DevOps And Purpose

Smart and creative employees get bored easily if they are doing something repetitive or something that’s not meaningful that doesn’t contribute to their skillset. It is this need for a strong purpose that drives many talented individuals to pick and stay in a job.

Pay a talented developer or infrastructure engineer a lot of money to do a dull job, have them flip switches or stick them into pointless meetings all day and they may stick around with you for a short time while filling their bank account, but eventually they will start to feel restless and bored and they will move to a different role that’s more exciting and you will lose them.

A smart employee understands the value of a great role, even if that role doesn’t offer pretty benefits and a lot of money. He or she knows that the value of the role you offer is not just how much you pay, or how many chocolate bars you give for free at the kitchen, it is how much it allows them to grow and achieve mastery while contributing to a worthy and interesting cause.

Skill mastery and purpose are non-tangible benefits and powerful assets your company can offer to employees. And this doesn’t necessarily have to be via training and seminars, these are great but nothing beats giving them a task where they need to use their brain juices to solve it and in the process learning something new. Smart creatives (as Google calls them) love this kind of thing.

I have met developers extremely passionate about the work they were doing, and even when the pay was mediocre and the benefits only fruit and coffee, they stayed for a lot longer they would normally would simply because there was a good purpose for them to fulfil and refine their skillset.

This seems simple enough. You have a problem that needs solving and then you hire someone who loves solving those problems. Yet many organisations will hire talented people and have them drowning in red tape or reining them in every time they have a great idea they want to try. Don’t do this if you want to keep your creative talent. Give them freedom, have them engaged and let them embark in interesting projects to help you.

If, following the vanilla example above, the job requires the engineer to flip switches all day, let that engineer automate that and give them any required freedom to perform this project.

If you have too much red tape or form filling or permissions escalation to fulfil a job, you may want to review that as well, it is the opposite of DevOps and it will frustrate your engineers, who badly want to design and create cool stuff for you.

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