The Ship Show #46 podcast, The Epistemology of DevOps, originally published 13 August 2014, has many takeaways, generally focusing on issues associated with organizational and process "debt" that have little to do with the technical issues generally talked about in the "DevOps" context.
Participants:
12 min:52 sec - Primary focus of the podcast starts about here
14:13 Kevin Behr makes a remark about sensing "restlessness about scaling" in the industry. This isn't directly about the organizational/process debt discussed later, but insightful since posts and tweets about scaling concerns are pervasive today and have clearly been a concern for some time.
16:53 Engineers want to know, "Is there an RFC for DevOps so I can use it like a tool?"
17:30 We don't need to standardize DevOps (so it can be productized and sold)
18:05 Developers: "If you ops people would just expose an API so we can interact with you like robots..."
18:25 DevOps is not about optimizing for developers
20:25 Culture is an abstraction we invent to represent interactions in a system
25:30 Taylor did atomistic science, focusing on the individual. Lean focuses on the system.
26:25 Science means we don't know, so we have to keep asking in a structured way. Once we know, we do engineering.
30:35 Almost no company teaches how to improve daily
37:10 The ability to transmit information among people is the limiting factor in most organizations
44:00 coal miners cross training for more productivity and safety through learning in a complex, dangerous environment
46:15 increase response repertoire
47:00 ITIL good for simple environments where things are constrained
51:00 Difficulties in creating emergent teams to deal with problems
51:40 Meetings to deal with problems diffuse responsibility and people think they provide safety
52:00 ephemeral crews to deal with dynamic capabilities; cross silos like cells with permeable walls
54:00 the pragmatic maxim
55:15 Explore it by Elisabeth Hendrickson
56:45 Heresy in Devops is ok
59:20 What's wrong with the enterprise today? Everything is a project. Actually, we're on a permanent change footing.
61:35 We're not resources, we're humans.
62:15 conversation ends