Career Change Into DevOps with Michael Hedgpeth, Annie Hedgpeth, and Megan Bohl

Matty and Trevor host a show on entering DevOps after a different first career, with guest host Sonia Gupta, who spent eight years as a lawyer in Louisiana (public defender, prosecutor, assistant attorney general) before moving to Denver, attending the Turing School of Software and Design, and starting as a software developer at Ibotta. The episode was suggested by Michael Hedgpeth, who is about to lead application operations and DevOps for NCR's hospitality division. The guests are Annie Hedgpeth, a cloud automation engineer at Tenth Magnitude, and Megan Bohl, who has just finished a DevOps and continuous integration course and is job hunting.

Annie's Path

Annie has an art degree with an emphasis on film, started as a casting director, then stayed home with three boys for about ten years, blogging and running a home decorating business. Coming back in the late 30s, Annie had nothing of interest on a resume, didn't want to start at the bottom, and had lost the film network. Michael kept suggesting technology and Annie thought that was crazy, since "I have a freaking art degree, man." Then InSpec came along, which is written for non-coders and is human-readable, and Michael asked for a three-week experiment. InSpec, Annie says, "lowered the barrier to entry into technology," because writing controls to check that things are as they should be teaches IT in an inverted way, and then Chef teaches remediation.

The hardest part was belief. Annie had to get over imposter syndrome and the feeling of being the dumbest person in the room, and learned that not everybody knows everything: "It was just my own psychology, I guess." Annie's InSpec tutorials got buzz on Twitter, and Matty asked Annie onto the podcast at ChefConf 2016 about six weeks into technology, which Annie finds too cringy to relisten to. Trevor worked at Tenth Magnitude then, and that is how Annie got the job.

After the Hire

Getting the job wasn't the endgame. At a consultancy driven by utilization, Annie knew a narrow slice, cookbooks and InSpec profiles, and "I was on the bench a lot," learning on the side until a project translating ARM templates to Terraform. A colleague, Scott Nowicki, spent so many hours training Annie that Scott's own utilization took a hit that quarter, which the company treated as an investment, and Annie was much more independent afterward. Michael had warned that it takes three to six months to be effective in a new role. Annie says new people have to be scrappy and get help where they can, like the Chef community Slack. Annie adds that the scope was the surprise, since at first it was all cookbooks and InSpec, and only over two years did the context of MS SQL, PowerShell, ARM templates and Jenkins fill in.

What the First Career Brings

Sonia asks how prior careers inform the new one. Annie says casting and parenting taught reading people and empathy, "the greatest asset that I have from both of those things," while home decorating taught planning projects. Michael adds that people with art degrees had to work extremely hard to succeed, unlike the business school, and that what drew Michael to suggest technology was Annie's work ethic: "There's a lot of entitlement in IT."

Megan's Path

Megan spent 15-plus years in supply chain operations, worked as a liaison between IT and operations and loved it, but "never really felt like I was smart enough to do that kind of job," believing a computer science degree was required. After a visit where Annie talked about Ruby and Chef, and three or four conversations with Annie and Michael, Megan started self-teaching Ruby online through Udemy and Udacity. Annie then asked Megan to join the organizing board of devopsdays DFW, as sponsor liaison, which led to job interest and a scholarship from the organizers to Tech Talent South's 12-week DevOps and continuous integration course. Megan says the DevOps crowd's culture of sharing is "so open and, I don't know, inspiring," unlike the business world. Michael says "I don't think that anybody could make a career transition without a strong mentor."

Degrees, Code Schools and What Surprised Them

Trevor asks about first degrees: graphic design, marketing, English and American literature, and management information systems, and Matty's unfinished degree was in theater directing. Matty notes that privilege helped get opportunities without a degree. Megan's course was small, and Megan worked through tutorials ahead of the class with the instructor, which Michael says is the kind of person to hire from a code school. Sonia's school was a seven-month program of 60 to 70 hours a week, in four six-week modules of Ruby, Sinatra, Rails and APIs, and Sonia says the biggest takeaway over self-teaching was working in a team. The surprise at work was that "everything is brownfield," navigating code from engineers who've left, and understanding the whole workflow from mobile app through AWS and Lambda, which school doesn't cover. Annie adds that newcomers can't tell whether confusing code is elegant or just bad.

Michael says what was hard for Annie was "being comfortable with being just okay at something," since the world of technology is too large, and Matty adds that's the T-shaped idea: nobody knows everything deeply.

DevOps Native and DevOps Jumpstart

Annie coined the term DevOps native: never a sysadmin, starting in 2016 and learning only automation, configuration management and working with other teams, taught by people including Michael, Christoph Hartmann, Nathan Harvey, Dominic Richter, Trevor and Scott. Michael says job postings ask for ten years of traditional IT experience, when many of those people won't code anything, and Matty jokes "Those 10 years of experience come with 8 years of doing it wrong."

Michael and Annie describe DevOps Jumpstart (devopsjumpstart.org), which grew from the devopsdays DFW experience. It aims to sponsor people from underrepresented groups in technology with mentoring and financial help, such as childcare or scholarships, and build a repeatable pattern. Annie says the goal is life-changing for single parents or people who grew up in poverty who have the drive.

Advice

Sonia's advice: "Don't be afraid. Actually, be very afraid, but still do it." Annie recommends the book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

What is it like to change careers and get into tech later in life? Annie Hedgpeth and Megan Bohl tell their stories.

This episode also features special guest Sonia Gupta!

Referenced in this ep:

• Podcast with Annie when she was brand new
• Greater Than Code episode with Scott Hanselman
• https://www.techtalentsouth.com/
• http://devopsjumpstart.org
• Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Community & Event Stuff

If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/conf

Upcoming conferences

Open CFPs

• lots of DevOpsDays
• GopherCon: CFP closes March 15; Conference Aug 27-30.

Discount codes

• ADO2018 for 20% off lots of devopsdays, 10% off ChefConf, 5% off GopherCon.

Where We'll Be

Matt

• Time Series meetup in Denver, Feb 28
• Minneapolis DevOps Meetup, March 20