Day Two #DevOpsDaysNYC

When you hear someone is going to a tech conference, the last subject you assume you would end up having conversations about are your feelings.  Well a lot of day two was focused on how burnout, depression and anxiety can have an impact on you and those around you.  

John Willis, who's done some extended studies on the subject of overwork provided a wonderful discussion on the issues of getting run down and depressed in the Ops side of the tech industry.  The subject hit me pretty hard because one of my major issues in my career has been accepting my own failures as situations to learn from.  Take things to heart, cause I wear it on my sleeve.  It's even more difficult considering the DevOps community is mostly made up of introverts that have had few people to reach out to.  John's talk on suicides he's been directly impacted by on so many levels nearly brought the room entirely to tears.  Long story short, be there for people and be there for yourself.  I am learning this skill more and more.  I talked to John shortly after our discusssion and talked with my own personal issues.  You'd be shocked how a room full of mostly strangers were waiting in a queue to discuss with this man how someone out there gets what they are going through.  You can find John Willis's article on this subject at http://itrevolution.com/karojisatsu/ and on twitter at https://twitter.com/botchagalupe.  

The next conversation at DevOps days was by a friend, a person I respect (at times) and someone I talk to nearly daily.  As soon as he finished his talk, I posed a question to Justin Lintz of Chartbeat that of almost every conversation we have ever had, we never once discussed our own personal bouts with anxiety.  Justin was extremely brave and frank about his own issues and discussed how he's handled his day to day life in the world of operations with a diagnosed anxiety disorder.  His recommendations on creating ways to keep yourself calm and composed under fire was great.  Justin can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lintzston.

A really wonderful woman named Carmen that I spent a few days talking to made a great argument on why women, specifically mothers, are important to IT organizations.  She compared her own personal ways of #MomOps and how it directly was correlated to some of the #DevOps work she does.  She also did so wearing a pretty killer "At The Gates" t-shirt.  I am in full support of Metal Moms for DevOps.  Read more about her deployment of #MomOps at https://twitter.com/caelestisca. 

Later on during the OpenSpaces discussions, I came up with the topic, "How Not To Be a Jerk in Operations."  I admittedly had an extremely poor attitude in how I handled many situations in my career.  Whether it was frustration to have someone understand my point, misunderstanding others needs or simply just being in a bad mood, I was just a miserable prick.  I spent so many years finding nothing wrong with this until later in life I had a revelation, "I am getting no where in my life, my career or with the people I am having this piss poor attitude."  I told my direct manager recently about this and actually apologized.  It had less to do with the quality of my work, but the quality of my character.  I lead a discussion of nearly 15-20 other folks interested in my concept.  Essentially what I said was, the more miserable you are as a person for whatever things that are killing you inside, the less you are helping the people and systems you are responsible for.  

I am a severely depressed person with anxiety issues.  I have never been properly treated for these in my adult life, but I am getting better.  I am developing better coping skills, making personality changes and overall taking a more positive stance on things.  My personal struggles in life lead to being overly cynical in general as a person.  Most of us "SysAdmin types" tend to already have this predetermined idea by others that we are grumpy and are annoyed to help you.  Some are, but it's because they suffer from some of the anger issues that I have.  I am finding new ways to handle this kind of emotion and make it less detrimental to the work I do.  

But I am also lucky.  I have a support system.  I have people who care about me that don't always understand why I was up until 2AM because a dress was popular on a website.  But there are others out there who get it.  Create a community, go to a meetup, make a friend over IRC or twitter.  Just get involved and pay attention to each other.  Hug your friends, hug a co-worker (check with them first, duh) and remember that software and hardware are nothing without the people who build and maintain them.