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I was hired by a company to perform as a technical lead in DevOps/Automation, I have been asked to scale up further, for which I have asked for other devops profile to be hired to help me.

My direct boss, without any sort of technical background or idea of what I am doing, has provided me with interns and manual testers instead, his direct reports, who do not even know what version control is. I told him that I am being imposed a team and a strategy I can't agree with, I need people with a minimum experience in this field to handle growth properly.

It will end up being a disaster, and although I have voiced my opinion and disagreement and therefore I feel I am not responsible anymore for the outcome, he has unilaterally decided to continue with his idea putting me in a difficult situation... What do you suggest I do?

I do not want to sound pretentious, DevOps is a difficult field for which many skills are required, it takes years to learn it properly.

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  • Who in the company hired you, and what are their views on the direction being taken?
    – Philip Kendall
    Commented Jun 18, 2022 at 14:45
  • I explained it to him throughout the last year but he does not understand it. He just sees the results, he has no idea what it takes.
    – Esteb
    Commented Jun 18, 2022 at 15:09
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    @PhilipKendall the guy who hired me approached me the next day after the decision was made and told me to ask him directly for resoueces the next time, bypassing my boss.
    – Esteb
    Commented Jun 18, 2022 at 15:10
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    "I have been asked to scale up further" -- what does this translate to in plain English?
    – androidguy
    Commented Jun 18, 2022 at 16:29
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    As a lead, isn't part of the expectation that you take time to upskill the team, rather than just rejecting them as not good enough?
    – Fiora the Ferret
    Commented Jun 19, 2022 at 11:03

2 Answers 2

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I was hired by a company to perform as a technical lead in DevOps/Automation, I have been asked to scale up further, for which I have asked for other devops profile to be hired to help me.

My direct boss, without any sort of technical background or idea of what I am doing, has provided me with interns and manual testers instead, his direct reports, who do not even know what version control is. I told him that I am being imposed a team and a strategy I can't agree with, I need people with a minimum experience in this field to handle growth properly.

It will end up being a disaster, and although I have voiced my oppinion and disagreement and therefore I feel I am not responsible anymore for the outcome, he has unilaterally decided to continue with his idea putting me in a difficult situation... What do you suggest I do?

You have expressed your opinion to your boss. Hopefully, you have thoroughly explained why you feel a different direction is required to achieve the goals assigned to you.

Your boss has chosen not to grant your requests. Ultimately, this is your boss's decision to make.

You now have three options:

  • Try as hard as you can to achieve the assigned goals using the resources given to you. It appears that this might require some training and hand holding.
  • Go over your boss's head and ask the guy who hired you to give you more resources now (rather than "next time" as you indicated in your comment)
  • Find a new job and leave this one.

If you choose to find a new job, make sure you take time during the interview process to talk about the resources that will be available to you.

In general, we don't always get to hand pick our teams. And we often don't get all the resources (people, time, money) we would like.

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    I would generally agree with you, the main problem is that the team does not have transversal or core skills that can be of any use, I would take years to get to the point where they can contribute. I was not given years to scale up.
    – Esteb
    Commented Jun 18, 2022 at 15:12
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    I agree with the last point that we don't always get what we like, but that's probably irrelevant here. OP looks like a chef who asked for a knife but got a blender because the guy who controls kitchen supplies thinks that a knife and a blender should be equivalent, as both are things that cut other things into pieces
    – androidguy
    Commented Jun 18, 2022 at 16:37
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For the general management question you've asked in the title, the answer from @Joe Strazzere is good.

For the specific software management question underneath the general statement, you should consider whether you are being a little precious.

It's not uncommon for software technical leads with a new team to build to be given junior staff or less than full staffing. It's also common to see DevOps and QA as linked, because they are, even though constructing DevOps infrastructure requires a different skill set to manual QA.

In that case, your question is "Can I build some useful software infrastructure with a junior and reskilled team?"

In the past I have used both interns and manual testers in DevOps tooling work.

For interns, it is just the usual intern lottery, in that they can be a great help or not really a fit. Often you can get decent programmers, but they don't have the domain context, and are most useful in small structured projects where there is careful review before using anything in anger.

For manual testers, if they have been around for a while, they can have great product and domain knowledge, as well as organizational knowledge of pain points and bureaucratic blockers. I had some great team members who "got it" around devops and automation generally, but needed time to skill up on scripting and programming tasks. Manual testers who didn't get it unfortunately didn't work out for us and needed to be managed onto something else.

This was a while ago in the context of an organization where one of the continuous delivery challenges was very partial test automation across multiple development teams. You may have a different mandate and different challenges.

If you stay, consider that your manager (and larger org) probably has a problem of transitioning a number of different teams to a new way of working. One way or another that will be the terrain to deal with.

One problem, if it is just interns and manual QA conversions, is you have no ongoing team member who can be a technical backup for yourself. You could also use this as an argument for more staff. Even a new grad programmer would be useful.

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