Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Okay. We are now up at a session that we call DevOps Confessions, and I believe there is a slide for this. DevOps Confessions. Okay, great.

So, as many of you know, I had the pleasure of working with John Willis. He was a co-author on the DevOps Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project. And through him, we were able to work with this astounding panel of speakers from the Lean community and the safety culture community.

And last year here in London, you actually saw a talk from Dr. Richard Cook, who works with the famous John Allspaw, and he said something that I found astonishing. Essentially, he said, "Experience reports are great." That is true, and I agree with him. But he said there's a certain type of stories that you just can't tell on stage, right? In fact, there is a category of stories that you will never hear from talks. You'll only hear them if you're lucky enough to catch them at the bar and after many drinks. And those are the stories of the real mistakes, right?

And as he said, great practice comes from experience, and experience comes from bad practice. Right? And so what occurred to me was that it seems very important, I think, as a community, that we be able to hear these stories in a way that, as opposed to just being lucky to be sitting next to the right person who's sharing these stories at the bar.

So what we wanted to do was create something called the DevOps Confession Format. And what this is, is we've collected stories that we've anonymized so that we can share them with you on this stage. So please welcome one of our programming committee members, Courtney Kissler, who will be sharing one of these anonymized stories. Courtney.

Courtney Kissler

Thank you. Yeah. All right. So I'm very honored to share this story. As Gene said, there's a lot of things that don't get said on stage, and I just think this is such a great format for us to be able to share some of the stories that are part of our reality.

Okay, so I'm going to start. This is not my story, by the way. Say that real explicitly.

I work in a large multinational company. I am a typical ops engineer in one of the horizontal organizations. I've been with the company for 20-plus years, first as a contractor and then as a full-time associate.

Over the last about seven years, my company has undergone a digital transformation. It started with an Agile and DevOps journey, and I've been there with this journey from day one.

I was at the top of my game when it all started, getting all the new tools installed, rewriting and revamping our configuration management processes, training development teams, starting to use the new tools and technologies, creating online training and onboarding documentation, so on and so forth.

I was everywhere from describing branch strategies to Maven settings to CI job configuration to deployment. I worked days and nights because I loved it. I loved the energy, and I loved how I was helping every developer in the company.

I always had been in the configuration management space. I was considered a SME in that space, and almost every developer in the company knew me by my first name. I used to be at the top after every performance review.

At that time, we only had on-premise data center. There was no cloud. I had scripted every installation and configuration of those tools and trained junior team members to use them, too.

And then came the cloud. We were told to move to the cloud as fast as we can. The leadership brought in new tools, replacing the old tools. There was excitement among all the engineers. There was also the worry of a smooth transition from data-center-bound old tools to cloud-bound new tools.

There were these shiny new things that everyone wanted to get their hands on, and the company provided free training to all those who were interested. But since I was the hands-on SME of the existing tools, I was given an enormous responsibility to slowly transition out the old things. I was given the technical responsibility to burn down the ships.

I knew that once I burned the ships, I would move on to the new world and be a SME again. I was very confident about my technical skills. I'd done this before. I started working with the new team and designed migration processes, all the technical details, all the planning, timelines, training documents, so on and so forth. I successfully burned down two of the many old tools.

This part's hard. In the meantime, I had a crisis in my personal life. My wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my life suddenly turned upside down. I could not balance my personal crisis and work pressure quite well. I started taking more and more personal time off, and I slipped.

Deadlines were missed, development teams were impacted, things broke in production, and I just could not help it. I could not meet my goals and expectations. In the meantime, my leadership team changed. My new leaders managed to get backups in to keep the ball rolling.

Over the next few months, things turned worse. My wife passed away. I was completely devastated. While I was trying to get my life back together again, I missed all the training opportunities, and I fell back, almost becoming irrelevant. My performance review did not go well that year.

Since then, I had been struggling to perform well in the midst of new shiny things that have been coming down the line on almost a daily basis. Things were so bad that I was about to lose my job last year.

I realized that it was a lost game for me. First, the technology changes happened way too fast in front of my eyes. Second, I was specifically assigned work that did not deal with the new technologies. Third, I was working hard to get my life together. Getting trained on new tools and cloud technologies were not on my priority list.

At this time, I'm back on my feet as far as my personal life is concerned, but I truly lost the race. My current team has engineers who are way more savvy, driven, and motivated. I know that given time, I can retrain myself very soon, but my leadership does not think that way.

I've been offered to take another rather non-technical role within the company, and I think I will take it. That was my story. I know it could have a better ending, but I'm still here. I'm confident that I will get my chops back in the coming days. That'll be the second part of my story. Thank you.