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> Right Hands often dive into a fire, edit the approach, and delegate execution to the most appropriate team, and then pop over to the next fire elsewhere in th

> Right Hands often dive into a fire, edit the approach, and delegate execution to the most appropriate team, and then pop over to the next fire elsewhere in the organization. > The Solver and Right Hand bounce from fire to fire, often having more transactional interactions with the folks they’re working with on any given week. It's worth noting that Ben Purgason from LinkedIn, identified Firefighters as stage 1 and beyond throughout his article on the five stages of SRE: > At this early stage, SRE is essentially fighting fires whenever the need arises while simultaneously trying to automate the process of fire suppression. With each piece of reliable automation written, the time saved on fire suppression is freed up for use on permanently fixing problems or for forward-looking priorities such as monitoring and alerting. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_winter18_02_purgason.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_win... My observation has been that problems arise when you have roles that clearly default to firefighting without the larger organizational recognition that this is a signal that the default mode need to evolve or improve continuously. That is, that the stages beyond stage 1 (firefighting) that involve developing the roles, teams, tools, and ops in concert with one another are latent and need to scale with the organization, products, services, and customers.

joshuamorton 4y ago
"Firefighting" is being used in two different contexts here. In the SRE document, it means literal incident response, while in the Staff Eng context, it means "addressing whatever the organizational P0 is", which may occasionally be a literal incident, but it may also be developing an incident response team, or lending a hand to a project that is behind schedule, or...whatever. There's always something that is highest priority, and having a floating person(s) who can continually identify and provide support for whatever that thing is isn't a sign of a dysfunctional organization.
- davidthewatson 4y ago
  > "Firefighting" is being used in two different contexts here. In the SRE document, it means literal incident response, while in the Staff Eng context, it means "addressing whatever the organizational P0 is", which may occasionally be a literal incident, but it may also be developing an incident response team, or lending a hand to a project that is behind schedule, or...whatever. Good point. That's right. > There's always something that is highest priority, and having a floating person(s) who can continually identify and provide support for whatever that thing is isn't a sign of a dysfunctional organization. Yes, I do think that "floating" is an appropriate term here. I've also seen "consulting engineer" used in this context within large multinational organizations. However, I would point out that too much floating may be a sign of diminishing returns on matrix management.

joshuamorton 4y ago

"Firefighting" is being used in two different contexts here. In the SRE document, it means literal incident response, while in the Staff Eng context, it means "addressing whatever the organizational P0 is", which may occasionally be a literal incident, but it may also be developing an incident response team, or lending a hand to a project that is behind schedule, or...whatever. There's always something that is highest priority, and having a floating person(s) who can continually identify and provide support for whatever that thing is isn't a sign of a dysfunctional organization.

davidthewatson 4y ago
> "Firefighting" is being used in two different contexts here. In the SRE document, it means literal incident response, while in the Staff Eng context, it means "addressing whatever the organizational P0 is", which may occasionally be a literal incident, but it may also be developing an incident response team, or lending a hand to a project that is behind schedule, or...whatever. Good point. That's right. > There's always something that is highest priority, and having a floating person(s) who can continually identify and provide support for whatever that thing is isn't a sign of a dysfunctional organization. Yes, I do think that "floating" is an appropriate term here. I've also seen "consulting engineer" used in this context within large multinational organizations. However, I would point out that too much floating may be a sign of diminishing returns on matrix management.