The DevOps culture claims to be a cure-all, a cloud of magic dust for all your problems. While that isn’t exactly true, what’s the worst that could happen? When your teams intend the best but the implementation isn’t well received, how do you recover your trust and heal the harm that has happened?

The DevOps culture claims to be a cure-all, a cloud of magic dust for all your problems. While that isn’t exactly true, where do we go from there? Teams in a DevOps culture often start with the best intentions but their implementations can be received as the worst. Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation about how things can sometimes go awry, and how we can recover trust and heal the harm.

This talk offers a blameless retrospective on patterns that many may have fallen into and some may have recovered from, including:

• ivory tower isolationism
• firehose of unsolicited opinions
• prescribed edicts
• coercive testing methodology
• highly speculative development
• outsourcing emotional labor to junior engineers

Presented by a panel of engineers who have been on the frontlines of DevOps cultures and experienced many sides of these problems, we’ll consider how to re-establish the bridge while being mindful of the consequences of the power dynamics that you exist in.

Meagan Cooney is a senior engineer at Ibotta in Denver, Colorado. She enjoys reading and writing fiction and traveling.

Erin Atkinson was a senior devtools engineer at Ibotta in Denver, Colorado and