A handful of the roles that we have worked on over the last year have been very similar in their requirements from a cultural and technical perspective. The common themes have been the adoption of the Spotify approach to engineering and the DevOps culture, creating loosely coupled, closely aligned squads with cross functional skill sets. Sounding too familiar?
What we have found is that the elite of Melbourne’s Infrastructure Engineers now have a delicious buffet to inspect when it comes to choosing the right career path and as the Docker ecosystem has ballooned, so has the adoption of impromptu containerization of just about anything in sight. It seems like a lot of this type of stuff is almost, soooo last year, and with this in mind, we have noticed that the very best Infrastructure Software Engineers in the business are after two things in particular.
Firstly, it’s essential that an employer has failed a lot.. although not just any mistake ridden rickshaw of a business and maybe not failed in the purest sense of the word. Joining an experienced team which would enhance and compliment an existing skill set is prerequisite and one example might be an organization that experiments as a matter of course using different tools in microservices in order to take advantage of a single point of failure. If it doesn’t work, ditch it. This production line of ideas is great for creating ‘learning opportunities’ and producing high performing ecosystems.
This ties in nicely with the second thing, which is innovation. Docker, microservices, adopting the DevOps mindset, Spotify Engineering 101 has been done (nearly) to death.. so what is next? At a certain level, we have found that what is really important to candidates is the next step in the evolution of a technical team which means that things like hackdays or innovation days and experimental environments ensure that technologists are cultivating the right career path for themselves and keeping very tightly current.
We have been extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the best individuals in the business in assembling innovative infrastructure teams over the last year which has helped us understand what technologists are looking for and also why they might choose to work at one place over another.
As we also push to keep current about some of the exciting tools being used by individuals and organisations, we’d love to hear from any awesome Engineers or if you just want to tell someone how excited you are about Kubernetes, Clocker, Compose or Machine, let’s get caffeine.
gary dot donovan at takeagile.com
