Ask HN: How to Help Inexperienced Operations Staff to Grow?
Hello HN, I am hoping some people on this fine site can share some wisdom on a problem that has recently been highlighted for me.<p>I work remotely with an operations team which is tasked with various sysadmin responsibilities.<p>Some new work has popped up that requires research of new applications and technology, prototyping, automation via Chef, and extensive documentation creation.<p>The problem the team has run into is that the operations staff aren&#x27;t very comfortable researching new technologies, writing simple code, or thoroughly documenting the steps they&#x27;ve taken during software installs.<p>Several incidents have brought this situation to the attention of management. One involved 2 people manually installing an application on a windows server, disabling most security settings on that host, then installing multiple non-standard unapproved applications that caused security audits&#x2F;approval to fail, making someone else take on the task. Another incident involved people performing manual installations of software that was supposed to be automated, and doing a sloppy job with very little relevant documentation. Another issue is that other people were receiving warning emails from a system, but because they didn&#x27;t know what that system was, they didn&#x27;t do anything about it.<p>Currently the team lead would like to try to bring these people up to a higher standard, and that is what I&#x27;m hoping people here can help with. We recognize that these are good people who just don&#x27;t have the experience and training that they need to really shine.<p>What experiences have you had with instilling professionalism into inexperienced people? How do you go about helping IT people to gain the confidence to try new things? How do you help them to really care about doing a good thorough job with attention to detail and a meticulous nature? How do you help them to feel comfortable about raising issues with unknown systems, or asking questions when they don&#x27;t understand something?