SOLVING THE DEVOPS CRISIS, ONE PERSON AT A TIME, CHRISTINA BABITSKI, Develeap
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We all know how hard it is to find DevOps engineers, and creating a diverse team despite gender and ethnicity bias? Nearly impossible. At this talk we will show our tools and methods implemented in the Develeap hiring process that overcome this inherited bias. About 2 years ago we faced a crisis in our DevOps consulting company - the market demand was higher than we could supply. The traditional recruiting process depending on CV and artificial credentials was not working. So we came up with an alternative solution, and since then - we are growing exponentially and diversely. In this talk we will show the practical tools we deployed in order to increase our capacity, and we will show how these tools overcome the inherited bias in the process.
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SOLVING THE DEVOPS CRISIS, ONE PERSON AT A TIME, CHRISTINA BABITSKI, Develeap
- 1. Solving the DevOps Crisis, One Person at a Time
- 4. Chris Babitski DevOps Professional @ Head of Education
- 7. Why biased is bad now in general and specifically in business?
- 8. Statistics
- 12. Be Aware
- 13. Affirmative Action Doesn’t work “Affirmative action is a set of policies and practices within a government or an organization seeking to include groups based on their gender, ethnicity or sexual preferences in areas which they might be underrepresented such as education and employment.”
- 15. Different
- 16. Reach Out
- 17. 2. Reach Out 1.Be Aware
- 18. Our Story Problem Solvers Self Learners Team Players
- 20. 100% 60%
- 21. Ditch the CV
- 22. Interview No CV Genuinely get to know them Challenge they are not familiar with
- 25. 1. Bare Necessities 2. Ditch the CV 3. Teamwork
- 27. Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Crisis - prod server is down, specifically the one in charge of all the financial transaction, everybody running around screaming, waving their hands in the air, friendships were compromised. Nobody knew what exactly was it. Then came an awesome devops engineer and solved it in less than 10 minutes The amazing thing is they are with us for less than a month and already are showing a great promise
- How did you imagine this devops engineer looks like? Like you? Like most of your team members? Same color? Gender? Ethnicity? Sexual Orientation?
- Hi, my name is Chris Babitski I am a DevOps Professional, head of education and a consultant at Develeap And I want to talk with you today about bias and its correlation with the lack of quality DevOps engineers I would like to start with the definition of implicit bias -
- First we have implicit - it is something that we are doing unintentionally, we are not aware of it Bias - is having a preference for OR having an aversion to a person or a group of people But is it really such a bad thing to have? How come we were all born implicitly biased? Let’s look back about… 35 thousand years ago.
- This is when our brain was shaped into its modern form. The modern homo-sapien brain. At that time we were all hanging out in the wild, hunters-gatherers, high-fiving mammoths. It was fun! And deadly. So we as species needed a quick way to assess a situation before we even have time to react on a conscious level. May it be good or bad. That is why we are equipped with this great survival tool - our implicit bias. So now, if we see a large animal running towards us in the savanna - we will probably run away, making our survival chances much higher. But today, this same life saving tool is actually making our lives and especially our teams - less creative due to lack of diversity.
- For example, let’s look at a classic dungeons and dragons game. If we choose a team of 4 barbarians, it will be a very strong team, but not so intelligent. BUT if we will choose a team of a barbarian, rogue, druid and a wizard - it will be a whole other story. --- why them --- Each comes with their own unique set of skills, some are better in healing, some have more dexterity - our adventure options just got better! In this team, they all have the same title: Adventurer. But they are all with completely different origin stories and abilities. So we NEED a diverse team. And in this world of dungeons and dragons, we always tend to create the perfect diverse team. But in real life, the numbers say otherwise, let’s look at the statistics --
- Here we can see the data collected from Stack Overflow’s annual survey of 2021. This is the race and ethnicity statistics of professional developers - people in development roles. Out of nearly 56 thousand respondents - we can clearly see that the dominant race here, with more than 60% is white or european descent. [And even though they are the most popular profession in DnD, they don’t necessarily make the best team. A team made of 3 warriors could not accomplish what a team with a rogue, a wizard and a paladin could accomplish.] The same applies when looking at the gender statistics --
- The numbers speak for themselves - an unbelievable majority of men when looking at professional developers. More than 92 percent. Things get even worse when we look at engineering role statistics, divided by gender.
- This right here is from Stack Overflow’s annual survey of 2020. This one is less easier on the eyes - so please bare with me. --explain -- In the X axis, we have the number of survey respondents. On the Y axis, we have the relative participation man to woman. For example, if we look at data or business analyst, we can see that you are 10 times more likely to be a man than a woman. When looking at full stack developers - you are almost 15 times more likely to be a man - which is really close to the average that is marked with the dotted line. Now, you see that sole red dot right there at the top? THAT refers to devops specialist. If you are a devops specialist, you are 30 times more likely to be a man. That is 100% more than the average! In other words, in a team of 100 devops engineers you will have 3 women on average. For those of you with great eyesight, we also have site reliability engineers, there you are about 24 times more likely to be a man - still not so great. Folks, we have a problem. Let’s think what those numbers REALLY mean... It means that when we are looking for DevOps to join our team - our subconscious brain is going to look at candidates and prefer the ones that look like… most of our team --
- In this case - man, most likely white or from European descent. Furthermore, the majority of teammates that we already have will bring their friends - who most likely have the same background, making this majority even bigger, and our diversity problem - worse. So we have this implicit bias when it comes to hiring. Our SUBCONSCIOUS brain will do that. It will happen unintentionally. So the solution for implicit bias is first and foremost --
- BE AWARE. That is the key. Once we are aware that bias is a vital part of us human beings, we already made the first step in fighting against it on our day-to-day lives. The fact that you are sitting here, listening to a talk about bias for the past 10 minutes or so - already made an impact. And don’t worry, there are practical solutions to “debias”. But just before I will tell you all about them - I want to talk about a solution that DOESN’T work --
- Affirmative action. Affirmative action is a set of policies and practices within a government or an organization seeking to include groups based on their gender, ethnicity or sexual preferences in areas which they might be underrepresented such as education and employment. And it DOESN’T work. Studies have shown affirmative action in US colleges and universities mainly did more harm than good. In a study from 1996, titled “The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Highly Selective Institutions” [led by Dartmouth psychologist Roger Elliot] found that the most important cause for minority attrition was “relatively low preparation of minority students to science in these schools”. An article named “the sad irony of affirmative action” describes it perfectly: --
- A student who attended a school at which his math SAT score was in the top third of his class - was much more likely to follow through with an ambition to earn a degree in science or engineering, than was a student with the same score who attended a school at which that score was in the bottom third of the class. The problem for minority students was that, as a result of affirmative action, being in the top third of the class was relatively rare. So the minority students simply felt like they don’t belong or that they just weren’t good enough, and chose to leave. But the sad truth is, they were merely the victims of the same affirmative action that was supposed to help them. I want you to imagine being one of this minority. You don’t have to go far, we all had experiences in our lives in which we felt the odd ones from the group --
- When we were not a part of the collective. When you are the minority - when you are the one who is not so good at sports, ot at a certain game. Maybe you are the only one in the group who doesn’t play DnD? You will probably think twice before speaking up. Maybe you had a good idea, or maybe it was just a joke you wanted to share, but you held yourself. Why? Maybe you didn’t want to get noticed? Maybe you thought twice and then the moment just passed away? Or maybe you were scared that someone could point you out for being the odd one in the group. Now imagine that someone would have reached out to you and simply asked “Hey, how are you doing?” or “What do YOU think about it?”. How would that make you feel? Not the odd one anymore. This bring me to the first practical solution -
- REACH OUT. Any minority or even just the shy people around you - try asking them “hey, what do you think about this?” It might feel a bit forced to do so, but the other side will feel involved, appreciated and valued. And the best thing about it? You might get a whole new point of view that will help you achieve you goal in an original, creative and exciting way. In time, this single conversation can evolve to a day-to-day communication, maybe even a friendship - making this person a part of your group and a part of your life. And by doing so - chances are you will do this again, and again, and maybe someday - YOU will control the bias. So by now, we have 2 solutions that can be implemented immediately --
- Be aware and reach out. These solutions apply to all of us. And are great for our current teams, but we also need to address the root of the problem, which we believe is based in the hiring process and focus on long term solutions. So recruiters, team leaders, any of you in charge of the hiring process in your company - I am reaching out to you. I want to share with you our story and how we at develeap manage to hire - on average - a new DevOps Professional every 3 weeks.
- About 2 years ago we faced a crisis in our DevOps consulting company - the market demand was higher than we could supply. The traditional recruiting process depending on CV and artificial credentials was not working. We are a DevOps consulting company, we make DevOps consultants. So not every great DevOps engineer would necessarily be a great DevOps consultant. We are looking for very specific traits. So after realising that, we have decided to sit down and sum it up to 3 essential personality traits: Problem Solvers, Self Learners and Team Players. But how can we check if someone has those qualities? Some of those things might be written in someone’s CV, but let’s be frank - we ALL write it in our CVs. How can we check those traits in a 30 minute interview? That is how we came up with our bootcamp - we examine online about 500 applicants, interview the ones that passed our exam, at this stage we have on average 20 applicants which start an intensive 13 weeks journey. There are 2 exams and a big project along the way so at the end, we have on average between 5-8 great, refined DevOps Consultants which we KNOW they are problem solvers, self learners and team players. Furthermore, we are actually familiar with the people we are going to be working with. And because of that we now have 12% women DevOps in our company. We still wish to do better, but for now, having 300% above the global average is already something to be proud of. THAT is what works for us. Of course it is something that CANNOT be easily applied in most companies - but there are some takeaways that CAN be applied in all companies. I want to share them with you so we could all thrive in a diverse community.
- The first thing that we did was decide what are the bare necessities we need in our DevOps Consultants. And why is that important? When you look for a lot of qualifications, it makes your recruitment process complex. It is much like looking for a life partner, at first you have this long list “great cook, shares the same hobbies, likes the same sports, books etc” and at the end you wind up with “I’m ok with someone who likes to breathe”. When you sum it up to a short list of 3 must-haves you can clearly see and filter the traits that you are looking for. And no, I am not talking only about juniors, it applies to seniors also! When you are looking for seniors, do you really need someone with 6 years of experience with kubernetes? Or will 2 years suffice as long as they passed your test and you see them as problem solvers? Then THAT is what you write in your job description. The bare minimum that you need. This is a solution to a problem you might didn’t know existed --
- A finding from the Hewlett Packard internal report have shown that women will not apply for jobs unless they answer 100% of the qualifications while men will apply if they meet only 60% of the qualifications. We don’t want to miss that opportunity, it’s us who should reach out. And we can do so by writing down the bare necessities in our job postings. Now that we have great job postings, we come to the interview part. But wait -
- Before any interviews in which our bias might creep in - why not ditch the CV? Before any actual face to face interaction with our candidates, we can give them an online exam that should be done in a reasonable amount of time - no more than 3 hours. If they succeed - than we can have an indicator about their technical skills before the interview, thus eliminating the chances of prejudice from our side. If they fail - we just saved valuable time for BOTH sides. If you take the time to write a precise online exam that is tailor suited for your needs, you are saving a lot of interview and training time in the future. Continuing with our hiring process - now we can finally do the interview -
- with no CV of course. If you are hiring for seniors, than it is ok to demand prior experience but I would still recommend for the interviewers to avoid from looking in the candidate’s CV. We all know and we probably do it ourselves - CVs are artificial, and it is better to get to know someone without this prior knowledge. Simply because we will not be biased - for better or worse. And therefore, we will hire the person who is actually fit to do the job after we genuinely got to know them. In the interview itself, it is really important to understand the candidate’s way of thought and check if they truly understand the technology they are working on. And because we specifically are looking for self learners, we will give a candidate a task including a programming language or a challenge they are not familiar with. Thus, we can evaluate if they are self learners or not.
- So now we checked 2 of our 3 traits: problem solver by using the online exams and self learner by using the interview in which we check the candidates way of thought when faced upon an unfamiliar challenge. What about team player? Why do we need team players - because even if we have only 1 devops engineer, they still have to work with the whole company and be the bridge between developers and operations, that is why we are called Dev-Ops. If you are looking for team players, I wish to propose this:
- Let your final candidates work on a project together, under your supervision of course. This gives you the opportunity to see how they work in a team - how do they communicate with each other? Do they share ideas with the group? Do they help each other? And the real question you should ask yourself while evaluating them is - based on this team project, who would you like to work with? This teamwork is highly evaluated and appreciated in out bootcamp and that is how we can evaluate who is a team player. And now we checked all our boxes using these 3 methods:
- // This is the hiring process we have implemented and chose to share with our community: Figuring out the bare necessities in teammates Ditching the CV both in our pre-interview exam and during the actual interview Checking the real teamwork among the people we are considering to hire It doesn’t matter where the person you chose to hire got educacted, how many years of experience they got and from where, you know their technical skills and personality - you know who they are and how they handle the day-to-day work based on who they are as a person and not based on their age, ethnicity, gender or sexual preferences. These 3 are the takeaways for anyone in charge of the hiring process. BUT there are the things we can all implement TODAY --
- Being aware and reaching out. The most important thing that I wish for us all to take away from this is --
- Awareness awareness and some more awareness. Now that you are aware you can never be unaware again. Thank you! Any questions?