When you can't see the forrest for the trees

How often do you work at a company and see only the bad? I see this a lot. In operations particularly we are dealing with so many problems that we often lose site of the awesome, cool stuff we are doing.

I was at a meet-up recently where a company was demoing some orchestration tools they had built for wrangling AWS. This was of particular interest to me because my present company has spent a lot of time doing just that. As a primary user of these tools there has been a lot of frustration. Infrastructure orchestration is complex. Any tool built will have bugs. When you are the one fighting through the bugs, you tend to have a very negative opinion of a tool set. But getting out there and seeing what others are doing can be very refreshing.

This particular tool that was being presented was very good as far as it went. But I soon realized it was doing about ten percent of what we are doing in my present company. The purpose of this short post is not to brag about what we are doing -- although it really is pretty awesome! My intent is to caution against getting bogged down by the problems.

The problems are a way of life and operations people see more of them than any other team. My advice; take a step back. Get out there on the meet-up circuit, look at what others are doing and you may well get a new perspective on how awesome your company and your team really is.

After some 30 years in the IT industry I can say with some authority that all companies have their fair share of good and bad. I can also say that the bad tends to dominate in any bar room discussion. We need to do a better job of advertising the good. The DevOps movement has helped a lot with this but we can do more.

Look for the cool in what you are doing and talk about it more. It will make you feel good and others around you.