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SRE has got to be one of the organisations that have done the most damage in the big G. They were given a license to mandate things based on philosophical musings backed with no science, and they can decide what's best and should be done without any data, just based on feels. They also have a culture of misanthropy, patronization and contempt towards devs. From what I can tell anyway.


> they can decide what's best and should be done without any data, just based on feels.

The book is exactly the opposite of this. The Principles chapter alone talk about many things that involve actually dealing with numbers (SLO, measuring complexity, etc).


“It has numbers attached” does not mean something is backed by data.

Unless they are testing correlations between these target metrics and business success or some other external cost metric, it’s still “just feels”.

I’ve seen internal crusades against cyclomatic complexity that resulted in massive engineering waste to reduce and reliability saw no improvement.


Yeah, but to be fair I don’t think Googlers can tell the difference between a decision backed by data, and a random ass measurement.


Be google SRE. Elite software engineer. Cool under pressure.

Pager goes off! Grab pixel. Press finger print reader until it lets me enter my passcode. Ack page. Put down whisky. Shake self. 5 minutes to be logged in and dealing with the problem.

Password. gnubby. password. gnubby. gnubby. gnubby.

Check alert, see playbook, ignore playbook. Check which cell the problem is in. Correlate with rollouts. See a match. Roll back poorly tested dev promo project. Charts recover. Alert not firing.

Log out. Back to whisky.


I think you picked the least interesting part of SRE to poke at.

It's the equivalent of saying "SWE just adds new stubby endpoints to a service, so simple".


The drinking culture is also pretty weird.


It's also outdated. I don't think I've seen real are drinking culture since like 2018.


Spot on, but you missed two gnubbies and another password.


Why don't you give Mission Control a try for 6 months?


> culture of misanthropy, patronization and contempt towards devs.

When you’re being paged for the Nth time because of an idiotic problem that you’ve pointed out repeatedly, you too might exhibit these traits.


[citation needed]




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