[hosh]

He isn’t pushing human interaction. That is part of the job and problem solving. There was this story going around about what kind of developer you are: cowboy or farmer? Good devops people are plumbers.* Plumbers get stuff working by making sure all the disparate components of the the whole system work together. Human interactions are necessarily part of the whole system.

A solution can be technically fantastic, and yet people may not adopt it for one reason or another. You have to get buy-in from people.

I recently interviewed at a place where they vaguely know they needed devops but there wasn’t sufficient buy-in. I made the mistake of taking the interviews at face value. I should have been treating it as consultation from the get-go, drawing out any issues they might have (by starting with pain points), coming up with solutions. I didn’t realize I can be applying the same skills I have while working to at the very earliest stages.

If I were to build a consultation firm, I would sell organizations on the human interaction (because that is easier for people-managers to grasp; it is what they fo for their jobs). However, if I were hiring someone within my hypothetical consultation firm to do this kind of work, I would look at their problem solving mindset and people skills, at whatever experience level they are at.

*And it seems reading that Small Farmer Journal article about how to get started as a farmer with no money, real farmers have to problem solve too.