4 ms·

> > Every 40-60 mins wanting to check with the ~3 engineers working on the issue for an update > I find that teams who complain about their manager very often

> > Every 40-60 mins wanting to check with the ~3 engineers working on the issue for an update > I find that teams who complain about their manager very often don't trust their manager and vice versa. I get that sometimes it's not (only) the manager's fault if there is no trust, but if as a manager you need a status update every 40 minutes while the people are fire fighting and working on an incident, I feel like you failed as a manager.

viraptor 4y ago
I feel like there's a good and bad way to do this at the same interval. Of course it depends on the situation as well and what you say, but when I'm dealing with an actual emergency, I can't imagine not posting an update every hour or so. Usually much more as a way of documenting what's happening for a later PIR. If a manager doesn't get the required details to know what's happening (I'm situations where they do and still ignore it), then the whole process could use an improvement. From my SRE perspective, if an incident takes longer than 30min, I want my manager/coordinator to be constantly updated and handle communication with the rest of the company/customers.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I’ve been that SRE senior manager in some longer-than-ideal outages. One of my biggest roles was chasing off the lookie-loos and fending off the VPs and CIO (usually by telling them to GTFO of the war room but then going to give them an update away from the team with what we knew and what I thought).
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  Usually there’s a primary and a secondary. One person handles the actual debugging and the other handles the communication and coordinating. While I agree it’s poor management to ask for an update every few minutes, it’s not because asking for an update is bad, rather because they themselves failed to communicate and train their employees to properly handle communication. Looking back, this was something we did in our team when I was just <2 years out of college. I was the secondary and posted updated to the tickets and emailed the team every 30 minutes. I was also the one calling in people to help when primary needed help. My manager didn’t bother us because he had already clearly laid out how we handle issues of each severity and who does what. It was also clear what the chain of escalation was and who and how to reach out. Incidentally, it was also my job to close the issue by identifying the cause and fixing the issue from recurring - because the secondary was only observing and communicating they get to see the bigger picture and also a welcome break for the person working hard to fix the issue. Learnt a lot by working with a team that knew how to handle themselves. And we weren’t SRE - just regular devs. This manager - my very first one - has also been the best one I’ve ever had. I wasn’t surprised at all when he quickly scaled the ladder and is doing really well for himself now.

viraptor 4y ago

I feel like there's a good and bad way to do this at the same interval. Of course it depends on the situation as well and what you say, but when I'm dealing with an actual emergency, I can't imagine not posting an update every hour or so. Usually much more as a way of documenting what's happening for a later PIR. If a manager doesn't get the required details to know what's happening (I'm situations where they do and still ignore it), then the whole process could use an improvement. From my SRE perspective, if an incident takes longer than 30min, I want my manager/coordinator to be constantly updated and handle communication with the rest of the company/customers.

sokoloff 4y ago
I’ve been that SRE senior manager in some longer-than-ideal outages. One of my biggest roles was chasing off the lookie-loos and fending off the VPs and CIO (usually by telling them to GTFO of the war room but then going to give them an update away from the team with what we knew and what I thought).
8ytecoder 4y ago
Usually there’s a primary and a secondary. One person handles the actual debugging and the other handles the communication and coordinating. While I agree it’s poor management to ask for an update every few minutes, it’s not because asking for an update is bad, rather because they themselves failed to communicate and train their employees to properly handle communication. Looking back, this was something we did in our team when I was just <2 years out of college. I was the secondary and posted updated to the tickets and emailed the team every 30 minutes. I was also the one calling in people to help when primary needed help. My manager didn’t bother us because he had already clearly laid out how we handle issues of each severity and who does what. It was also clear what the chain of escalation was and who and how to reach out. Incidentally, it was also my job to close the issue by identifying the cause and fixing the issue from recurring - because the secondary was only observing and communicating they get to see the bigger picture and also a welcome break for the person working hard to fix the issue. Learnt a lot by working with a team that knew how to handle themselves. And we weren’t SRE - just regular devs. This manager - my very first one - has also been the best one I’ve ever had. I wasn’t surprised at all when he quickly scaled the ladder and is doing really well for himself now.