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Founding Uber SRE
- visviva 5y agoSRE = site reliability engineering (as best as I can tell), for anyone else wondering. How you can write an entire article with an acronym in the title and not define it anywhere is beyond me.
- pokoleo 5y agoWill's a great communicator, and quite personable: I know this because I've worked with him for a few years. I don't think it's bravado, SRE is a common industry term.
- XorNot 5y agoSo are all sorts of terms, but in the sciences at least the rule is still that you introduce the full term and its acronym the first time it is used, before switching to the acronym for the rest of the paper. Sure, everyone doing electrochemistry knows what EIS means, but you still write "electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS)" before you go on. You can adjust the strictness for audience and intent perhaps, but it's still sloppy not to.
- mwt 5y agoAnd on your blog you can choose to use common abbreviations like OS, BIOS, and GPS without spelling them out.
- n42 5y agothis acronym is ubiquitous in the industry of this site and anyone who follows his blog. it's not unreasonable. I'm shocked someone commenting on Hacker News doesn't know it.
- ramraj07 5y agoI’m in the industry. Have been for years. I still have no clue what an SRE is. Like what do they do? Debug broken services? Unless you worked with people in that SRE role it’s not clear how you’re supposed to know what they do. This article could have helped me with that but it didn’t fully. It sounded more like a rant that will totally make sense maybe to 50% of infra or devops people. Maybe it’s me though. I actually still don’t know what a true product manager is supposed to do lol.
- idunno246 5y agosre means different things to different people, it’s an overloaded term like devops. but I feel like he spent a lot of this article defining what it meant for this team - all that about embedding a dedicated person is their definition of sre
- tbrownaw 5y agoI assume it's like "Enterprise architect" only maybe less so. For EA I've heard that no two companies ever mean the same thing by the term (I barely even know how we define it, and that's the team I'm on), where SRE I think is supposedly copied from people's half-understanding of what Google says it does.
- browningstreet 5y agoEA is design, SRE is ops/support.
- throwaway-dos 5y agoThis is wrong. SRE is an engineering org, NOT an ops or support org. While it's common practice for SRE teams to share some of the operational burden, it's for the purpose to find risks and vulnerabilities and then engineer solutions to those. I have never seen SRE do support. SREs should know how to build and run reliable and maintainable systems. Architecture and design are the best tools for that.
- greatpostman 5y agoSre is a really common term
- colesantiago 5y agoMe neither, I have no clue what this means either, I guess the author is in a very very small circle.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoSRE/Production Engineering are common terms in the tech industry... How do you come to the conclusion that the author is the one with a "very very small circle"?
- colesantiago 5y agoI've been an engineer and manager in a software company in europe and have only heard about what an SRE is. Now "software engineer" is a common term, but not this SRE thing. Perhaps it's only common within silicon valley circles, that being said, the fact that the author didn't define the acronym didn't help either.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI'm curious, have you heard of any of these: Data Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer (MLE), Staff Software Engineer. I'm surprised you've never come across the term SRE/Production Engineer before (Assuming you meant to say "have only __just__ heard about what an SRE is"). I live in New Zealand and I'm pretty sure I knew what an SRE was before I even joined a big tech company (Not a SV one btw).
- syntheticcorp 5y agoI’ve worked in tech in NZ for 7 years or so, never actually met someone who calls themselves an SRE. Obviously I know the term, but IME we don’t use that title here
- exdsq 5y agoHonestly it'd be like explaining what sysadmin means nowadays. It's so common I am surprised there are sectors of the industry that don't use the term yet! But it makes sense that a person who's been blogging about SRE-work for years doesn't feel the need to define SRE. It's been around as a role since the early 2000s. Edit: It's probably been around longer that SDET!
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoIs "founding" being used too liberally these days?
- langsoul-com 5y agoHe created Ubers SRE department. The word choice is correct
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoIt seems... a little...something. The word "founding", "founder", "founded", at least in technology circles (the relevant circle here), has historically been used to refer to starting a company. All of a sudden people are saying things like they "founded product X at Google" or something. Everyone knows the historical usage of the term, so why use it when "started" or "created" or "stood up" or "established" would work?
- AlexeyMK 5y agoIt's an article on a personal blog targeting a specific readership familiar with the term. More broadly, I think the level of granularity at which it makes sense to define terms (Mesos, Kubernetes, even Uber) has to roughly match the level of familiarity of the reader that will get something meaningful from the piece.
- rrix2 5y ago> It's an article on a personal blog targeting a specific readership familiar with the term. He's the CTO of a "wellness" tech company now and writes broadly on the topic of engineering and engineering management. The folks who will read this likely are familiar enough with these technical terms to glean knowledge, or at least to gloss over them.
- exdsq 5y agoBy "Wellness tech company", they mean Calm, possibly the most well known app for mental health!
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago> The SRE organization remained. The SRE organization that we’d built was gone. Sad :(. > That’s not to say the experience was entirely good. Working at that era of Uber extracted a toll. Many others paid a much worse price; I paid one too. I was in way over my head as a leader, and I struggled with it. On a work trip ramping up the Uber Lithuania office, my partner of seven years called to let me know they’d moved out. Writing had been my favorite hobby, but I gave up on writing during my time there. Some chapters enrich our lives without being something we’d repeat, and Uber is certainly one of those chapters for me. As someone very early in their career, I would still take that experience in a heartbeat. Just by observation, I strongly believe that kind of experience is both extremely rare and extremely valuable.
- ramraj07 5y agoI’m glad they mentioned the Susan Fowler article, but I’d love to hear from a guy who overlapped in Uber at that time in the same team, ostensibly “not as part of the problem” tell their side of how they saw things.
- rrix2 5y agofull range of feelings reading this... not what i was expecting to do this evening, but here's an attempt: i have a uniquely close perspective to all that stuff having interviewed and then later reported to the guy who first harassed Susan when she started and working with her on the team she transferred to, and ostensibly "not as part of the problem" (though you could take my inaction in this whole saga as a grain of salt.) I started working at Uber the same month as Will after the infrastructure team passed on my resume without even a phone call and handed it off to another infra team which Will neglected to mention -- a "shadow infrastructure" team created as an artifact of technical differences and personal grudges which both doubled every six months like our head count, we were responsible for edge services' business logic written in Node.js instead of the Python 2 predominant in the rest of the engineering org. I joined as a junior engineer out of two failed ruby on rails startups with ~0 positive Node.js experience but a good enough sense of Linux systems engineering and administration to be doing release engineering and on call for those edge services three weeks later. Everyone had a similar trial by fire in that time, and many didn't "make it" a month despite having a smoother hiring experience than the story Will related. The infrastructure org was lucky to have Will. I didn't have a manager for months, reporting to a 20-something "director" who was too far in over his head and too up his own ass to care about that, and taking day to day "marching orders" from someone who is the most technically brilliant people I ever worked with but with the EQ of a bat. This leadership debt was a recurring pattern through out the whole engineering organization throughout the years of insane growth, even after the "new SRE" came to be. But that toxic division and leadership debt and the "shadow" infrastructure organization itself festered in to some of the awful behavior which ended up exploding in the saga with Susan et al. We promoted two senior engineers on my team in to management who proceeded to compete to be the first manager to hire a woman in to our 100 man, 0 woman engineering group. A year and a some change later Susan ended up reporting to one of them when we had all finally made up under the new SRE leadership. I have some very surreal memories of these times, some dear memories of the brilliant folks I worked with, some unspeakably regretful memories of both, and some of this I had completely blocked out. It's hard to believe in the two year arc of this blog post, we hired endlessly (occasionally poorly, often brilliantly), we brought up four data centers including a reverse-engineering of our tech stack to launch two from first-principles in China, rebuilt entire parts of the company's architecture from empty git repos to a thousand plus servers in a quarter, and nearly burst at the seams doing it. It's an irreplicable and irreplaceable experience but I can't say I'd go through with it again. I'm not even sure I'd wish it for someone: after three years on these infrastructure teams and two more on the privacy team after #deleteuber and starting work on GDPR compliance 6 months before the enforcement started, I left. two years later, I am still recovering from burnout spending down my little dragon's hoard healing a complete lack of interest in technical work. I'm glad that Will has been distilling and expressing the lessons we learned so that others can go through this sort of experience in a less extreme and painful fashion.
- ProAm 5y agoI can never be interested in any story about Uber after hearing about the (early) culture there. This is literally the company that started the #MeToo movement and showed us how bad the VC/SV culture can be, and can be covered up with money.
- pm90 5y agoThis story actually does mention that. And while I understand the desire to dismiss the whole company, it should be remembered that companies, like any communities, are large and diverse.
- photochemsyn 5y agoCreepiest outfit in tech today? Uber wins the prize: https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-much-of-uber-does-saudi-arabia-own-15162803 https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-much-of-uber-does-sa... > "In the interview with the digital news platform, Khosrowshahi said the 2019 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi shows that "the (Saudi) government said they made a mistake. It's a serious mistake, but we've made serious mistakes, too right?" Tech isn't some neutral zone free of ethical quandries. Google leadership pushing a Dragonfly contract with China is another example. Israel selling their Pegasus spyware to the Saudis so they can round up and murder dissidents is another example. Just because it's profitable doesn't mean that justifies doing it.
- pm90 5y agoI haven’t implied any of the things that you’ve asserted.
- rhizome 5y agoAnd culture comes from the top.
- doktorhladnjak 5y ago#MeToo existed for many years before Uber was even founded. It really became a thing because of Harvey Weinstein, not Uber.
- faangiq 5y agoIs SRE the most inflated ego job title in tech?
- oxff 5y agoSoftware "Engineer" is (stolen valor from real world Engineers)
- exdsq 5y agoML Engineer? Wait! No. My vote goes to AI Ethicist.
- borplk 5y agoNo it's quite an accurate title and I don't think it's inflated. It's not really considered something prestigious.
- trhway 5y agoIt is presented as prestigious in order to hire at least somebody into it. While, depending on place, work may be interesting the management usually is more rotten than say in dev.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoIt's considered prestigious by other engineers. Outside engineering, not so much. At one point in my career I moved from a technical presales role to SRE. The engineers congratulated me on the promotion, while the sales people all thought it was a demotion. (And in terms of career progression it probably was.)
- tristor 5y ago> It's considered prestigious by other engineers. I'd love to see some evidence of that. I have never been in an organization where Ops folks and SREs are treated as if those roles are prestigious by other people in the engineering org. Generally they're treated like digital janitors, and assumed to be bad at software development. I've literally had an SWE /at work/ say to my face that "You're in Ops because you weren't smart enough to pass a code interview" because they were upset I had pointed out a flaw in their design and were essentially making an appeal to the nebulous authority of their title. SRE is definitely more prestigious than being in technical presales to other engineers, but that's because to other engineers any role in the sales org is not real engineering (even if it is), and to sales people anything in the engineering org is a demotion because it means you are joining "the basement people". Sales people aspire to becoming a CEO, not to building something that makes a mark on the world. Engineers want to build the thing, they don't care /how/ they have to go about doing it (whether that's being a founder/ceo or working in the basement).
- pm90 5y ago> To this day, I believe these new leaders had a fundamental misunderstanding of what problem Uber’s SRE organization was solving (enabling bottoms-up organization with highly fluid priorities that weren’t resolved into a single priority list anywhere to function successfully), viewing it instead from the lens of their previous experience. As a result, SRE quickly shifted from an embedded model to a very different model. > The name was unchanged, but it was soon a very different team. That unchanged name concealed the beginning of a significant leadership and cultural shift Unfortunately a very common problem. New person weighs heavily towards their own great experience previously, fails to understand new org and its problems. One of the best infrastructure managers I worked with shared their approach with me: the first 6 months, they would go to all the team leaders for the teams they served and listen to the problems they faced. No solutions were proposed. Just understand the pain points first, develop solutions after learning those. I often wonder if we should have social scientists study these phenomena and create some guidance so people don’t keep repeating these mistakes.
- munchbunny 5y agoThis is what the professors in business schools study. MBA’s often get a bad rap, but as far as the actual research goes, that’s where the current efforts at rigorously studying management and organizational dynamics are.
- barry-cotter 5y agoIs there any evidence that these academics affect the practice of business much? When I think of ideas or changes coming out of business schools and changing how businesses are run the only thing I can think of is Michael Porter’s five forces. Toyota has likely had a greater impact on how business is run than every business school professor combined, ever. More bluntly most business professors never even try to become successful entrepreneurs. They’re unwilling to bear the costs of the market test because they don’t expect the benefits to be worth it.
- ajb 5y agoSure: W Edwards Deming.
- barefeg 5y agoI’m curious why the OP didn’t take their manager’s role instead of hiring externally? Maybe a different post explains it?
- Terretta 5y agoDon’t know in the particular case, but it’s very common at a VC-fueled company for the VC to be pressuring execs to hire “seasoned management”. The hypothesis appears to be spend money to bring in people who know how enterprises work. Instead of people “just” managing or managing managers, get “leaders” who are “proven”at managing business functions or lines business through managers of managers. So, pay big bucks to people that have risen to that size management before. Of course this means “layering” the Wills of the world with LOB or functional managers who by virtue of having been at a big enterprise predating the unicorn thing, have no clue what the function needs to be (no ‘north star’). Next thing you know, thanks to this overweening managerialism, the unicorn-turned-Leviathan is hiring “transformation” executives. You know what’s next… the next unicorn still made of Wills, ready to eat Leviathan’s lunch.
- stevebmark 5y agoLanding a job you have no qualifications for, with no deadlines, building internal tools at your own pace, and becoming a multimillionaire in the process? Sounds like a pretty good gig!