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Arrested DevOps
Arrested DevOps

chatting with pauly comtois

5 november 2016
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Om avsnittet

The week the Cubs won the World Series, Pauly Comtois finally comes on the show, after Matty kept saying they should do this eventually. Pauly is the VP of DevOps at Hearst Business Media and a former VP of Operations at Chef, where Matty works now. The conversation is about driving a DevOps transformation across a company made of independent business units, and about staying an engineer while doing it. Pauly opens with the line Pauly returns to at the end: "As a great conductor, I don't know how to play every instrument, but I know how they should sound and how they should sound together."

From the F-117 to Ten Business Units

Pauly's background is varied. Pauly worked on the F-117 stealth fighter in the Air Force, then moved into telecom and satellites, did development, got roped into being a network engineer because the company didn't have one, and then moved back to development and operations. At Silverpop in Atlanta, Pauly started digging into DevOps, after some cultural and tooling transformations, and found Chef, after starting with a few other tools, some homegrown. Pauly then bumped into a Chef employee at a bar in Seattle who said they were looking for an ops leader, and moved the family to Seattle, where Pauly spent about three and a half years as VP of Operations at Chef, talking to customers at different maturity levels. Hearst Business Media has 10 business units going through transformations to agile, lean and DevOps, and they hired Pauly as VP of DevOps. Pauly tried to talk them out of the title. Pauly's job for the last two years has been building a DevOps community across ten islands that interact mainly at the senior leadership level.

Unique Snowflakes

Matty says that's common, and relates a story from a Chef customer's private community where someone asked why a person from another business unit was telling them something. Pauly says the first hurdle was building trust with each unit, since a VP title can be menacing, and the second was the belief that DevOps works everywhere else but not here because "we're a unique snowflake." Pauly's response was "you're incredibly unique, just like everybody else": where humans are involved there is a limited set of emotions, and those shape culture. Drawing a ten-circle Venn diagram showed more overlap than they expected, in language and tools if not process. The magic, Pauly says, was seeing people help each other who hadn't known each other a week earlier, including during outages, for no reward beyond paying it forward.

Matty says it's more facilitating a community than building one, since a community forms out of humans and you can stymie it but not force it. Matty shares the opposite: at a previous employer, a bank, Matty and later colleagues at Apartments.com found they had worked on the same product one floor apart, dev and ops, without ever meeting. Matty also quotes Sascha Bates that every snowflake has six sides.

Don't Make a Framework Into Dogma

Pauly agrees with Matty's "don't take a framework and make it dogma," and admits to originally going in looking for economies of scale, which was the wrong approach, so the choice of tools came off the table, since business units have the context. One level up, Pauly looked at common SDLC approaches, without change for change's sake: work that is cyclical, with a fixed start and end each year, may not need agile at all. Big bang plans like everyone being 100% agile and in the cloud by August were dropped, since it's like throwing someone in an icy pond instead of teaching them to swim. Instead they changed processes iteratively, with DevOps principles underneath, like turning up the water on the frog. Facilitation is guiding, not dictating, and some people won't come along.

Make the Easy Path the Right One

Matty tells of a sysadmin asking how to make developers follow a process, and Matty's answer was to make the right way the easiest way, which the book Switch validated. Change annoys people because learning a process isn't their job. Pauly says ops people are so mired in daily brushfires they don't do fire prevention, so you show the investment makes their life easier, and they join organically. Matty says a cultural change has users, and the UX of that change matters, so put yourself in the ops person's shoes, and that "Everything's a product."

Pauly's principle is to work with the downstream work center in mind, since every customer in the value stream matters, and if work has to be sent back that is waste, measured as percent complete and accurate. Matty says the easiest waste to hammer home is people's time, and that, as Damon said, we should just call it common sense.

Value Stream Mapping

Pauly says the value stream mapping workshops turned out to be the most powerful tool, because everyone is in the room at once. Pauly adds that most of the time what someone cares about isn't the root cause, so you dig as with five whys, since "fixing the output doesn't fix the cause": Pauly compares it to giving a cough drop to someone diagnosed with lung cancer. Pauly's example is a color the customer wanted blue that was never specified, fixed each time, while the feedback loop from product never improves. They use Little's Law for efficiency ratings, and numbers on lead time, process time and percent complete and accurate, which confirm what people already feel. Matty says decisions from the gut are reactive, like the screaming customer versus the quiet one buying less, and that data doesn't have to be numbers, and Pauly says use your gut, but don't fly at night with no lights, or stare only at instruments.

Pauly says every workshop has one person with folded arms who rolls their eyes, and "that person should have representation." Matty recalls a proof of concept where a skeptic turned out to be the biggest champion, telling stakeholders to go buy it. Pauly says being a facilitator means letting that person be heard, and that they may either join or opt out, and leaving is a fine outcome. Pauly also cautions against forcing the top engineer, the Brent, through a transformation, which hurts the organization and the person. Matty recalls Adam Jacob saying most people want to do good work and haven't had the opportunity for a long time, that some people just don't want to be on the bleeding edge, and that change agents have to think like salespeople and understand drivers, as in Adam Jacob's talk on the five love languages of DevOps and the Bill Joy episode.

Conferences and Speaking

A listener, Michael Lombardi, asks whether companies should pay employees to attend and speak at conferences. Pauly says employees should get paid T&E and not take PTO, with common sense, and got the business unit leaders to go to the DevOps Enterprise Summit, which was an aha moment for them. Pauly has stopped going to purely technical conferences where Pauly doesn't gain anything. Pauly worries paying people to speak could push an agenda, and describes a DevOps conference in New York that was a day of sales pitches. Matty says DevOpsDays are strict about vendor pitches, and tells of a manager who offered a cash bounty per talk, which only rewarded people who were already speaking. Pauly says pushing someone terrified of speaking hurts quality, and a blog post is another medium, and Matty adds a podcast. Matty warns that an engineer who speaks constantly becomes a better speaker and a less awesome engineer, unlike a full-time evangelist. Both suggest bringing back an internal blog post or brown bag, and rotating who goes so no one becomes a conference pariah.

Staying an Engineer

Matty loves seeing a big-muckety-muck VP in a customer's Slack talking about attribute precedence. Pauly loves being an engineer, and says that if the role doesn't allow building, Pauly will create an open source project. Pauly has to speak engineers' language, and when visiting a business unit and offered an office, Pauly sits in the queue with everyone else, because engineers can put on a show for a day but then start complaining across the walls, and that unvarnished view is the real world. Pauly works with CTOs, CEOs of business units and new engineers, and says the exposure is incredible.

Matty admits to over-engineering a Go application for the DevOpsDays website partly to keep chops up. Pauly says it's less about street cred, since developers will sniff out bluffing quickly, and more like speaking Spanish: saying hola gets you a torrent of Spanish, so you have to understand how it works. Pauly tells of building an elaborate Lego train and Arduino plan to wean a son off a sound machine when Pauly's wife suggested turning it down a little each night, and the domain name was already bought. Pauly points to Adam Jacob, who never stopped loving technology, as a guide.

Pauly's checkouts are the DevOps Enterprise Summit talk, which will be delivered as a story about middle managers in a transformation, and DevOpsDays Kansas City, and Pauly is starting a blog called DevOps Therapist next year.

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