> I doubt the majority of SREs at Google have even read the "Google SRE book". That's absolutely true, but by design. SRE already had exceptional horizontal kn

> I doubt the majority of SREs at Google have even read the "Google SRE book". That's absolutely true, but by design. SRE already had exceptional horizontal knowledge transfer before any book. The book was published (specifically, published) to extend that knowledge transfer outside of Google's own walls so the rest of the industry could also benefit. I was a SWE-SRE for several years and absorbed a lot just through talks and postmortems. I left Google and joined another big org that was a ... bit ... less far along in its SRE ambitions. I couldn't convince a single person to read the book, even after linking to specific sections to explain why e.g. jitter is important to have in tandem with backoff. Nobody cares, they have boxes to tick and janky bullshit to ship. Most people are not interested in learning from books these days, inside or outside Google, but at least inside Google you can learn from an unbroken lineage of experienced SREs. If you're trying to build out an SRE org in your own company, you're better off hiring one ex-Google Senior SRE than you would be if you bought everyone a copy of the book and two weeks of formal training. Actually embedding real-world experience into your teams is the most effective form of knowledge transfer available.