Outch 😵

Hi,

Change hurts.

The sentence is somewhat jaded.

But it became clear to me again a few weeks ago.

Toni, an external DevOps Engineer (shoutout to you 😉), was new to the team.

On his website he writes, “As an expert in Developer Experience, my goal is to create an ecosystem for high-performance & innovatively-acting development teams.”

And he lives it. There is also more than enough to do. And we want to tackle it!

He felt that.

He started off with full motivation.

So, we sat on a Tuesday in a regular Jour Fixe meeting with the developers and the admins. It was Toni’s first time in the round.

On the agenda was our new CI/CD pipeline. We want to migrate from the existing Jenkins to GitLab. That’s Toni’s first task.

The difficult part is not to “translate” the pipelines. The work lies in the configuration of the runners and the environments to enable deployments. And that’s what he mainly focused on.

Currently, this is not the area of responsibility of the development team—which he is a part of. It’s the administration’s.

And he addresses it.

Of course.

Why not?

With a modern understanding of software development. With knowledge about the DevOps movement that has been ongoing since 2013. The problem lies exactly in this division.

It should not be the responsibility of the admins.

There should not even be a separate admin team.

And he addresses that.

Absolutely open and transparent.

Objectively—nothing to criticize.

But it suddenly changed the atmosphere in the room.

Everyone knew he was right.

But it hurt.

This change would immediately alter the working methods of everyone present.

A working method that had been established for over 10 years.

Ouch.

Change hurts.

Not because it’s wrong.

But because it creates uncertainty.

When you point out a necessary change, the recipient initially doesn’t have a complete picture.

They don’t know what will change for them.

And that’s scary.

We always first imagine the worst.

That’s why it’s so important to be clear about how, with whom, and when we talk about change.

If we really want to make an impact. If we want to effect change for the better. Then we need to serve it up in a digestible manner.

It needs to feel natural. We have to take everyone along.

And we have to shape it with those affected.

By the way, Toni noticed this too. We talked directly afterward. And we’ll definitely get there—with a little more time.

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus