Dawn van Hoegaerden and Jorn Knuttila

Dawn van Hoegaerden: This is our title slide, but we had some DJ talks, we had some DevOps stuff, so it actually segued very nicely into what we're going to talk about today.

Jorn Knuttila: Total accident.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Which is, everybody's a DJ. So I'm Dawn.

Jorn Knuttila: I'm Jorn.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: I've been in marketing 20 years, so there probably maybe are not a lot of marketing people out here. Jorn's been a solutions architect, solutions engineer for more than 20 years. So we feel like we know of what we speak, and yet everyone thinks that they can do marketing because it's not technical. They had a lemonade stand when they were five. They did-

Jorn Knuttila: Saw an ad on TV once, right? That was a cool commercial.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Yeah. They maybe did the flyer for the prom, and what do they do anyway? They throw parties, right? Isn't that what they do?

Jorn Knuttila: Oh, they have a lot of Twitter followers. That makes them a genius.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: We're just super fun people that bounce around the office and spend money. So everyone's a marketing genius. So Jorn and I were talking one day, and Jorn actually was a DJ.

Jorn Knuttila: Professionally.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: And I said, "I know how you feel," because everybody thinks they're a DJ because they have music on their phones, or their iPods, or some damn cassette in their car that they were just rocking out to.

Jorn Knuttila: You have no idea how often that crap happens, and they want you to come in and play something because everybody knows how to do your job, right? It's kind of like being an armchair quarterback.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Quarterback, yeah. Right? Does this audience understand that? No? It's a football reference.

Jorn Knuttila: No?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: No? Okay.

Jorn Knuttila: Not that football.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Not what we call soccer, but that-

Jorn Knuttila: It's football.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Jesus loves... No, he doesn't. So fun fact, I was a football manager in college, and I can't tell you how many times after games people came up to me like, "Gosh, if Brian had only thrown that pass in the third quarter and completed that, we would've had a better game." Not necessarily. You've never played. You don't know what you're talking about.

Jorn Knuttila: And the tool doesn't make the maker, right? A lot of times, and we see this in this industry, it's like we're walking up and down the aisle of the hardware store going shopping for tools to see what that purpose is. And so when they go out looking for problems, and if I asked you, "Dawn, could I hit this nail with that wrench?" You'd say-

Dawn van Hoegaerden: "Sure, dummy."

Jorn Knuttila: And then I come back to you and say, "Your wrench sucks. It's really crap at pounding nails. Why did you say yes? It's the wrench's fault." Is it?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: It is the wrench's fault, but like our friend Paris, you can have the tools and not do the job, because she has no idea that none of that equipment is actually turned on.

Jorn Knuttila: True story.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: But she's got the fist pump. She's there. She thinks she's rocking out the party. So the tools don't make you, right?

Jorn Knuttila: Right. And you say, "Okay, that was fun, guys, but what does this have to do with DevOps?" Well, once upon a time, many of you lived in silos. You were very happy. You never communicated with the other people except through tickets.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: It was very enjoyable.

Jorn Knuttila: Life was good. And then someone said, "Let's do DevOps. Let's all be friends." Yeah, but then we came in and everybody said, "Well, everybody needs to learn to code." Right? So everybody with operational experience, everybody with this experience and that experience got flattened out, and this bad message came back to say, "We all need to learn to code or be flat organizations," which is wrong.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Right. And then you have this guy, right? Who wants this guy to be your wedding party DJ? He's got the tools. They said, "Hey, Billy, you have a record player" -- dating myself -- "but you can DJ our party." But not everyone should be a DJ or learn to code.

Jorn Knuttila: Right. And so we're coming around to a point, and the point is maybe not everybody needs to learn code, and maybe not everybody needs to be exactly the same person.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Right. Let's celebrate our differences. Learn to be different. Remember, you're all individuals. You're all unique. You all have special skills.

Jorn Knuttila: And you can think for yourselves.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: You do. You really, really do. So... And some of us are good at some things, but not all of us are good at everything.

Jorn Knuttila: Not all of us are good at everything.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: You wouldn't want me to run your CI/CD pipeline, but you would want Jorn to DJ your party.

Jorn Knuttila: I'm retired.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: And you would want Josh Atwell, who was just up here, to DJ your party because he actually has great taste in music. So where are we going? Subject matter expertise. Instead of flattening our organization, let's celebrate our subject matter expertise. Let's celebrate who we are as individuals-

Jorn Knuttila: Right.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: -come together, and put that subject matter expertise into one spot.

Jorn Knuttila: Into one. You know the analogy of a Trapper Keeper. I put a cat GIF in here, not because we all do them, but Dawn hates cats.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Because I hate cats, and we're friends with VictorOps, and they have a cute cat.

Jorn Knuttila: Right. But we had a webinar a few months ago, Gene did, and we talked about self-service and how it's much better to let people be themselves, share their subject matter expertise across the organization, rather than living in their silos and not sharing or being forced to be someone that they're not.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: So put your smarts into one spot, learn from each other, celebrate your differences, pile all those differences together, and wind up using something that, well, it's called self-service. So I can take your smarts, use them over here, you can take my smarts, move them over there, and everybody's happy. Celebrate diversity. So it really makes DevOps work better. So the lesson is be yourself.