4 Easy Steps for Reclaiming Your Life (without quitting your job)

From Ins1ghts 2020 virtual conference. Session recording can be found here: https://resources.ns1.com/ins1ghts2020

Transcript

1. 4 Easy Steps for Reclaiming Your Life (without quitting your job) Bethany Abbott (she/her) TechOps Manager • NS1
2. YOU!
3. My Background It’s always DNS. • NS1 ◦ TechOps Manager ◦ Aug 2017 - Current ▪ First TechOps Hire • Team of 8 • Across 5 time zones • On call went from a week to one day ◦ 26+ Global Pops ◦ 600+ servers
4. • Dyn -> Oracle ◦ NOC Lead ◦ 2012- 2017 ▪ DDoS 10/21/16 My Background It’s always DNS.
5. This is Fine
6. No! This is Not Fine
7. Quick Exercise
8. Currently 56.7% of tech workers are experiencing burnout Blind, anonymous employment app
9. Burnout Who has felt it? • According to the World Health Organization, the official diagnosis for burnout includes: ◦ Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; ◦ Increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and ◦ Reduced professional efficacy • Some other startling statistics from the Institute of Stress: ◦ 25% of workers have felt like screaming or shouting because of job stress ◦ Nearly 50% of workers say they need help learning how to manage stress ◦ More than a third of workers (35%) say they feel their jobs harm their physical or emotional health
10. Four steps to building sustainable on-call processes for happier teams 1. Stop having a quarterback
11. Stop having a quarterback Word: Quarterback Train Empower Everyone can run an incident
12. Four steps to building sustainable on-call processes for happier teams 1. Stop having a quarterback 2. Build processes with other teams
13. Build Processes with other teams Customer Success Developers Incident Management Process
14. • What was customer impact? • Why did it happen? • What did we do to resolve it? • Why won't it happen again? Customer Success Questions Required for all customer impacting incidents
15. Four steps to building sustainable on-call processes for happier teams 1. Stop having a quarterback 2. Build processes with other teams 3. Actionable alerts that raise awareness without causing alert fatigue.
16. Research shows that between 72% and 99% of all clinical alarms are false which results in them being completely ignored. Nurse.org
17. Actionable alerts that raise awareness without causing alert fatigue Predictable on call schedules Easy to acknowledge Links to Runbooks Reporting
18. • Multiple ways to ack ◦ Slack channel ◦ Push notification ◦ Web ◦ SMS ◦ Call Easy to acknowledge One click ack-ing
19. • All alerts should have a runbook ◦ Rules Engine in VO ◦ Internal tools ◦ Runbook template Links to Runbooks Runbooks make on-call and onboarding easier
20. • Using Pager Tools ◦ Frequency ◦ On-call workload • Internal Audit ◦ Record actionable vs un-actionable alerts Reporting Actionable vs Un-actionable alerts Take action on this data!
21. Four steps to building sustainable on-call processes for happier teams 1. Stop having a quarterback 2. Build processes with other teams 3. Actionable alerts that raise awareness without causing alert fatigue. 4. Chaos Engineering and Wargames
22. Chaos Engineering and Wargames DDoS Yourself Incident Drills Break things on purpose!
23. Four Five steps to building sustainable on-call processes for happier teams 1. Stop having a quarterback 2. Build processes with other teams 3. Actionable alerts that raise awareness without causing alert fatigue. 4. Chaos Engineering and Wargames 5. Train for a half marathon. Teach kids to code. Live your life.
24. Live Your Life Note: Work is not a hobby • Train for a half marathon • Teach kids STEM principles • Participate to Trivia Night • Go Hiking • Ride a bike • Motorbike across the country • Binge some Netflix • Build Lego sets • Advocate for a cause
25. Five steps to building sustainable on-call processes for happier teams 1. Stop having a quarterback 2. Build processes with other teams 3. Actionable alerts that raise awareness without causing alert fatigue. 4. Chaos Engineering and Wargames 5. Train for a half marathon. Teach kids to code. Live your life.
26. Q&A Bethany Abbott TechOps Manager • NS1
27. Thank you!