Growing Serverless Talent
The renowned author Robin Sharma once said “the swiftest way to grow a company is to grow its people.” People are the most valuable commodity in every organiza‐ tion, and it’s important to nurture and care for this asset. Along with technological advancements, engineers’ growth is attributed to their soft skills, happiness, self-esteem, attitude, and belonging, among other things. Improvements, however, don’t happen overnight but are made over time with adequate support.
Growing Versus Building
Why do we talk about “growing” serverless talent? Growing is organic, whereas building is a matter of assembling and joining components. To build something, you source the parts and raw materials, employ labor, and make a blueprint or equivalent. Enterprises often apply the fast-track build principle to quickly make a product by hiring specialist consultants, doing a bit of team scaffolding, and setting it to work. Though this approach may produce the intended outcome, it doesn’t necessarily grow the skills of the engineering staff or promote a culture of togetherness and belonging. Driven by business pressure and a need for fast outcomes, leaders disregard the dis‐ tribution of knowledge from the consultants to internal engineers. This is a mistake teams make time and time again. A failure to grow the internal serverless knowledge base can be devastating for an organization in the long run, resulting in a lack of commitment and ownership of applications (or services and features).
Growing talent takes time and effort, though. If a fast-track build approach generates the expected product outcome, why endure the hardship? The answer is in the philosophy mentioned earlier: the swiftest way to grow a company is to grow its people! When there is no people growth, there is no team growth. When there is no team growth, there is no organizational growth. Needless to say, in such organizations there won’t be any serverless growth either.
So, how can you grow serverless engineers and teams in your organization? Organic growth takes time. Do you have the patience and energy to embark on a growth mission?
The Demoralizing Fast-Track Build Formula
The fast-track development mantra is common in the software industry. This approach comprises the following phases:
Hiring consultants
In the initial phase, talent acquisition teams in an organization reach out to industry experts and enter into fixed-term contracts to utilize their expertise, agreeing to pay a premium price.
Assembling a team
Forming a team in this context is mainly a matter of assembling a collection of individuals capable of performing the tasks required to develop the desired solution. Depending on the engineers’ specialist skills, they take possession of different parts of the serverless ecosystem (architecture, tooling, testing, opera‐ tions, etc.), reflecting a siloed setup within the team itself.
Developing the product(s)
The serverless development, in this setup, is based on the experiences the indi‐ vidual engineers bring in. Usually, the most aptly skilled engineer will take the lead and replicate their experience. The team’s main goal is to build the product quickly, not to lay the groundwork for future projects in the organization.
Delivering the product(s)
Deploying the products in the production environment to the satisfaction of the business stakeholders marks the completion of the work. Management will start reducing the team size at this stage to reduce costs. In the majority of cases, the operational aspects of the product will become the responsibility of internal teams.
Dispersing the team
Retaining consultants once they’ve served their core purpose is costly, so they rapidly get offboarded from the team and organization. This may happen as soon as their contracted term ends or more gradually, depending on the agreement. Once the experts are all gone, the internal engineers, who never received proper training or knowledge transfer, become the maintenance team for the product. These engineers are often the most demoralized people in an organization.
With the fast-track template now in place, enterprise teams get sucked into a spinning flywheel as a shortcut to success. The organization’s formula becomes:
Repeat [Hire, Assemble, Develop, Deliver, Disperse]
The adverse by-product of this fast-track development flywheel is disgruntled, demotivated, demoralized, and growth-deprived engineers. With no people growth, there is no team growth. With no team growth, there is no organiza‐ tional growth. This is not an environment for serverless growth either.
