Can a DevOps culture help avoid burnout?

Clinical burnout has several causes. Chief among them are things like absence of fairness and a feeling of being ineffective in what we're doing.

In this talk I'll cover some of those well accepted causes of burnout and talk about how a culture of shared ownership and responsibility will help avoid many of them.

I'll also cover how adding new need to learn some fancy new tool and changing someone's title to "DevOps Engineer" is more likely to make it worse.

My hope is that people will understand and be able to recognize the causes of signs of burnout in themselves and their team. They will also understand how making positive changes to their working culture can help in some situations.

Making strategic technology choices in a fast moving world

Organizations have always struggled to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change to make effective strategic investments in the future. Even when decisions are made, communicating and aligning them with the rest of the organization difficult.

How do we reasonably keep up with the technology landscape?

How do individuals and teams learn what has been done in other parts of the organization?

What are the unintended consequences and social implications of technology trends?

What has worked well?

What has not worked well?

When there are multiple reasonable choices, how do we focus?

When does it make sense to not adopt something “the whole world is doing”?

When does it make sense to adopt something “nobody else is doing?”

Over the past couple decades, Thoughtworks has had to deal with all of these questions. We’ve created several internal procedures for gathering, scoring, and choosing technologies we want to focus on, and those we do not. We’ve also created external resources such as Thoughtworks Radar and Thoughtworks Looking Glass to share our learnings with the world.

In this talk, Ken will show the frameworks, tools, and processes Thoughtworks has used over the past couple decades to attack this problem.

While this session shows both internal and publicly available tools and publications, it is definitely NOT a pitch for Thoughtworks products or services.