[AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations

[Simon Attwell]

Well said Mark, as usual hit the nail right on the head. Generalists are
awesome.

- Simon

On 13 May 2016 at 22:13, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org> wrote:

> On 13 May 2016, at 7:02 PM, Chad Kelly <chad at cpkws.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 5/12/2016 10:07 AM, ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net wrote:
>
> Most people are having trouble at the moment.
>
> It is an interesting time that I've spoken about at Commsday events,
> talking about the void of skills in certain areas:
>
> - Cloud specialisation and experience (AWS, Azure, Google Compute)
> - DevOps skills - Ansible, Puppet, Chef - with deployment experience
> - Network (Cisco/Juniper/etc) + Linux + NetDevOps experience
> - Anyone with actual experience on SDN
> - IoT infrastructure experience - even using the AWS/Azure tools
> - Languages like Golang
>
> But these are all different skills.
>
>
> How many skills do you have? More than one?
>
> Your not going to find an individual with skills in every single platform
> and every single operating system as they are all slightly different.
>
>
> This is a consequence of mismanagement in the IT industry. It's a growing
> problem.
>
> It is my belief that quite a lot of the specialisation that exists now is
> a dead end. We actually need generalists in a Cloudy Cloud McCloudington
> world. People who understand concepts across a broad swathe of many IT
> disciplines, and how they interrelate to each other; and with enough
> applied skill to attack any problem from that "first principles"
> understanding.
>
> Even the newer Cloud platforms such as AWS and Google Compute vary
> slightly with what they can do and how they opperate.
>
>
> They all use the same concepts. A generalist can write you an API server
> front-end which can drive the provisioning pipelines on both of them via
> the same client-facing API, and write monitoring plugins to import
> performance metrics from both of them into the same Prometheus instance.
>
> A specialist will say, "I'm really good at AWS," but doom you to
> maintaining two incompatible OAM systems if you ever decide to put some of
> your workloads in GCP.
>
> You are better off building teams and having people with specific skill
> sets working on particular projects.
>
>
> People who believed that statement in the 1990s spent tens of thousands of
> dollars on Novell or Windows for Workgroups vendor certifications, then
> went into full revolt when Windows NT came along and their "specific skill
> sets" we're suddenly obsolete.
>
> If you want to get ahead long-term in IT, be a generalist.
>
>    - mark
>
>
>
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