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From 2008-2018, I went all over the world handling incidents and attempting to teach companies how to do the kinds of things the author is talking about. It was multi-diciplinary and very demanding, both in terms of technical and organizational (political and communication) skills. One of the core observations I made was that few companies were willing to actually get better. Rather than figure out what skills they lacked organizationally, or how to improve their processes, or how to align their goals and teams, or any of the lessons they could have learned, it was way easier and cheaper to just keep on status quo. SRE as a practice, a position, a skill - whatever it could have been, it instead failed to really exist apart from maybe a hero here and there who chose to care about it. SLOs (or whatever name might have been used) did not exist to actually measure or inform anything. They were a kind of placebo - come up with something that looks measurable, find a way to make sure we always score well, and make sure there is a wall between these metrics and anyone's compensation / job performance. An example of this, at a very prominent health insurer. I identified issues that could have been solved for, let's say well under $10MM. Rather than do any of that work, the company threw about $50MM in new hardware at the problem. In another case, at a national name Pharma company, about every two years I went back out to do the same basic consulting engagement, because they lacked the leadership to develop the skills in house or to figure out how to align their teams with the work they actually did. Still another case (prominent bank), they had this serious problem that blocked their commercial lenders from doing their job... they finally called me in after about a year of fooling around, I got the problem fixed, rolled out a bunch of tooling and training, but I guarantee they never used any of it... again - problem outright blocked key bank personnel from doing their job and yet it took them a year to do anything about it. So... I guess what I'm saying is that yes SRE work can be fun and rewarding, but it's just not something most companies have the maturity to really do. I read the Google SRE book way back when, but I didn't find it particularly insightful. Likewise, I'm not really sure what to take away from this blog - for me, it doesn't answer any questions about a clear path forward and leads me to believe not much has changed since I left that kind of work years ago. |