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company which calls their IT departments "SREs" now. My org recently made a bunch of people SREs, with no one leading the cause except for a Director who only

company which calls their IT departments "SREs" now. My org recently made a bunch of people SREs, with no one leading the cause except for a Director who only involves themselves enough to be effectively seen as a taskmaster, and otherwise is forgetful, disorganized, egotistical, lacks follow-through, constantly spreads his team too thin, and has put my direct boss in a REALLY terrible spot more than one after my boss did exactly what he was instructed to. A bunch of people were moved from roles they previously excelled at into this new org structure and called SREs. Hired a few more off the street. What are they doing? 25% help desk tasks, 25% break fixes on legacy systems, 40% fixing their own damn laptops, 10% having panic attacks. Roadmaps? Lol. Planning? Lol. SLO? SL-NO. Error budget? I dunno, expense it. We had to have a zoom to explain and get approval to use Terraform this morning. Not even Terraform enterprise (which is a cost), just plain Terraform. Management essentially threw a bunch of shit at a wall, stood back, watched as it slid down towards the carpet and but found themselves pondering why the shit wont stick. Short of using my main account which is a bit too revealing, I have NO qualms admitting a brutal truth about the situation in which I find myself: I am milking this company for every ounce of knowledge and upskill-ing my dev chops and I am gone come Summer. The pay is JUST good enough that I can take my time, be VERY selective about the next job because good lord if I end up in another shop like this ever again it will be 100% my fault. I'm about to start being stupidly picky about who gets my labor from now on, my only regret is not seeing this value sooner. Sorry for the rant but I'm mad and snowed in and that part of your comment really brought some shit up.

sokoloff 6y ago
This is one of the best comments from a green handle I’ve seen in a while. Rant or not, it adds to the site; just this weekend, I was lamenting some very low quality green account comments and contemplating whether a 12-hour waiting period or de-ranking of green would make HN better. This argues strongly against.
jq-r 6y ago
Having a similar situation myself actually. In a team of SREs and "SRE" only in name. Just a bunch of ops guys, and being on the bottom of food chain[1]. When I came over there, and I shit you not, there were pager duty alerts every 15 seconds at peak times, multiple ones at that as well. And for years they thought it completely fine. Took me 6 months of employing best of soft skills to be even allowed to tweak some(!) of those alerts. Believe or not, we have tens of millions of users each day and at least 50 "micro" services. It is a complete mess with a lot of reliability problems in the last couple of months (failed projects getting "second chances" - sunken costs fallacies etc). Every few weeks some dev teams organizes meeting with us and basically say: "hey guys, so you've earned [newspeak for we're giving you our shit we don't want to support and move on to next big thing] this service, you're now the proud owners of it, glhf". I'm also like you, preparing for my next job and this is the first time in my career that I actually know what questions to ask on the next job interview. The experience here is that bad. The only problem I have right now is that I'm so ridiculously micromanaged at work and interrupted every few minutes (or more) that I just cannot focus on learning anything of substance. So I'm trying to do it my free time. I'll get there, but I agree, some changes you're trying to do on a job take years to get there (even if those happen). Life is too short to change a lot of short sighted, entrenched people. [1]: word of caution for anyone: you cannot be a decision maker (and SREs are supposed to at least be at the place of decision making) if you're on the bottom of the hierarchy. So be wary of jobs with great sounding titles where you cannot change anything for the better.

sokoloff 6y ago

This is one of the best comments from a green handle I’ve seen in a while. Rant or not, it adds to the site; just this weekend, I was lamenting some very low quality green account comments and contemplating whether a 12-hour waiting period or de-ranking of green would make HN better. This argues strongly against.

jq-r 6y ago

Having a similar situation myself actually. In a team of SREs and "SRE" only in name. Just a bunch of ops guys, and being on the bottom of food chain[1]. When I came over there, and I shit you not, there were pager duty alerts every 15 seconds at peak times, multiple ones at that as well. And for years they thought it completely fine. Took me 6 months of employing best of soft skills to be even allowed to tweak some(!) of those alerts. Believe or not, we have tens of millions of users each day and at least 50 "micro" services. It is a complete mess with a lot of reliability problems in the last couple of months (failed projects getting "second chances" - sunken costs fallacies etc). Every few weeks some dev teams organizes meeting with us and basically say: "hey guys, so you've earned [newspeak for we're giving you our shit we don't want to support and move on to next big thing] this service, you're now the proud owners of it, glhf". I'm also like you, preparing for my next job and this is the first time in my career that I actually know what questions to ask on the next job interview. The experience here is that bad. The only problem I have right now is that I'm so ridiculously micromanaged at work and interrupted every few minutes (or more) that I just cannot focus on learning anything of substance. So I'm trying to do it my free time. I'll get there, but I agree, some changes you're trying to do on a job take years to get there (even if those happen). Life is too short to change a lot of short sighted, entrenched people. [1]: word of caution for anyone: you cannot be a decision maker (and SREs are supposed to at least be at the place of decision making) if you're on the bottom of the hierarchy. So be wary of jobs with great sounding titles where you cannot change anything for the better.