Adapt and evolve

Adapt and evolve

A couple of days ago I was on the panel for a Hangout with Mark Thiele, of Switch fame. We had an interesting and wide-ranging chat, but Mark’s answer to the last question stuck with me. The question was, what advice would he give to new graduates or in general to young people contemplating a career in IT. His answer was long and considered, but if I had to choose one word to concentrate it, the word would be adaptability.

The idea of adaptability resonates very strongly with me. In my own career, I have had various very different jobs, and I don’t expect to have the same job ten years from now. In fact, I fully expect that the job I will have ten years from now does not even exist today, at least in that form! This is the world we live in nowadays, and while IT may be at the bleeding edge of the change, it is coming to all of us. Nobody can assume that they will go to university, study a topic, and work in that narrow field from graduation to retirement. Our way of working is changing, and the pace of change is accelerating.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the stiffest resistance to these changes comes from the field most outsiders would expect to be leading the charge. Many IT people do not like the changes that are coming to the nice cozy world of the datacenter - or, well, the frosty world of the datacenter, unless the cooling system has failed…

I used to be a sysadmin, but that was more than a decade ago. The skills I had then are obsolete, and the platforms I worked on are no more. Some of the habits I formed then are still with me, but their applications have evolved over time. Since then, I’ve done tech support, both front-line and L2. I’ve done pre-sales, I’ve done training, I’ve done sales, and now I’m in marketing. Each time I changed jobs, my role changed and so did what was expected of me. This is the new normal.

In the last few years, my various roles have had one thing in common: I have been travelling around, showing IT people new technology that can make their jobs better and trying to persuade them to adopt it. My employers have always had competition, of course, but far and away the most dangerous competitor was what a previous boss used to call the Do Nothing Corporation: the status quo. People would say things like “we’re doing fine now” or “we don’t need anything new”, all while the users were beating at the doors of the datacenter with their fists in a combination of frustration and supplication.

This is not your grandfather’s IT

Every time you have to execute a task yourself, you lost. Your goal is to automate yourself out of ever having to do something manually. Your job is not to install a system or configure a device, to set up a monitor or to tail a log file; that’s not what you were hired for. Your job is to make sure that users have what they need to do their jobs, and that they can get access to it quickly and easily.

This might mean that you have to let go of doing it all yourself - and that’s fine. The WOPR was a big, impressive piece of kit, but it was a prop. If only half of “your” IT runs in your datacenter, and the rest is off in the cloud somewhere… well, as long as the users are happy and the business objectives are being met, you’re ahead of the game!

Right now there is a certain amount of disillusionment with all this cloud nonsense. According to Gartner, we’re about half-way down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the Trough of Disillusionment. The cause of much of this disillusionment is partly those inflated expectations built on some overheated rhetoric by cloud boosters, but partly the refusal to accept the changes that are needed.

This is what it looks like if you try to treat the cloud like the same old IT

Of course cloud is built on servers and hypervisors and storage arrays and routers and switches and firewalls and all the rest of it, and we forget that at our peril. What makes the cloud different, and forces a long-overdue change in how IT works, is the expectation on the part of users. People expect their IT to be instantly available, to work nicely with what they already have - and with what they will add in the future - and to make it easy to understand costs. This is where IT can add value. Provisioning a server - that’s a solved problem. That’s not even table stakes; that’s walking-into-the-casino stakes.

It’s not so bad. Join the evolution!