhethorics. Shall we? At long last?