Objecting to Aristotle and Performance

As ever, any time we launch something unprecedented in our space, I am painfully reminded of the divide between the DevOps and unDevOps community and how that adds to the HumanDebt™.

The former is welcoming, fast to try and adopt, open. The latter immediately digs out the “but”s, the excuses, the risk assessments, the contrary evidence. A stark contrast between a culture of “yes and!” and one of “computer says “no”. One that’s daring and hungry for good news and one that’s ultimately unsustainable and doomed, whether they realise it or not.

In particular this week, the reactions to our newly launched Aristotle Score reflected that. The enthusiasm of the DevOps community and the obstinate -and alarmingly irrational- detraction of the unDevOps one.

I would have expected -and welcomed!- mistrust of what the score entails in our Dashboard, or how we formulated our questions to capture the four other dimensions that Google mentions and l was looking forward to dissecting every choice of words, or feature design decision -in particular so we hear if we got them wrong and rethink!- but l didn’t anticipate the pushback against the study in itself. Unbelievably, the most undebatable of studies with findings so evident that we all collectively knew where key, but never saw enunciated so clearly, manages to be controversial to some.

“But their rigour…”; “But their lack of transparency…”; “But their special circumstances…”; “But they don’t use it themselves…” were the main topics. At first glance it’s just fear-based classic HumanDebt at play where people are terminally afraid of anything new, questioning any fundamentals or threatening the status quo, but in practice their objections are bedazzling. Let's try and go over some.