It's more complex than you think

We finished a meal in one of these overhyped New York restaurants. For payment we just used one credit card. That was a mistake. Perhaps it was the alcohol.

Now we had to transfer money between each of us. I opened my banking app for the first time since I had moved to the US. I looked into the menu: Pay Bills, Quick Pay with Zelle, Account Transfer, Wire Transfer, Global Transfer, Brokerage Transfer. I was swamped. Suddenly my little buzz was gone.

I flashed back to my experience in DevOps. Beginning developers also lose their buzz when they get swamped with too many options with no training. They are used to writing new code. Now, they need to do additional test automation, take care of security and operations. So they look into their menu and see new tools and tasks: JUnit, JFrog, Selenium, Jenkins and tasks like Value Stream mapping and the Anchor Cord. All without any explanation. Just a link to a wiki page. And they’ve already over committed their time writing new business features. That is more than confusing.

No explanations, no time, just expectations. It leads to the same feeling: mental overload.

In fact, technical features and tools require time to learn to use them. And DevOps is about learning. It's mostly about learning. We have to combine the technical change with training. This requires a time commitment. Also it moves slower than the technical journey. The DevOps movement starts in technology, changes processes and moves people. 

Sounds obvious. I know. But how is it in your company - do you get enough time to train your people?

You can install a new tool in minutes, but you need weeks or months to learn to use it productively