Technical adoption

Last week I gave a presentation about technical adoption, to paraphrase it differently, how do you get your peers or coworkers to adopt a solution that you designed and get them to be interested and maybe even more important, to work with it.

This is a problem that a lot of techs will face once in a while, as even when you propose the best technical solution, the people might pick a different one, bypassing all your efforts that went into it.

I always like to go the extra mile, as I love doing what I do, that means that since the start of my IT career I have implemented the needful technical solutions, facing the above problem too, but in most cases, not all, we overcame that problem.

Take for example IPv6, maybe your provider (looking at you, Odido) hasn’t implemented it yet for their customers, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important, probably there are a couple of engineers at Odido screaming to get a week of time to just implement it, and even though customer demand is there, most likely management is pushing it back, as the money is flowing in anyway.

My takeaways are:

• It is not always about the perfect technical solution;
• Talk with stakeholders when choices are made, preferably one from each aspect of the company that will be involved with the solution;
• Get out of your comfort zone, it is really easy to ride the wave, but there are people needed to step up and stand up for the crowd;
• Remember that choices you make now, can affect your company for a long time to come (and you career);
• Lookup new technologies, but don’t try them all yourselves, give each team member one and present them to each other once in a while to see if it is worth investigating further.

Another presentation I can recommend watching is the “Life long learning: dealing with change” from Bert Hubert, you can find it here, presented at NLNOG Day 2024.