Empathy in Tech AI Meets The Enterprise with John Willis
Sep 12, 2024
John Willis, a DevOps pioneer and infrastructure veteran, reflects on a 45-year IT journey. He explores the rise of generative AI, risks like model collapse and shadow AI, and why CIOs must own AI infrastructure. He shares governance ideas, the LARMR framework for pragmatic projects, and why empathy and listening matter when building technical teams.
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From Mainframes To Empathy Through Operations
- John Willis moved from IBM mainframe assembler work to startups and infrastructure roles over decades and found operations is the glue when code hits machines.
- He learned empathy through operations' toil between developers and ops and taught it to his children as central to human work.
Pitchforks And Bank CIOs Resisting DevOps
- John recalls early DevOps resistance from sysadmins who feared automation would 'destroy everything' and rejected Linux and infrastructure as code.
- He describes pitchfork imagery at meetups and bank CIOs insisting Linux 'will never be part of this enterprise.'
DevOps Is Rooted In Older Management Theory
- Willis traces DevOps and agile infrastructure back to Toyota, Deming, and Theory of Constraints, not as inventions but as rediscoveries of older management ideas.
- He found DevOps after attending DevOps Days and connecting with Patrick Debois, which reframed his focus from pure tech to sociotechnical design.
