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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

Isn't there always a fundamental tension like this between people who build and people who maintain?

As a person who builds, I am awfully grateful for the people who maintain, as my stuff would never work without them.

I think devs should be responsible for maintaining what they build. You get your incentives aligned better that way, and it removes the tension.

This is actually covered pretty well (imho) in Chapter 32. Many services start out wholly supported by their developers, and are only onboarded to SRE after they reach a certain level of maturity (and/or criticality to the business)

Even after SRE takes over operations of a service, developers remain closely involved, and in many cases have their own pager rotation for "something's really broken, SRE has stopped the user-visible bleeding, but we need a code owner to jump in and help solve the root issue."

Well, I haven't read the book yet, but the commentary seems to suggest the SRE's role is more to teach the devs how to make their software maintainable, scalable and reliable, and then verify it really meets all of those traits.

As a developer, that is a service I greatly value, and greatly respect those who have that knowledge and experience.

This essay talks about the difference between thinkers, doers and janitors.

http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/03/16/engineers...

In it the difference is erased and people are reorganized in a, I think, more productive way.

Never understood why that should be separate people.

Actually, dont understand how it could be separate people either.

That's a relatively new concept. Traditional developers didn't understand much about systems design for scalability, redundancy and much less about operational discipline and systems change management (and in my experience many developers still don't).

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