Devopsdays Chicago 2018

Trevor records live at devopsdays Chicago 2018, the fifth year for the event, with a panel of speakers, and Matty, a founding organizer of devopsdays Chicago, appears as a guest with Trevor as host. The panel is Aaron Kalin of DNSimple, who spoke on drawing parallels between DevOps and the restaurant industry, Katie Prizy, who gave a first Ignite talk on five rules for becoming a better DevOps leader, and Jeff Smith of Centro, whose Ignite was on making on-call more humane. Matty notes the show has recorded at devopsdays Chicago every year, though last year's took about six months to release. Most of the discussion comes from an open space and talk on bias and ethics.

Two Kinds of Learning in 48 Hours

Katie says the conference balanced deeply technical material with emotional conversations about bias and ethics: "I didn't know what a service mesh was until yesterday," after an open space where people explained it well, and then a session on bias where people "got really emotional."

The Bias Open Space

Katie describes the session starting with a video of a race where people step forward if they've never worried about where the next meal comes from, so that by the end some are near the finish and others are far behind through no choices of their own. The point was to look at who is around you, and to use an advantage to help people behind. Open spaces on bias are usually a self-selecting group in agreement, but this one had varied opinions. Katie describes one participant who graduated in a class where the only three people hired during the recession were women, which affected that person, and an immigrant woman of color who has had a hard time navigating life and work. Katie says the aim is to listen to voices not yet heard while bringing the perspectives together.

Jeff says the conversation followed a talk by a speaker named Sonia, who directly challenged white supremacy, and Jeff's table had an intense reaction. Jeff's observation: "people have a problem accepting a narrative that runs counter to their experience," and the challenge likely filled the open space with diverse opinions, more than the usual virtue signaling. Trevor says a similar circle at ChefConf in 2015 was mostly white men, so the change is notable.

Is Software a Profession?

Jeff says the ethics part raised whether software development should become a profession with an enforced, rigorous governing body, as systems move into safety-critical settings, such as Teslas that park themselves and may run outdated software. Katie recalls a DevOps Enterprise Summit panel with a pilot, a doctor and Gene Kim on whether engineers are responsible for how software runs in production, such as in a self-driving car, and says that without a decision "we're really just a bunch of cowboys pressing buttons and then saying, well, I didn't do it, not my fault."

Matty points out Sonia's point that a consortium publishing ethics guidance was nearly all men, with one person of color, so how can you enforce ethics from one set of experiences. Jeff says messaging matters, because someone at the table heard it as white men being incapable of being ethical, when the point was that no single group can represent the whole spectrum.

Who Uses Our Software

Trevor asks whether the discussion reached who uses the software. Aaron raises the reports about ICE using Microsoft's platform, and asks what an engineer does who learns their software is helping doctors and also enabling agents to do harm. Matty says that without governance that backs you up, quitting on ethical grounds is "a place of privilege" since you're alone when you do it, and compares it to lawyers who can be disbarred and so can refuse an unethical request from a firm. Jeff adds that much of the industry rests on questionable uses of user data, so a serious ethical conversation has to acknowledge the consequences for companies like Google and Facebook.

GDPR and Privacy

Aaron says GDPR acts as a governing body for the domain world, catching registries and registrars off guard, since transferring domains needs WHOIS information that now needs the owner's permission, and some countries and domains don't care. Jeff says GDPR is noble but technologically a nightmare, since companies use delay tactics on requests for data, and "we can't just design a rule for privacy, we have to design a system of privacy," or we end up with "a EULA 2.0." Matty says making the right thing hard means people half-ass it. Aaron says reactions to disasters tend to be poor, so voluntary action is better, citing Target's breach and Have I Been Pwned. Jeff notes people still shop at Target, and Matty calls the shrug at breaches "normalization of deviance," with Equifax as the example.

Remote Work

Aaron, who works for a fully remote company, heard in another open space about companies moving toward remote by allowing one day, then three, for people with families and long commutes. One company used software to keep everyone's webcam on, and made a reluctant person join, which Aaron says "would be terrifying." Aaron adds: "You don't want to see me at 3 in the morning."