Ken Mugrage


Title: What were learning about burnout and how a DevOps culture can help

Description:

One of the most overlooked advantages of converting to a DevOps culture can be the reduction of stress. This could be due to sharing the load as a whole team, the feeling of joint ownership in solving a business problem, or many other things.

If youre asked to support somebody elses application without any insight to how it was built and what problems its trying to solve youre likely to experience more than a little stress. The same is true if youve toiled away creating the perfect application only to see it deployed in a way that makes it unable to perform.

The combination of stress and burnout is perhaps the biggest health threat in our industry. In fact, recent research has found that burnoutand the related concept of vital exhaustionincreases your risk of cardiovascular disease as much as body mass index, smoking and lipid levels. Unfortunately there are also well-known stories of burnout-related suicides in our industry, making this literally a life and death issue.

If that isnt reason enough to address the issue, we also know from the State of DevOps survey that the #1 indicator of company success is job satisfaction.

In this talk Ken will go over some of the leading research in the area of burnout. Well talk about some of the more common causes of burnout as identified by clinical research and talk about how you can learn from organizations with solid DevOps cultural practices to help alleviate them.

Speaker

Ken Mugrage

Ken Mugrage

@kmugrage

Ken Mugrage has 25 years of experience in the IT industry, spending the last 7 at ThoughtWorks. During his entire career, Ken has focused on using technology to increase business effectiveness, as opposed to using the latest cool thing. Ken has been focused on Continuous Delivery and DevOps for most of the past decade, working with organizations all over the world, ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies. He now uses this experience to teach others how to get better at building, testing and deploying software.