"We can’t hire the right people” is the eternal complaint of CIOs everywhere. They’re beset by all this FUD’ing out about Facebook coming and disrupting the toothpaste industry, Google accidentally dis-intermediating car insurance, Elon Musk launching a bank1, or Amazon doing anything new.

I call this freaking out the “macro-economic headwinds” part of any pitch, freakout, or “TED-style” talk. The CIO’s reply is often: if only they could just hire the right people to sling the code, install Kubernetes the hard way, write good ChatGPT prompts, or whatever, they could turn those headwinds into tailwinds.

We’re trying our best, the executives clamor. But, the skills! Our people just don’t have the skills! So, like, sorry: can’t improve.

CIO goes: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is, of course, this:

And there has been this for a long time as well.

Solving the skills problem

The Skills Problem came up a lot during the VMware Explore executive summit I was at earlier this week. Instead of just being mopey about it, though, there was a lot of talk about how to solve it. Most of it sprung from the notion of: instead of focusing on hiring new people, focus on training your current staff.

Solving the "skills" problem is possible, people were saying. It just takes some planning and operating changes. One plan was very prescriptive: (1) put in place all you can eat self-directed training services like Pluralsight and O'Reilly; (2) plan out (in person) classroom-like training for new technologies and practices that you’re planning on using; and then (3) activity encouraging staff to always be learning. You can “enforce” these with annual review metrics, sure, but if you just make it part of expectations and allocate time with it, most people in IT will be happy to learn. Some enjoy stacking up certificates, which is fine if it works for you.

If "skills" means that you either (1) can't afford to hire people who have the skills in the new tools and ways of working you want to do, or, (2) that your existing people are not learning how to use new technologies, then solving #2 is likely easier and cheaper. It just has to become a high priority: training and education.

A good way to discover how high a priority "skills" is in your organization is to track how much time executives spend on planning, meeting, and budgeting on that topic. You can also track people's use of the self-directed learning platforms. As ever with management, the managers are the ones responsible for the overall system of the "organization," so if skills are a problem, that's something they have in their power to solve by changing the organization, how it works and allocates resources (time and money).

Thriving

The second related topic that I found interesting was making people happy at work, and happy with their work. Since knowledge work (most IT work) requires a lot of self-motivation to learn and adapt (see above skills problems!) and to problem-solve with open-ended, unknown problems, you need people who are in a good state of mind, not grumpy and unmotivated. As one discussion participant put it "a happy developer is a productive developer," which applies to any role, of course.

A lot of the important work in studying developer productivity over the past few years has been on this topic: how do you create the environment for thriving IT staff. There's the SPACE work from Microsoft and others, and some work from this year that I just discovered at Monktoberfest from the Developer Success Lab. A lot of this work is about metrics and measuring, but there's also a lot to learn about creating those happy employees who will then thrive.

If skills are a problem, that's great! Unlike all those macro-economic headwinds that executives have no control over, they can actually do something about that by putting in place operational changes. As ever: you just need to do it.

Wastebook

• I’m Barcelona, you can always get an Uber in five minutes if you don’t mind waiting fifteen minutes first.

• I propose we call all official conference events in the evening “soirees.”

• AV guy at #VMwareExplore “I presume this is another talk about computers? You should try doing one sometime on wildlife.”

• “an activity that is restorative, intentional, relaxing.” Here.

• Sometimes, being the person who knows how to print something out at their hotel is the most valuable thing you can do that day.

Relative to your interests

• Big Blue Can Still Catch The AI Wave If It Hurries - I am not a chip person, so I don’t understand any of this. Sounds good for IBM if they commercialize it and make some hoopla out of it?

• OpenAI introduces GPT-4 Turbo: Larger memory, lower cost, new knowledge - Updates to ChatGPT (and API updates too). A much longer memory for conversations (the “context window”) is what I care about most, that is: “The model is 2.75 times cheaper than GPT-4 and has a context window equivalent to 300 pages of text per prompt”

• Forrester has some succinct coverage of OpenAI the announcements, and, of course, some prescriptive advice.

• Gartner Says AI Ambition and AI-Ready Scenarios Must Be a Top Priority for CIOs for Next 12–24 Months - This either means people are barely starting, or that you don’t need an “AI vision statement”: “A Gartner survey in June 2023 of 606 CIOs and technology leaders found that only 9% of organizations have an AI vision statement in place, and more than one-third of respondents had no plans to create an AI vision statement.”

• The 2023 State of Kubernetes in Production - Embrace the Kontainer Khaos, just get some good management tools: “If you’re trying to standardize and have the same stack in the same environment for all your applications – that’s not realistic for today’s IT environment. It’s never been realistic,” Newman said. “The idea instead has to be how do you manage diversity, rather than how do you limit it.” // A survey on Kubernetes.

VMware Corner

I’m at VMware Explore EU this week. There’s a lot of VMware announcements. Here’s some coverage:

• VMware makes data services push with help for DBAs and devs - Soon, it’ll be a metal to UI private cloud stack.

• While it waited for Broadcom, VMware set out to do to data services what it did to storage, The Register.

• FinOps for Kubernetes in Multi-cloud, Multi-cluster Environments with Tanzu Mission Control - FinOps in VMware Tanzu land: “see the fully loaded cost of their clusters in the Tanzu Mission Control GUI. The cost will be based upon information added to Tanzu CloudHealth related to their custom pricing with AWS cloud and Azure platforms. The widget will display both single cluster costs and the total cost of a cluster group to support teams in making informed decisions for their Kubernetes environments.”

• VMware consolidates AI push at Explore in Barcelona

• VMware Explore - VMware focuses on cloud journeys and AI implementations.

Logoff

We went to a small Italian place in Barcelona called Teta de Monaja last night: it was great! I feel like a mother and son were running the place. At least, it had that vibe. And the food was tasty and affordable.