Great article. I think part of the difficultly with the word "guys" in particular is that it depends on the usage. Saying "hey guys" or "you guys" when referring to mixed company is generally interpreted as gender neutral. But talking about "ops guys" or "a guy" is definitely not gender neutral.
> As for those conversations I had at devopsdays with the folks who thought they were “just” not devops enough?<p>As a junior, my vision of devops is someone who is guarding staging and production, and release management, assuming you have a mature self-service platform for developers. As for why people feel they are not devops enough I think it is important to realize that devops is mainly a culture change (quoting from a coworker). Your devops can be your system admin. Your developers should know how to handle some operations, because they will have to work with the SRE/devops. There should be a structure, a list of runbooks and procedures in place. Automation is only a syntactic sugar of blueprints, documentations, plans (recovery, backup, SLA, etc). DevOps should be the people that say NO to developer and NO to business and NO to upper management when you know something won't go well (e.g. there is a strict release/deployment requirements). So a mature DevOps team is essentially jack-of-all-trade go-to team. You write a lot, you talk a lot, you plan a lot, you maintain a lot, and you innovate a lot (looking at the big picture). Whether you are running a startup or an enterprise, automation is the last thing on your to-do list. To claify my last point: sure you should build your VPC and security groups using cloudformation if you are on AWS. But before doing that, you obviously need to start off with a discussion.
"of whom perhaps 98% were guys"<p>In my extensive non-coastal observation of ops centers, mostly at very large companies, the male-female ratio in ops is much more "normal" than the dev group ratio (which is often all male). Then again I've never worked with anyone who would go to a ops-conference (what do you guys talk about?). This may result in some audience bias, if the audience at a con is entirely mid/upper mgmt (probably all male), or marketing people and startup founders trying to sell stuff to ops mgmt. She might be seeing a mgmt glass ceiling and thinking it has something to do with ops at the bottom of the pyramid.<p>I have observed that the more competently run the ops dept (procedures, decent mgmt, staffing by butts on seats 24x7 instead of on call) the more likely you'll see women working there. I worked at a huge telco that had an all female fiber ops center during 3rd shift some part of the week, for example. Its not too far fetched that a good indication you have professional adults running a place instead of kids, is having female ops team members. Counting them is probably not the dumbest possible metric for a quick eval of a company.
Here is a link to the actual graph she has on her blog:
<a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/" rel="nofollow">http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/</a><p>The important thing we as a community need to understand is that there are terms that can be very gender specific and at the same time being gender neutral depending on the context.
I've always been bothered by the fact that so few roles on the infrastructure/operations support side of things have an actual coherent job title. My team has developers, testers, and a business analyst. Their jobs have <i>names</i>. But my friends on the other side of the cube-farm in the rooms full of half-assembled PCs? They're all just "IT guys". They might have a proper title for their role, but nobody knows it.
It's worth noting that this article is by Bridget [<a href="http://bridgetkromhout.com" rel="nofollow">http://bridgetkromhout.com</a>], not Julia [<a href="http://jvns.ca/" rel="nofollow">http://jvns.ca/</a>].<p>Both of them are awesome. ;)
this is only going to go away if people use gender neutral terms naturally... its sad but true.<p>i've always used guys to mean 'people' because there is no natural slang alternative. i'm now rethinking this, but its hard to retrain years of doing what i thought was correct in this manner.<p>although in hindsight its so obvious i should have seen it :/<p>but at the same time nothing jumps to mind as an alternative. this is definitely problem, but i'm not sure how to actually fix it.
Anything it takes to get more women in these type of fields is a good idea, imo. There's a slight perspective difference that I find really beneficial when working with women in tech. Besides the other obvious benefits.
I was expecting something more on topic.<p>First rule of the Fight Club is:<p>> You do not talk about Fight Club<p>Kind of expected something along those lines with more emphasis on the actual DevOps instead of meta talk about community.<p>Still, interesting read.