That’s a great question. I think it’s important to realize with technology that it’s constantly evolving. Like upskilling isn’t a choice you have to make. It’s kind of an imperative organizations must upskill, otherwise they’re getting left behind.
In terms of how Red Gate does that, I think one of the first principles we operate from is we always try and hire curious folks and and that means people who have a thirst for learning. And you might wonder, how you find such such people, right?
And you know that is hard. One of the simple filler questions we use is just to ask people, what’s the last book they read, what’s the last technology they played with? What makes them excited?
That can give you a great impression of whether someone has that curiosity and that mindset to learn and adapt. Another principle we try and put in place is before you need to, before you introduce a technology, you really need to understand the why of that technology.
You need to feel the problem that the technology is trying to solve. So for example, if you’re trying to learn Kubernetes, a container orchestration framework, and you haven’t felt the problem that Kubernetes solves, it’s going to feel like an over complicated solution to a problem you haven’t got.
The way you can create that space for people is to not run workshops treating things in the abstract is to give people a chance to play with that technology and run into those problems themselves, so they can discover those solutions and learn to put them into practice.
Some of the ways we try and do that. At Red Gate, we have this thing called 10% time, where we give up every Friday afternoon for people to embrace learning and development. And that might be through lightning talks.
It might be through trying to fix a particular customer issue in a new and novel way, or it might just be trying to get to grips with a new technology, with a toy application, a Slack bot that orders lunch for the team every Friday, something akin to that.
And the final way, I think is really important to upskill people is to expose expert thinking. And I think that that’s really key to see the decision making process in action.
And again, one of the things we’ve put in place, and it’s taken a long time to get this actually showing value, is architecture decision records.
So when we ask people to make or when people make changes to software at Red Gate, we ask them to fill in a short description of of why they’re doing it, the options they considered and why they chose the path that they chose.
I think we put this in about five years ago. Now we’ve got a library of almost 500 architecture decisions that detail why we did something, and sometimes a few years later, why we were wrong about that. And that’s brilliant.
It’s that organizational repository of knowledge that new starters can look in to understand why the decisions were made. They might be wrong. We’re still going to make wrong decisions. Everyone does, but at least you can see the thinking process underneath. Valerie Potter
