Empathy Skills for DevOps By @ScriptRock | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Containers #Microservices

We think we’re doing the whole DevOps thing right — new hires can deploy on day one, Travis CI is humming along, and we own the code we ship. But then something breaks, something doesn’t go according to plan, tempers flare up, and all that warm, fuzzy collaboration seems to evaporate. What’s going on? What happened to #HugOps? A large part of software engineering doesn’t involve code at all— it’s talking and collaborating with our teammates. Soft skills are harder to measure and quantify than performance or reliability, but they’re just as important— and while we’ll readily spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on books, courses, and training to improve our software skills, companies rarely invest in creating the culture of empathy and compassion that was behind DevOps in the first place. Empathy works great…until it doesn’t. It’s easy to be compassionate and collaborative when stuff is going great and everyone’s having an easy time, but it’s stressful, high-stakes situations that show you whether you’ve actually built a culture of empathy. Let’s look at some specific strategies and tactics teams can use to improve organizational empathy.

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