Harrison 
My mind does little cartwheels when I experience two independent streams of thought merging into a larger, faster stream.
I’ve been listening to Stanley McChrystal’s “Team of Teams,” which is interesting and insightful. Recently, someone forwarded a blog post by his colleague Forrest Brazeal titled “Cloud Irregularities: Creeping His IT Apocalypse.”
This combination looks delicious and nutritious.
The Teams team speaks of a global, undeniable dedication to Frederick Winslow Taylor-style efficiency. In the late 1800s, Taylor astounded the world by crushing his competitors with the speed and efficiency of mass production technology. This book makes a strong case that this doctrine is deeply ingrained in our global business culture and has permeated much of our social culture.
But this is because optimizing something to be efficient against “known risks” or “known priorities” can at the same time be flexible and adaptable to as-yet-unknown risks and priorities. I make an equally strong case that it is about choosing to distance yourself from others.
The “problem of pursuing efficiency” in career management can be summarized in one line as follows:
Activities that are performed more and more efficiently by humans will soon be handed over to machines.
At the very least, it’s ripe for transition, and in some cases even overripe (a polite way of saying “rotten”).
Autometer’s daily work is precisely that transition, the transfer of work from human hands to machine hands.
As an automation worker, the siren song of efficiency tempts you to achieve efficiency, which is the epitome of career development, not just your work product.
Forrest’s article is a comforting advice not to get stuck doing the same old things in your IT career. His suggestion is to bring in a fresh perspective and have fun learning new things. This is a great suggestion. I feel like these are also heard in the Team of Teams theme. This means that even though efficiency has a lot to do with our careers, we embrace the opposite of efficiency in managing our careers.
Let’s talk about principles that, if adopted, can help solve the automation contractor career management paradox.
principle: If creating efficiency through automation is your day job, take control of your career with efficiency’s murder victim: adaptability.
Some automata take some exception to the juxtaposition of automation and adaptability, citing self-healing automated behavior as an embodiment of adaptability. I would argue that in current implementations, most of this adaptability is still for pre-assumed risks, and the risks to any computing system are relatively small compared to open systems such as weather or carriers. That is, it is narrowly defined.
Humans have a much greater ability to adapt than computer-based automation. So it becomes even more tragic when we become efficiency machines.
This leaves us with the puzzle of how to do two almost opposite things at the same time. One way to balance this yin and yang is to implement them on different levels.
You can add adaptability in a variety of ways. Here are some:
- Change the scope or level to which adaptability applies:
- Move up or down. For example, you might learn orchestration technologies like Chef or Puppet while primarily running operating system-level scripts, or vice versa. If you’ve done a lot of traditional virtualization, add cloud skills.
- Spread laterally – If you’re strong with a particular OS or cloud platform, learn what’s available on competing platforms.
- Add work management skills.
- If you primarily contribute as an individual, consider studying and practicing team leadership.
- If you usually focus on coding (story ownership), consider taking ownership of code feedback and adoption (solution/product management) as well.
- If you have only worked under traditional project management, seek the understanding and opportunity to work under agile methodologies.
- Add technical guidance and advocacy
- If you’re focused on developing your expertise in technology, consider creating situations where you can offer that expertise to others.
- If you’ve never participated in community development before, start participating in open source.
- Cross-pollinate mental models
- Reading books about new approaches can help you come up with new ways to frame problems and provide insight into new solutions.
All of the above are examples of adding adaptability to your skill set while focusing on automation (efficiency).
Unfortunately, you can’t set up monitoring alerts if your carrier needs more adaptability. Therefore, the best approach is to continuously increase your adaptability little by little.
Just like managing your code, constantly adding adaptability to your career is much less stressful than doing extensive refactoring on a regular basis.
“Team of Teams” by Stanley McChrystal
“Cloud Irregulars: The Creeping IT Apocalypse” by Forrest Brazeal
