 anything done. So I'm going to tell a little story here. I'll call him Business Guy Joe. Business Guy Joe and I had worked together at that point for about seven years and I knew Business Guy Joe had some you know I guess tics that would tell me when he was getting a little frustrated with me or frustrated with the conversation. He would do a few things when he was not happy you know sitting he would he would always lean forward when he was first having a conversation but when he was not happy he would start leaning backwards in the seat and he would kind of distance himself from the person that he was talking to and then if it escalated he would you know do one of these and he would lean even further back and then this is this is the best one it was the Blackberry on the table. When he was really mad he would do one of these and he would just pick it up and he would look at it and I don't think he actually ever looked at anything on there he was just almost like signaling that he was done with the conversation so he was like forget it I'm done and so I had learned to pick these tics up and know when to aggressively ask him questions or know when to pull back from the conversation. So when we injected the engineers into conversations with him basically what happened is they picked up on none of those tics and actually it escalated into like almost immediately into one of the greatest arguments of all time in my career which was the guy saying you know I'm the business person this is my product and I want this thing on the screen and I don't care about it was people talking about a text box on the screen okay just to be clear so the engineers were like what do you want in that text box is there information somewhere on a different screen that you can use or it should it be on this box because maybe you don't need to maybe it needs to be on this screen versus this screen how many characters are going to be in that text box should it be should it be a number or do you actually want to type what are your reporting plans on this text box you know you guys probably have other questions pending in your head about what am I going to do with this text box so business guy was like I don't care just don't care just give me a text box so I can type I don't care what you're gonna you know do with it after the fact just put it on the damn screen and so when he was like just do what I said you can imagine the reaction on the other side of the table which was how dare you tell me what to do with my product this is my baby this is not your job to tell me how to do it you're supposed to tell me what problem you have it I'm gonna come up with a solution that's agile and I was like whoa and so these these gaps and communication caused tremendous friction as the two years went on as you can see why I had a hellish period of my career and instead of me viewing this as a way for me to think about my career differently like I actually viewed agile as very threatening because I thought it was gonna essentially eliminate my job eventually I thought engineers would take over the world and I would need to learn how to code and oh god what am I gonna do so generally I thought there's no way that long-term project managers are gonna be needed or business analysts are gonna be needed in the role of software so I was very threatened by this but what I failed to realize was instead of viewing my changing role as a threat what I could have done is view it as an opportunity to teach the other people around me what I knew about business guide Joe and what I knew about his body language and and how to effectively communicate in a way that other people could actually hear what you were saying so the four soft skills and in case you weren't wondering I am referring to soft skills and soft skills if you would that I think you all need to be excellent at in order to self profess yourselves as quote-unquote DevOps engineers are communication collaboration the ability to resolve conflict and compromise so we're gonna talk about these in terms of actual examples so you guys can have a reference and we'll see what you guys think so so the number one communication so this is open-source land and communication isn't something that we have often time to actually be face-to-face with people but there's a lot of different forms of communication there's email IRC if you're old school there's you know forums if you so desire you know whatever you want to do there's other other types of communication instead of face-to-face the only thing that you need to know is that you need to be able to express your ideas calmly and concisely and you need to be able to read people because there is a heck of a lot of nuance in the way that people are perceiving so like I know that if I look across the room I can see who is actively paying attention and who might be coding so you guys will know also to I will also mention that when I am working with my teams I absolutely know when they're not paying attention and so I call them on it all the time so everybody's smiling because I think I caught some people coding it's okay it's okay it's fine go ahead and code just a code on project atomic so that we you know get some love so do you guys ever have that manager who might have come up to you in the past in your career and was like you know we have the most important project of all time and it is the most important thing that we will ever do and it must be done by this date anybody raise your hand anybody come on no one come on seriously and until we get to that deadline everybody is gonna work weekends yeah raise hands again no no one ever had to work weekends I have twice maybe more than twice so I've heard it too and I've actually on a frequent basis although not so much at Red Hat which is nice I've had to coach people on how to talk to their management about the idea of weekend working so this is a very very challenging thing to do right so you've got your boss and they're responsible for your performance they might be responsible for allocating your bonus they are responsible for things that are mysterious like promotion and long-term career goals and all those things that you're kind of like how did they do that so it could be quite intimidating to go up to them and say something like you know what I am not coming in on Saturday how dare you even ask right but I will say there is an acceptable way of doing this and there is an unacceptable way of doing this there is the acceptable way which I tend to tell people to do which is you know manager I have a very active social life I don't know make up an excuse I have a new child I have ailing mother whatever you want to say it could be a complete like nonsense I am a very active ballroom dancer and I have a competition coming up and my partner is depending on me whatever you want to make up right and it is very important to me to have that good work life balance so I understand that we have this commitment to work on this project and we have to be done by the state but is it perhaps possible that I might be able to work 10 hour days five days in a row instead of coming in on a Saturday and you open the communication to remind your boss that you are indeed human and whether or not you are successful in reminding your boss that you are human is a big question mark but I will say that what it does is it puts the direct emphasis and also responsibility back on your manager to remind them again that you're human and that empathy is a big part of communication so the unacceptable way to do this is to just not show up okay and the reason why I say that is because I guarantee you you have a team of people who are also going to show up on that Saturday who probably aren't as you know outspoken as you may be who are not going to say anything to their manager but who are also going to be like so if you don't show up and there is no conversation had about why you're not there they might actually not be okay with that so it's not just the conversation that you're having with your manager it's also the coworkers around you who might be perceiving your actions in a way that you really don't want them to so by show of hands how many of you think I'm an extrovert outspoken gregarious like to talk to people I'm not I'm so far from an extrovert but sometimes it actually hurts it actually hurts me to be here I'm sorry it does it actually puts me so outside of my comfort zone that but I will say that that's part of what I do for a living so I'm standing in front of you and this leads us to soft skill number two which is collaboration so you have to work together to get things done right everybody knows that and in order in order for you not to make yourself be a bottleneck essentially right so if you're the only person who knows this code or you're the only person who has to push something in production or you're the only person you become that self-professed bottleneck so that you basically you just can't you can't be that person you just can't and it's partly because you can't you cannot be the hero if you want to claim yourself as a DevOps engineer you have to work well with others and you have to share the information that you know so as a DevOps engineer it is and you can repeat after me it's no longer okay to say so and so we'll figure that out you need to actually like if somebody says I have a question you don't know the answer to that question you need to actually go out and see if you can help that person answer that question or or maybe maybe you don't have to go and find the answer for them but maybe you give them information or okay I don't really know anything about that but I think this person over here may know something so go talk to them or you know I think I saw something in the code base over here so maybe you want to check over there but it's not really like don't even talk to me that's not really a thing so going back to the conversation of extroversion I think when I was reading about this topic and just in case you guys weren't aware the software industry has moved to the idea that collaboration is the only way to get your work done anybody not aware of that because that is the case in fact I recently was talking to a bunch I have a very broad network of agile folks in the Raleigh North Carolina area that I talked to on a regular basis and I was asking them questions and about 75% of all the people who work as Agilist in the triangle area are doing some method of agile software development so they're pushing very heavily on the idea that you must work with the people around you but on the other hand I also know that the majority of everybody in this room is probably more on on the introverted side of things they're more interested in I love this little pop-up window which is this is by the way not my laptop so if there's anybody saying anything on that pop-up window it's not it's not me or if you can read check and they're saying something crazy it's him right there so in any case the majority of people are introverts and when when I am talking about software collaboration and getting together to you know talk things through I'm thinking you're probably thinking that I think this is the way software engineering should work so as I was saying earlier I don't think that collaboration always has to be face-to-face in fact I think that that's actually pretty pretty much not a thing with the majority of engineers that I've worked with in the past I consider and I frequently tell people at IRC email github checking your code go and code review all those things that you guys are doing on a regular basis is a form of collaboration and should be you know baked more do it more have more feedback do all those things because that allows you to actually work with your with your co-workers or with your open-source community you don't have to stand around a table with a tie-on laughing and yeah I think is that President Obama there in the center I don't even know it looks like him right in any case so you can use those tools like github to communicate with the people around you and get more information or share information that you might have so one of the things though is that even though I am actively pushing extroversion as a method of getting things done and I also am an introvert myself these are my tips that I use with my teams to make sure that we don't have introverts table flipping at the end of every week because they can't handle it anymore so I advocate for meetings to be grouped together all in one day so for those of you who are familiar with scrum there are these things called ceremonies in which we have all these meetings that we have to attend and everybody's like so one of the things that I learned very early on in software development is when I thought like I would look at everybody's counter and I would see well they had a meeting in the morning and I'll give them a break for an hour and then I'll schedule something after that I actually did not know that that was a bad thing to do I was I was thinking I was giving you guys a break and then we'd go back into the meeting but in reality what was happening was an hour was not enough time to dig into what you were going to do and to actually get work done so what I do now is I advocate for four hour blocks of time or if possible two days two days a week where folks have no meetings at all and I also tell people that if they're getting invited to meetings where they're not really sure what the agenda is or why they're being invited they can feel free to decline the meeting as long as if the person follows up and says why did you decline I really need you there because of these reasons you don't ignore them you actually like interact and say okay well maybe I can try to be there so like I said advocate for meetings to be grouped together and this is something that I empowering you all to do with the folks who are scheduling you for meetings advocate at least one or two days where you are meeting free and that includes that 15 minutes stand up so if you have one say can we just do one day a week or two days a week where we're not actually talking to each other and this allows you to get focused on things that you know focus to get things done and also to by the way if you are a company where you have some work from home and some in the office the work from home days are perfect day where you don't have to do any meetings and then also and the most important thing if you are from the New England area like I myself are in the United States you tend to do something where you're talking faster and faster and faster and faster and faster when you're actually having conversation with somebody the biggest thing you can do for introverts and the people who do a lot more thinking in their head and thinking with their mouths is to slow down when you're talking and pause or restate something since somebody said so I understand you said this is that correct and so I have a I have actually the last team I worked with in my IT department had three I would say moderately extroverted people and one person who was so introverted that I could barely get him to talk sometimes and so what would happen in the situation is my three extroverts would be like nine miles down the road talking about all these things and there was all these decisions that they made before they had reached that point down the road and the introvert was standing over here going I'm still thinking about this decision you made over here and I read like 18 different things and I also looked at the code while you guys were talking and I think maybe this decision was wrong and so can we talk about it again and all the decisions that they had made before this decision predicated on the fact that this decision was correct and so as you can imagine this created a lot of conflict so the way that we resolved it as a team as we slowed down we restated things we took breaks in meetings so that we could think a little bit more so do yourself a favor and do that for other people in the room so doing these things can hopefully reduce the pressure on everybody who feels very put out because they're introverts and they're being asked to be extroverts at work so soft skill number three the ability to resolve conflict so let's face it change is really scary so I don't know if you guys have ever had to do something where somebody has asked you to not use a tool or not do a thing or look at a different programming language or do agile software development and you've never done it before and you're thinking gosh do I really want to learn something new I kind of have been doing this for X million years I went when my director said agile software development like said I was really threatened and it was very very scary for me to think about how how that was going to change what my job was and I would have to learn all those things so you need to understand that and you also need to understand that people's reactions to that change are going to be extreme so if you can manage your reaction to their reaction you'll be better off for it so I was sitting in a room a couple years ago and I'm gonna tell the story really class quick the engineers were arguing about whether they were gonna use puppet or ansible anybody been there puppet answer bowl of chef yeah and they're having a very civil conversation initially but then a third engineer joined the conversation and escalated very quickly and I was sitting over going I don't really know what you guys are talking about right now I mean I know I knew what they were talking about but I was like I don't really care what you're talking about but then they turned to me and said well what do you think and I was like both tools like all tools have frozen cons and I really like what is better for you guys like what do you actually want to use you're the experts please just tell me and they continue to argue about it and they continue to demand my opinion and I was like well I guess I can you know pick a name out of a hat and that's how we'll select the tool that will be everything that we do in IT for the next eight years but I didn't feel comfortable for that so I had a sitting there and I actually lost my temper with them I said oh gosh could be just stop talking about this topic because it it went on for weeks it wasn't just like an hour meeting guys and so had this shining moment of realization where I just didn't care anymore and so why would I say this to a bunch of technical people at a tech conference and so here is the single most important thing here is know your audience if you are ranting about a tech thing to a business person or you're ranting about a tech person to somebody like my husband rants about storage stuff all the time so they were trying to convince me about this and I just I really I really did not I did not care so the way I de-escalated the situation is I stepped back from them and I said hey guys okay time out let's make a list of all the pros and cons on the whiteboard and I made them do all the pros and cons on the whiteboard and we talked through them I restated their opinions I tried to interject and the voices started escalating and I did one thing it which is another most important tip when I was restating opinions I restated them wrong so that might kind of blow your mind but I just kind of tweaked it a little bit and added something in there that I knew was not quite accurate but what that did was it got that the brain I know you guys are like oh my god you did that what do you mean but what I what I mean is I said you know chef is this and I think it can do this and they're like oh no no no no no no let me explain it to you it actually does this and this is this and this is this and this is this and what that actually did for everybody in the room is it kind of brought it brought the like tension from here down to here because they they had to restate calmer so that I would understand so it is a it is a technique that you could choose to employ if you feel comfortable enough about your confidence level about what you know about technology I really am okay confidence wise to state something wrong and and I'm okay with it if somebody thinks I'm dumb because I stated wrong because I'm getting what I want out of a conversation so by the way does anybody want to know what what my opinion is now after you know saying I don't care about chef Ansible or puppet at tech conferences because I'll tell you you guys will probably corner me in the hallway and tell me why chef is better than Ansible right so this is now my opinion oh I deleted no here that's my opinion I still don't care so let me tell you how you can sway excuse me let me tell you how you can actually change people's opinions so how to convince others that your opinion is right this is my magic sauce stop so if somebody is arguing with you and you're compelled to argue back with them the best thing you could do is just stop that's the age old count to a hundred thing right then listen to what they're saying and I don't mean I'll listen I mean to listen to what they're saying ask them questions say okay I heard you say this is that what you meant and give them a chance to restate or re-clarify or add more information to what it is that they're trying to say and so here is the most important part about asking questions you may actually get them to think about what it is that they're saying by restating like they might say something like well I was thinking could do this the oh wait a minute I think I'm actually gonna get stuck here so maybe we need to do it this way and they may actually talk themselves into what you were going to argue with them about to begin with by just letting them restate it out loud a second time you know slow down let them think it through sometimes people talk with their mouths and they're thinking with their mouths and then to by listening to their answers maybe they'll have the ability to change the way that you're perceiving the technology to be so like I said ask questions and really listen and then finally compromise so you cannot have things your way all the time and you must learn to choose when your battles are to be fought versus when they're not to be fought so you must learn to compromise and you also need to know when to let go so my girlfriend wanted a cat but I didn't want a cat so we compromised and we got a cat yeah so you're not going to be able to you know change everybody's mind all the time and you basically need to be okay with that and please don't argue until you are mortal enemies because that is not going to help you out at all and this is my final point of wisdom you don't need to attend every argument that you're invited to I frequently get inflammatory emails all the time from people or hallway conversations or IRC like this is not this is stupid we're not going to do that I choose not to answer a lot of it because to me answering it incites the ability or insights that opens the debate and just by not saying anything doesn't mean that I actually agree with that person it just means that I haven't answered yet so if you've ever gotten that thing where you've sent an email and about like a month later they've responded to you with the information that you're waiting for I view that as a method of conflict resolution because eventually that person will either they either really need to have me know their opinion so they'll find me and they'll probably want to have a face-to-face conversation with me which I think is so much better than email or they'll call me on the phone or whatever but if they really really passionate about what they're saying and they really want to change my mind they will follow up so I wait for them to come to me so if you are ever in a situation where you are sitting down to write a very inflammatory IRC message or I'm going to tell somebody you know you suck because your code sucks and all the stuff what what I am going to tell you is that it is it is not okay to do that the best thing that you have in your arsenal of tools as engineers is the ability to disconnect from your keyboard and the ability to step away from what it is that you are in the moment doing so just disconnect take a break we'll get coffee we'll get water whatever and then come back and then respond or wait wait a night waiting a night typically works for me or I write the email I want to write and then I step away from my computer and then a couple hours later I come back and I go oh my god if I sent that I'd be a real jerk so that's another tip so as long as you commit to trying to practice all these ideas I think that you could as an individual get to where you need to be in terms of human occasion so here is homework so these are the things you need to practice expressing your opinions concisely and calmly pay attention to body language collaboration doesn't always have to be face-to-face so use all the tools in your arsenal you don't have to be right every time and most importantly don't attend every argument that you're invited to so this is the point in the man pages where we show examples so I'm going to encourage you all to tell me a situation that you have experienced in the past where you have been in a bad situation and you probably have not responded well and we'll talk about what you could have done better anybody and I am handing out these glorious to find the future 2016 and devconf scarves as and I for those of you who came in late they're very warm yeah we're gonna pass the mic to the one guy or one brave enough to share anybody so hi I'm the ops engineer so and I don't have the situation you wanted to me but I have a question for you sure I was in this situation not a long not a long ago that's I had to point some design flaws in some application and I had to tell it to the architect so I told him that there are some flaws and so on they were like quite thoughtful her flaws so the application would do some bad things so and he was like okay whatever so he I gathered some evidence and then came another time to him and so on and show him that yes this is a big problem he was like okay we have to change it and so I had the solution already whatever but from that point on he just doesn't like me how can I handle this because then it's he told my manager that I have bad soft skills and stuff and so on so now I was calm when I told him that there was flaws and so on but he doesn't like me now so right now the situation between me and him is like quite not very good yeah I understand that I actually had a similar situation when I was much younger one of the managers that I indirectly reported to wasn't okay with and in fact really was very related to the proposal that I had written that I referred to earlier wasn't really okay with the idea that I was trying to change things and it caused a situation in which I had to actually like go to lunch with HR and the manager and have a how can we resolve this conflict meeting anybody anybody have this situation yeah yeah right so I would say that if it ever escalates to that point it's gonna be it's gonna be really hard to recover from that socially just because you have a lot of like negative feelings built up I will also say something that my husband told me like I think I was like maybe 20 you really will never be able to change somebody else you can only change how you yourself react to what somebody is doing so while while I would love to tell you all the ways to get this person to be your friend again the reality is is that I mean like you can take him out for a beer you can take you know you can do all these different things and I would I would advocate that you try right I wouldn't give up but I don't I think the only thing I can tell you is to make your life better is to think about how you're responding to the way that he treats you and try to try to not take it so personally you probably hurt his feelings because he didn't think of it right and and so and that's not necessary I mean I'm also not telling you not to tell people when you found something that's technically wrong that's not it at all in fact you need to be able to be okay with that but if if the guy you're referring to was sitting here saying well I have this engineer tell me like something was wrong I would say again you really have to figure out how you're going to respond when people come to you with these things and decide how you yourself are going to react to it I just I don't know what to tell you other than that yeah yeah and we are unfortunately we're out of time no yeah I'm sorry too so thank you Jen thank you thank you I'm asking questions in the hallway and I'll pass these out