Not OP but I'll give my take because I mostly agree. Because Google lives in a world few of us do. I'm SRE/DevOps and our lives are nothing like Google SREs. We have almost zero control over software that is chucked our way. Any attempt to try and control them fails with management telling us "Just fucking ship it". Finally, something I realized after working with various FAANG SRE types, they don't understand what bad development practices look like, they can't imagine it.
Google invented the term SRE. And by your own words… “our lives are nothing like Google SREs”.
The whole point of google inventing a new title and team, from Ben Teynor’s mouth, was that ops should be superseded by a specialization of SWE called SRE.
If your company doesn’t support that, it’s not SRE.
Because is just useless. I mean seriously, what valuable insight does anyone get from that? It's some sort of truism wrapped in a word sandwich, ready for linkedin lunatics to pat themselves on the back sharing it. Do you feel you've gained something by reading it? Is this a valuable piece of intelligence which would guide your future decisions? Will you bring this to the team during an argument to push your agenda? This feels like the same type of 'feel good' content which people read and then feel like they did something productive. But I would argue that every piece of insight coming for a mega corp, valuable inside the mega corp is actually dangerous outside when people take it as dogma and try to apply it. SRE in general is something which IMHO of working in the industry for decades has poisoned the industry with half assed cargo cult implementations. But it has Google branding, so it must be valuable, hits hard for the fanboys and obviously can and should be applied in every company and every context.
I also find it ironic to see 'Simplicity' touted from the same people who let Kubernetes lose in the wild, but that's a different story for a different time
That's circular reasoning ("it's useless because it's useless").
If you haven't gained any insights from reading that content, maybe it doesn't apply to you or you don't know what you don't know.
> valuable inside the mega corp is actually dangerous outside when people take it as dogma and try to apply it.
mega corp or not, dogmatic principles are usually bad coming from anywhere. The SRE book contains insights that apply to startup, medium-sized companies and mega corps. It's not prescriptive for a reason.
I’ve honestly never worked on software in an environment where the advice in the article wasn’t important to keep in mind. Personal projects, single digit employee count startups, growth stage, ancient and slow moving Perl monolith shops … they all needed to keep the principles of simplicity, boringness (boring.tech is a great reiteration of this) and continually self-auditing to reduce inherited complexity in mind.
Whether or not Google interprets this advice in a sane way or whether they actually follow it are separate issues, but I think the advice is timely and (at least in my experience) important for many people to hear, regardless of where it’s author works.
