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Disc: Googler opinions are my own. I've been an SRE on a tier 1 GCP product for over three years this is not the case. In my experience, our systems have only

Disc: Googler opinions are my own. I've been an SRE on a tier 1 GCP product for over three years this is not the case. In my experience, our systems have only gotten more reliable and easier to understand since I joined. It's not like there are only a few key knowledge holders that single handedly prevent outages from happening. In reality, you don't need to know shit about how a system works internally to prevent outages if things are setup correctly. In theory, my dog should be able to sit on my laptop and submit a prod breaking change without any fear that it will make it to prod and damage the system because automated testing/canary should catch it and, if it does make it to prod, we should be able to detect and mitigate it before the change effects more users using probes or whitebox monitoring. This is happens for 99.9% of potential issues and is completely invisible to users. However it's what's not caught (the remaining 0.01%) that actually matters.

dijit 5y ago
I’ll be honest. My external impression of Amazon and Google could not be more distant in this regard. Google doesn’t have nearly as hard a time retaining good people as Amazon does.
- AitchEmArsey 5y ago
  From within AWS, it just feels like we push people too hard. Service teams are too small relative to their goals, sales teams have unrealistic growth targets and also double as support for needy/incompetent customers, and professional services have billable hour requirements which are as high as any major consultancy and with additional pre-sales support expectations. Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fail to bring in good people who aren't desperate enough to act out the cultish LP dance during their interview. Hiring new grads seems to be the only area where growth is not stalling - but that can obviously only help so much. My team is hiring for 2-3 people and we are being buried alive without that growth happening sooner - but I can't in good conscience recommend this place to anyone I respect or like.
  - kodah 5y ago
    I don't work anywhere as big as Amazon/AWS but it is still a "big tech engineering firm" and we're experiencing all the same problems.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    > From within AWS, it just feels like we push people too hard. Sounds like regular skeleton-crew enterprise IT.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      "We'll fix it when it breaks."
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - bogomipz 5y ago
    >"Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fail to bring in good people who aren't desperate enough to act out the cultish LP dance during their interview." What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? >"My team is hiring for 2-3 people and we are being buried alive without that growth happening sooner - but I can't in good conscience recommend this place to anyone I respect or like." I appreciate your candor. Are you in a dev role or are you on the SRE side? Is your description true across pretty much all teams/services then?
    - AitchEmArsey 5y ago
      > What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? The "culture fit" interview process focuses on leadership principles, so lots of questions like " tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer". Being yourself will get you nowhere, you need to research the questions and the script that is expected of you. > What service does your team work on? I'm a partner-focused SA, so not a developer and not aligned to a particular service.

dijit 5y ago

I’ll be honest. My external impression of Amazon and Google could not be more distant in this regard. Google doesn’t have nearly as hard a time retaining good people as Amazon does.

AitchEmArsey 5y ago
From within AWS, it just feels like we push people too hard. Service teams are too small relative to their goals, sales teams have unrealistic growth targets and also double as support for needy/incompetent customers, and professional services have billable hour requirements which are as high as any major consultancy and with additional pre-sales support expectations. Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fail to bring in good people who aren't desperate enough to act out the cultish LP dance during their interview. Hiring new grads seems to be the only area where growth is not stalling - but that can obviously only help so much. My team is hiring for 2-3 people and we are being buried alive without that growth happening sooner - but I can't in good conscience recommend this place to anyone I respect or like.
- kodah 5y ago
  I don't work anywhere as big as Amazon/AWS but it is still a "big tech engineering firm" and we're experiencing all the same problems.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  > From within AWS, it just feels like we push people too hard. Sounds like regular skeleton-crew enterprise IT.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    "We'll fix it when it breaks."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- bogomipz 5y ago
  >"Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fail to bring in good people who aren't desperate enough to act out the cultish LP dance during their interview." What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? >"My team is hiring for 2-3 people and we are being buried alive without that growth happening sooner - but I can't in good conscience recommend this place to anyone I respect or like." I appreciate your candor. Are you in a dev role or are you on the SRE side? Is your description true across pretty much all teams/services then?
  - AitchEmArsey 5y ago
    > What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? The "culture fit" interview process focuses on leadership principles, so lots of questions like " tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer". Being yourself will get you nowhere, you need to research the questions and the script that is expected of you. > What service does your team work on? I'm a partner-focused SA, so not a developer and not aligned to a particular service.