The DevOps Analogy
This won’t be a long post, rather a silly little thought process that I just wanted to share with you guys! 🙂
Since working for Lloyds, I’ve taken on a large number of DevOps focused tasks & it’s been odd, when family, friends or anyone that’s not technologically literate asks me what I do, I just try to skim the surface. Even in such a scenario I tend to cause non techies to glaze over, so recently I’ve been looking for an analogy & I think I’ve found the perfect one.
Much like companies that manufacture products, they’ll hire people to come & analyse the production line, these people will often try to improve overall quality, reduce time, cost & risk, etc. Well I do that, just with software & websites.
To me, that’s essentially what comes with the DevOps role, but obviously there’s a lot more to it than just that. But keep in mind, when explaining to people that have 0 interest in technology, I mean people that may struggle to use a computer… I think it’s good enough?
I don’t quite know why, but I’ve struggled for some time to come up with an analogy whereby the likes of my father can understand. Keep in mind, my father can barely use a modern mobile phone to make phone calls, never mind to browse the web, make text messages, etc. But with the likes of my father, he has quite literally subzero interest in technology, he has no desire to learn how to interact with technology & he sure as hell has no desire to learn about how technology works. So you can probably get an idea on how mentioning words like “containerisation” may cause him to lose all interest in less than ~5 seconds. 😂
I have also explained to the likes of my father that I essentially also build websites, I’ve not mentioned what technologies I use or how I do it for obvious reasons. Again, he has subzero interest in discussing such topics which does make it that much harder to explain what I do. If you mentioned anything remotely technical, i.e. the name of a programming language, he’d probably lose all patience & interest. It can be quite amusing at times to say the least, but it’s interesting how it forces the likes of myself to think in a different light. If that doesn’t force my skills to improve, regarding the explanation of technical subjects in a non-technical manner, then I’m not sure what will? 🤔
Anyway, what do you guys think, is it a half decent analogy? Yay? Nay?
