Comment by donavanm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donavanm | Hacker News Reader

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> the SRE org is unilaterally able to stop supporting the product/implement a production freeze

Who exactly does this. And by what mechanism do you enforce:

> take the ability to deploy out of the product org's hands

If it is not "incentives and top down buy in" from above/at both orgs, what is it? Are you literally proposing some reality where VP Alice nonconsensually tells peer VP Bob "you're missing your roadmap ship dates. Im taking away your orgs prod creds because your lines arent up and to the right enough?" Because when there's a conflict between the two it's either going to get resolved by negotiation and common understanding, at and above Alice & Bob, or Bob is going to tell Alice to stay in her lane and get bent.

Edit: For the above, Im interested in the medium/long term. Yes, if you have hived off deployment gates to a different team I believe the could tactically say "no" once. I do not believe they could maintain that position.

Unilateral actions only work when the power dynamics support the person taking action. And those power dynamics are roughly more senior management, broad cultural consensus, and revenue, in my experience. So I'm really curious what enables the dedicated SRE orgs unilateral force of action if its not incentives & top down buy in.

This isn't hypothetical to me. Im a principal systems engineer at AWS who spent years reporting directly to a VP with a billion dollar business, and now work on operations & incident management in the same VPs now larger org running multiple billion dollar businesses. I was there when a billion dollar business took a year off the feature roadmap to focus on availability & performance. No one "told" us to do that, but it was supported as the best thing for the business. I've also stopped working on teams when they weren't making progress with operational investments.

> Who exactly does this. And by what mechanism do you enforce:

That's one of the key pieces of what makes SRE "SRE" as opposed to an ops team. They are given the power to stop deployment. If they can't, they're not SREs.

> Are you literally proposing some reality where VP Alice nonconsensually tells peer VP Bob "you're missing your roadmap ship dates. Im taking away your orgs prod creds because your lines arent up and to the right enough?"

Yes, and no. No because "roadmap ship dates" aren't reliability. I'm describing a reality where VP Alice nonconsentually tells VP Bob "you've had three outages in the past three weeks, we're out of SLO and so you no longer get to deploy new versions until we have remediations in place to prevent future outages". (and of course they both agreed to this)

Of course, Bob, being a rational human probably starts taking actions after the first outage, and so it never gets to this point, but yes, that Alice can tell Bob "no more deployments" is literally the point.

> They are given the power to stop deployment. If they can't, they're not SREs

Google is the only place where this is even discussed. I cannot name any other company that does this. Not Apple, Meta's Production Engineers, Netflix, Amazon's SysDevEngs, Stripe SRE, Uber, Pinterest, and more. This must mean that nobody else does real SRE!

Given the availability of Facebook, Netflix and the rest, one might think that Google is on to something there.

> They are given the power to stop deployment.

Sweet. Given by whom

> Alice can tell Bob "no more deployments" is literally the point.

Fantastic. Why can she say & enforce this.

You seem to be going a long ways to describe “what” while explicitly ignoring “why” and “how.”

To be clear my thesis is that success in both operating models is built on a combination of top down incentive/buy in and broad consensus expressed as a cultural norm. Im not being intentionally obtuse, but Im yet to see any other hypothesis or method of action whicb would explain the differentiation of ability to execute.

> Sweet. Given by whom

Directly, the answer is the permissions system. In my neck of the woods, devs are quite literally incapable of pushing things to production on their own. The automated tooling handles it 99% of the time, but in the case that they turn it off, only the SREs have production access necessary to actually push new things.

But I think you're speaking organizationally, and the answer there is that that agreement was made by SVPs and is enforced by the PRR process. When you adopt SRE support, you hand over the keys, so to speak.

> Fantastic. Why can she say & enforce this.

Because there's nothing Bob can do except escalate, and SRE leadership will support Alice all the way up to the SVP level.

> To be clear my thesis is that success in both operating models is built on a combination of top down incentive/buy in and broad consensus expressed as a cultural norm.

My point is that the process creates the cultural norm, and enforces everywhere. That is, your org might have these good processes, and that's laudable. But if Andy turned around tomorrow and said "hey, this year your first priority needs to be shipping new features, because we're falling behind", would your org maintain that commitment? Would every exec? The same question goes for every exec speaking to their subordinates.

Its much more difficult to turn to the guy whose job is reliability and reports directly to the CEO and say "hey, your focus this year is shipping features". Like maybe you could say "your focus is shipping features reliably this year", and that should take the focus off of some other things that the SRE org is involved in, but I'm not convinced.

Or briefly, your approach is betting on there being a cohesive company culture of reliability that permeates every team, org, and manager. We both know that's not true, at Amazon or Google or any other company. They're all big enough to have different cultures in different parts. A distinct org and reporting structure, and split responsibilities, ensures that leadership has to be really explicit about such things ("lower your SLOs"), instead of just quietly deprioritizing enforcing or reporting on them. (And I'm generally a fan of multiple individuals with well scoped and distinct responsibility who are charged with reaching consensus over a single individual who makes a decision).

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