Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So far I haven't seen any companies replicating what Google SRE does, blindly or intentionally. Much as this article describes, organizations I've seen are just inventing a role they perceive to exist in their organization and slapping the label "SRE" upon it. Often these roles are directly contradictory to the way Google SRE works: they are just carrying pagers for products they aren't allowed to improve, they own build/test/release for some reason even though that clearly falls in the domain of the developer, SREs are setting service levels which is obviously the responsibility of product.

I think people should realize that when you go into the hiring market looking for SREs, you are about to pay more, not less, for a highly qualified software engineer who is also a systems expert. You want these people to not just operate product, but to be closely involved in architecture and development so the product turns out to be operable. Your SREs should be working in the product code on the bits that ordinary developers might overlook or not be qualified to write, because they lack expertise in system or distributed systems behavior.

What this article is calling "real world" is just an attempt to redefine the term.

An SRE with no authority to do anything is just an overpaid totally frustrated paperweight. They have to be able to change things on both sides of the 'fence' if they can only do one or the other or neither then their role is not an SRE no matter what sorts of titles you give them.

Any org I go into that says 'we want an SRE because google has one' I can not help myself I blurt out 'you are not google. what works for them will not work for you, you need to find your own way of doing this that fits your org. Trying to mimic google without the understanding of why they way they are will damage your org'

>>> An SRE with no authority to do anything is just an overpaid totally frustrated paperweight.

That matches my experience at most companies, the SRE/DevOps is just the sucker who is on call.

I think authority is a critical differentiator between the SRE described in the Google book and SRE as it’s practiced elsewhere. Google SREs can impose moratoriums on feature development or deployments if they judge that a product is becoming critically unreliable (which has a well-defined meaning based on SLO breaches). SRE teams will also sometimes “offboard” a product that is insufficiently respectful of the finite attention that an SRE team needs to spread across multiple products, returning full production control to the development team along with the pager and all responsibilities thereof.

I think one more differentiator is the dedicated position. Rotation is not SRE. It can be helpful to help people understand both sides. But just rotating your team into the role every few weeks with no real 'group in charge' just seems to make them mad.

> An SRE with no authority to do anything is just an overpaid totally frustrated paperweight

That's exactly how it is implemented in my company. We are called SREs but everything is driven my management (and by that I mean a single VP who is omnipresent).

I thought an SRE is contacted when your house burns down due to for example scaling and to improve operations where much more load/customers are expected, no? Where the house is expected to fall but where it is not allowed to happen.

No, you bring the SREs in to consult on designing a fire-resistant house before you turn a shovel. Calling them after you've already designed, built, and burned the house is likely to leave you disappointed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com