SPEAKERS

Session Name: Curse of the Unicorn

The DevOps jobs market is full of unicorn hunters: companies looking for just one or two superhero engineers that can fix everything. And we engineers often aspire to fit that profile – after all, the work pays well, it’s never dull, and it’s nice to be useful. But what happens when companies actually find these legendary people? Well, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It turns out they face the Curse of the Unicorn. In this talk, I’ll examine the various ways that achieving a DevOps unicorn dream team leads to disaster. I’ll explain how attracting unicorns leads to short term, isolated success, while silently sabotaging a company’s ability to scale. And on a more cheerful note, I’ll explain what I think you should do instead.

Speaker Bio:

Alex Cross is Group Head of DevOps at Endava. Over the last decade he has helped some of the biggest names in multiple industries adopt a DevOps approach to IT, and today he directs Endava's own DevOps-oriented delivery capability. Under the hood he's a keen cloud architect and tinkerer, and there's a Philosophy PhD in there somewhere too.