Opinion The slightest hint of butthurt colored the Linux Foundation and the latest annual edition of edX Open source job report. For the first time, pure Linux skills were not number one, slipping to second place after Kubernetes. Container cultivation has increased by 455%, but you just can’t get help.
Overcoming the soft opinion that “of course you need good Linux, whatever you do with open source” – calm down, penguins, you’ve already won this war – the real flesh of the study comes from the corporate attitude to recruitment and talent. There has never been an oversupply of good systems and developers in any major IT sector, but when you have something that grows fast and depends on new technology, the industry seems particularly bad at helping itself.
The absence of Kubernetes in the industry’s collective CV is only part of it. Talk to companies that want to play smart in the clouds, and a lack of knowledge is a pandemic. If you know how to connect AWS services or fly in the wild blue sky of Azure, you will not have a shortage of suitors. This will not change soon; yes, as advertised, you should still have these basic chops. You have to build and fix. But the cloud needs you. How do you acquire these skills?
Let’s reject some ideas. Governments often work hard with good people and without stupid funding to find ways to promote IT talent, but this rarely works, especially for this group, which believes the slogan is synonymous with strategy.
Skills training is often seen as intended for people who do not wear uniforms, and associations are expected to find workers ready for the furnace. Neither corresponds to the reality of corporate IT staff. Employers say they want talent, and employees say they want to train, but training doesn’t happen. This is a combination of the notion that if you are far from training, you are not doing the job you were hired for, and the fear that you will take the training and immediately ask for extra pay or go to a better job. Which you wouldn’t do if you really liked where you worked, but this idea can also be written in hieroglyphs in many jobs.
Even if you can get funding for training and certification or choose to pay for it yourself, it doesn’t work. We know this because there are not enough people.
And even the self-taught people who first opened the command line window at the age of five have a hard time finding the kind of cloud competencies for which the fine is being imposed.
You can and should install as many open source enterprise stacks as you want on your own systems and get to the Hello Cloud level, but while this may allow you to make your way somewhere, you don’t want to do it unless you’re angry. And there aren’t enough angry people. The complexity and scale of a suitable enterprise infrastructure is not something you can break down with a few Raspberry Pis and a gaming platform.
Let’s wave a magic wand and imagine the perfect world for generating first-class, up-to-date, cloudy top ninjas — and everyone else we need. Appropriate large-scale infrastructure, but one in which good pedagogical principles provide ways to acquire skills. One that, as it should happen in the real world, encourages collaboration and teamwork in a well-moderated environment. Somewhere the systems, components and documentation were strictly updated and easily detectable. A place that rewarded rigor but encouraged experimentation. We can also make scalable automatic adaptation to demand smart enough to recognize the quality of learners and offer the right choice for each person’s abilities and desires.
Now turn this into a system specification. Build it in the cloud – as it should be built – and design the right combination of services, applications, data flow and automation to apply it to best practice principles. Isn’t that exactly what cloud vendors are selling to all the time?
Forget about the need for a business model. This, like any education, should look like a military one – it’s worth what it costs, and you provide it for free where it’s needed. You want the poor black girl in the Soviet bloc with a Chromebook to come in if they like, as well as the crazy sons of the provinces. Of course, it needs to be properly funded, but it can all come out of the marketing budget for any cloud provider. This was one of the secrets of Xerox PARC – it was perceived as marketing, and the fact that he invented modern calculations was a wonderful advertisement.
There are various side benefits besides providing a system that could be part of many ways to train talent. Instrumented, it would provide participating companies with excellent visibility of how cloud services can be designed to interact effectively with an extremely diverse workforce. Rough work on the design and implementation of this thing will be another gold mine of practical information to improve the product, as well as impeccable internal training of staff and management. Talent discovery would be almost automatic, and coverage and PR would flow like honey.
The wild eyes among you may already think that this model can be extended beyond teaching how it works. In many ways, it has the potential to be a university built on DevOps. Education as a service. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s make this prototype, test, push and repeat in order to attract more people to the heart of the cloud, where they can do well by doing good. If humans cannot reach the cloud, the cloud must reach humans. ®
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