What Working in DevOps Has Taught Me About Empathy, Focus & Resilience
When I first transitioned into a DevOps role, I thought the biggest challenges would be around tooling, mastering Terraform, getting Helm charts right, or smoothing out CI/CD flows. And yes, all of that matters. But the longer I’ve been in this space, the clearer it’s become that people, perspective, and principles are what really shape outcomes.
I’ve had the opportunity to take the lead on some tricky infrastructure problems, some outside my comfort zone at the time, like upgrading an EKS cluster in production early in my time at SciBite, or rearchitecting Keycloak to support multi-tenant login flows using the excellent keycloak-home-idp-discovery extension. In both cases, the technical challenge was significant, but it wasn’t the tooling that made the difference. It was mindset.
Empathy Over Ego
One of the most underrated DevOps skills? Being empathic. Not just toward your team, but toward the systems you work with. Recognising when someone is stuck and giving them space to explore. Asking “What’s the real blocker here?” rather than just jumping to a fix.
I’ve learned that being available, being someone your team can talk to without fear, builds momentum. I’ve also learned to ask better questions, What are we really trying to solve? What’s the worst-case scenario? What don’t we know yet? Sometimes just asking the right question is more valuable than having the right answer.
Everything Fails Eventually
I’ve been in tech a long time. One thing I know for sure: systems fail. Even with all the automation and cloud-native resilience we build in, failure is part of the game.
So I lead with this in mind: I plan, I document, I automate, and I test, but I also accept that we might get caught off guard. When that happens, I focus on staying calm, being transparent, and helping the team work through it without blame. That’s what resilience looks like: not perfection, but recovery.
Mental Models for DevOps Leadership
Over the years, I’ve picked up a few mental models that help me stay grounded — many of them from studying people like Charlie Munger. Some of my favourites:
- First principles thinking, Don’t patch symptoms, understand the core of the problem.
- Inversion, Instead of asking “How do we succeed?”, ask “How could this fail?” and guard against it.
- Effort vs. Impact, Be ruthless about where your time goes. Automate the boring stuff.
These models help me triage between urgent support issues and longer-term infrastructure goals — especially when both are important and time is tight.
Final Thoughts
Leading in DevOps isn’t about being the smartest person in the room, or knowing every edge case of Kubernetes. It’s about building systems and relationships that don’t fall apart under pressure. It’s about enabling others to learn, experiment, and succeed, and knowing that when things go sideways, you’ve built enough trust to handle it together.
We’re entering an era where AI, security, and cloud infrastructure are colliding in unpredictable ways. It’s never been more important to think clearly, plan ahead, and keep one foot grounded in empathy.
If you’re in a leadership role, formal or not, ask yourself:
Are you helping your team grow, or just solving problems for them?
Are you preparing for failure, or hoping it won’t happen?
Are you available, or just visible?
For me, these are the questions that matter most.
👋 Let’s Talk
If you’re in DevOps or platform engineering and these ideas resonate, I’d love to hear your stories. What mental models do you use? How do you balance support with delivery? Ping me on LinkedIn or drop a comment, I’m always up for a chat.