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The cross training point is absolutely crucial. I've managed or worked on multiple Ops teams where one person was the "network expert" or the "kubernetes expert

The cross training point is absolutely crucial. I've managed or worked on multiple Ops teams where one person was the "network expert" or the "kubernetes expert" or whatever. If that person left the company for any reason, or even went on vacation, it was a disaster. People on a team can and should have their specialties but you absolutely must document and cross train so that someone can fill in when the expert is unavailable. Anything else is a horrible failure by management.

mschuster91 4y ago
> I've managed or worked on multiple Ops teams where one person was the "network expert" or the "kubernetes expert" or whatever. If that person left the company for any reason, or even went on vacation, it was a disaster. The problem is in almost all of these cases the workload doesn't match the financial capacity. Basically, there is an absurd lot of stuff you have to know for each of these fields, which is why domain experts develop in the first place - it's just too much to handle for a generalist unless you happen to run into a person on the autism spectrum with eidetic memory (these are rare and worth their weight in gold). So, assuming at least basic levels of redundancy, you'll need at least two people of each specialty (at least network, storage, virtualization/cloud, Linux, k8s, AD, macOS, Windows) in a company that has IT needs beyond "they're shuffling papers and emails". That's 16 people, but many organizations don't have enough work to justify employing that many people. Most end up with going the "hire a generalist or two and have them do everything", which can work for an incredibly long time but then it collapses in a dumpsterfire (the generalist calls it quits and no sane potential new hire wants that workload for that paycheck, the company gets hacked because the generalist only has rough concepts about client-side IT security, ...). Some end up with outsourcing their IT, either to some local company or to body farms from India. That usually has better capacity to account for vacations, sick days and whatnot, but comes at the price that you don't have someone you can call for a quick firewall change but have to wait days or weeks for the ticket to make its way around, leading to frustration and eventually attrition from the non-IT staff. And a very select few end up hiring a bunch of specialists, which produce very good quality and high amounts of internal satisfaction... but as these few companies usually do that because the CIO pushes for it, some day when the CEO wants to count beans and the CIO can't defend the effort ("preparedness paradoxon"), the department gets slashed, and they end up like the first sort.
- whitemary 4y ago
  Where do the specialists come from? University? Or do certain types of environments tend to produce them? How does that happen?
  - tristor 4y ago
    > Where do the specialists come from? They come from all different walks of life. That's part of what makes hiring specialists difficult. Specialists don't start out that way, they become that way, mostly due to intense focus on a particular area for a long period of time. Some people get that way quickly because they are pre-disposed with passion for a particular area, other people get that way due to their environment needing them to be there and sticking to it. There's consistent way, that I know of, to "create" a specialist. Probably the closest is by rote memorization and drilling from detailed and intensive instruction, which is the method militaries use to staff specialty roles, but quality and capability vary greatly. I don't necessarily classify these folks as "specialists" in the same way as someone who naturally gravitates towards a subfield.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    That depends. Some come from universities or various types of schools (coding bootcamps, certification program trainings like AWS Certified XYZ, MySQL/Oracle/... DBA, Cisco Certified, Microsoft Partner, you name it). Some drift into specialist roles from generalist jobs (with or without the employer paying for additional training) because they prove to be good enough at a topic no one else cares much about. Some get ordered into it, especially in public service/military where your choice is to obey or get the boot. Of these: - the first group tends to have the greater holistic view about their certification topic and know a ton about best practices, but lack detailed knowledge about dependencies, prerequisites and other experience you only gain during real world experimentation and work. - the second group, the ones I like most, may lack best practices, but their experience makes more than up for that - the third are one hell of an explosive mixture. Either you get a combination of the first two groups (basically, someone with tons of certificates because you're not worth anything in public service without a paper proving your worth, and a lot of experience working in constrained and otherwise troubled environments) which is the best you can get, or you get a serial bullshitter whose best experience is in kissing leadership arses (as said, all that matters in public service is the papers, not knowledge or performance).

mschuster91 4y ago

> I've managed or worked on multiple Ops teams where one person was the "network expert" or the "kubernetes expert" or whatever. If that person left the company for any reason, or even went on vacation, it was a disaster. The problem is in almost all of these cases the workload doesn't match the financial capacity. Basically, there is an absurd lot of stuff you have to know for each of these fields, which is why domain experts develop in the first place - it's just too much to handle for a generalist unless you happen to run into a person on the autism spectrum with eidetic memory (these are rare and worth their weight in gold). So, assuming at least basic levels of redundancy, you'll need at least two people of each specialty (at least network, storage, virtualization/cloud, Linux, k8s, AD, macOS, Windows) in a company that has IT needs beyond "they're shuffling papers and emails". That's 16 people, but many organizations don't have enough work to justify employing that many people. Most end up with going the "hire a generalist or two and have them do everything", which can work for an incredibly long time but then it collapses in a dumpsterfire (the generalist calls it quits and no sane potential new hire wants that workload for that paycheck, the company gets hacked because the generalist only has rough concepts about client-side IT security, ...). Some end up with outsourcing their IT, either to some local company or to body farms from India. That usually has better capacity to account for vacations, sick days and whatnot, but comes at the price that you don't have someone you can call for a quick firewall change but have to wait days or weeks for the ticket to make its way around, leading to frustration and eventually attrition from the non-IT staff. And a very select few end up hiring a bunch of specialists, which produce very good quality and high amounts of internal satisfaction... but as these few companies usually do that because the CIO pushes for it, some day when the CEO wants to count beans and the CIO can't defend the effort ("preparedness paradoxon"), the department gets slashed, and they end up like the first sort.

whitemary 4y ago
Where do the specialists come from? University? Or do certain types of environments tend to produce them? How does that happen?
- tristor 4y ago
  > Where do the specialists come from? They come from all different walks of life. That's part of what makes hiring specialists difficult. Specialists don't start out that way, they become that way, mostly due to intense focus on a particular area for a long period of time. Some people get that way quickly because they are pre-disposed with passion for a particular area, other people get that way due to their environment needing them to be there and sticking to it. There's consistent way, that I know of, to "create" a specialist. Probably the closest is by rote memorization and drilling from detailed and intensive instruction, which is the method militaries use to staff specialty roles, but quality and capability vary greatly. I don't necessarily classify these folks as "specialists" in the same way as someone who naturally gravitates towards a subfield.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  That depends. Some come from universities or various types of schools (coding bootcamps, certification program trainings like AWS Certified XYZ, MySQL/Oracle/... DBA, Cisco Certified, Microsoft Partner, you name it). Some drift into specialist roles from generalist jobs (with or without the employer paying for additional training) because they prove to be good enough at a topic no one else cares much about. Some get ordered into it, especially in public service/military where your choice is to obey or get the boot. Of these: - the first group tends to have the greater holistic view about their certification topic and know a ton about best practices, but lack detailed knowledge about dependencies, prerequisites and other experience you only gain during real world experimentation and work. - the second group, the ones I like most, may lack best practices, but their experience makes more than up for that - the third are one hell of an explosive mixture. Either you get a combination of the first two groups (basically, someone with tons of certificates because you're not worth anything in public service without a paper proving your worth, and a lot of experience working in constrained and otherwise troubled environments) which is the best you can get, or you get a serial bullshitter whose best experience is in kissing leadership arses (as said, all that matters in public service is the papers, not knowledge or performance).