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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'

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'

user5994461 6y ago
>>> 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.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  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.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    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.
apple4ever 6y ago
> 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).

user5994461 6y ago

>>> 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.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
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.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  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.

apple4ever 6y ago

> 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).