How to Attract and Retain Infrastructure Talent in a Competitive Market

Gartner recently held their 2022 IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies conference in Las Vegas. Overshadowed by the numerous SASE announcements and proclamations (more on that in an upcoming blog), this was called out. The heated market for talent. Gartner analyst Jeffery Hewitt said this, “As skills for platform engineering, wireless, SASE, and many other digital-related implementations grow, so does the need for increased skills of I&O teams. Yet, there is a limited talent pool available for high-demand skills, including expertise in cloud, automation, and advanced analytics.” He went on to back it up with statistics, “64% of I&O leaders point to insufficient skills and resources as one of their greatest challenges”. For a solution, he offers this. “I&O leaders must become more sophisticated in their thinking around the value proposition of their teams. Consider tools to identify upcoming skills requirements and new training approaches to enrich the skills of existing employees, to reduce the risk of them moving to other business units or competitors,” Hewitt said.

“Let’s Get Real, Let’s Get Loud” - Jennifer Lopez

My background is in managing high-performing infrastructure teams. First in the network space and then all of the infrastructure. I can tell you, skill enrichment is a requirement for a successful team. That said, training, to be honest, is table stakes. It is something you must do. But it is not the answer to attracting and maintaining talent. It doesn’t move the needle as much as other more significant issues. Those are culture and maintaining the balance between projects that either generate revenue or reduce risk vs keeping the lights on (KTLO).

“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” - Peter Drucker

Let’s first start with culture. To be a successful leader in today’s complex infrastructure world, you must be ready to set and maintain a culture of positivity, curiosity, and most of all, mentoring. The concept of servant leadership is often used here. Defined by the founder of this movement, Robert Greenleaf, the focus is on, "Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?" The idea is to serve your employees, your team. Make them the focus. If they succeed, so do you. This is a starting point. To go further, you must also encourage curiosity and challenge the team to think of new ways to solve old problems. If you are a network person because you were trained on vendor X 5 years ago, should you continue to use their technology, or are there new alternatives? If you are a platform person, should you consider learning to script so you can automate and scale a process? The key here is to continue to question and challenge the existing status quo but do it in a way that doesn’t mandate change. Give the team room and time to come to their own conclusions. Help them to buy in on their own. Finally, instill, in your senior engineers, the value of mentoring. This is critical in your battle for talent. In 2015, we did this. I had an opening for a senior-level engineer. Rather than backfill the role, I asked for two entry-level roles. Leadership thought I was crazy. “We only hire better, more competent engineers,” they told me. I asked them to give my idea a chance. We struck gold. The two engineers I hired (they had no Enterprise IT experience) outperformed and excelled. Why? The senior engineers took them under their wing and guided them to become high performers (note – one works at AWS in cybersecurity and the other at Arista Networks as a lead automation expert).

“Always in motion is the future” - Yoda

The other side of the equation is balancing projects vs KTLO. Why is this critical? Engineers love projects and they hate KTLO work which often involves late-night patching or worse, outages. How do you do this as a leader? First, automate as much as possible. Select a tool, and a method, and train your teams on it. Even better, create a center of excellence for automation. Include all aspects of infrastructure in the team. This can be either a dedicated group or an ad-hoc team (dedicated is better). Next, be ruthless about technical debt. Catalog it. Rank it. Be visible about it with both your team and senior leadership. While you will never eliminate all your technical debt, focus on the high-risk areas or the items which will most greatly reduce your KTLO load. Lastly, this goes back to the comment regarding promoting curiosity. When you are adopting new technologies or new tools, look for solutions that reduce your management burden. Account for operational simplicity. Ask yourself and your team if this new tool will allow you to “shift left” operational work. An example from my past was implementing SDWAN (which is a subset of SASE). Previously, managing a global WAN was a challenge. Each device had to be individually programmed with complex protocols and a command line interface. The team who managed it had years and years of experience and training. From a “run” perspective, this was high value talent dedicated to KTLO. Enter SDWAN. Simplified interface, reduction of complexity, lower operating costs. Remember those two entry level network engineers I had to fight to hire? Within a month, the team of senior engineers had trained and mentored these two individuals on the technology to the point they ran all the upgrades for a European retail network rollout.

The critical question for a leader to ask is, am I helping my team if I select the legacy vendor if it maintains or increases my KTLO operational burden or should I consider alternative options which allow my team to shift left and therefore open up more cycles for project work? Remember, engineers enjoy project work. It’s challenging, and new and usually does not involve working on frustrating problems at 2 am in the morning. Additionally, leadership will always vote for more project cycles as they increase revenue or reduce the risk for the company. After all, at the end of the day, IT is there to help the company flourish, not fix poor technology solutions!!

Good luck in your journey and may you create exceptional teams with low KTLO loads!