Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#21

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:36 AM UTC

dannypgh wrote: post #11

dkarapetyan wrote: post #6

I've come to the conclusion that drawing these distinctions is actually harmful in the long run. Software engineering requires operational understanding. If you hire programmers that do not know how to spin up a VM and codify their deployment processes then hiring SREs is not really going to fix anything.

I think it's true that you want everyone to be good at everything- you want engineers writing tests for their own code, you can't just hire software engineers in test and make it their problem. The distinction is practically useful because not everyone is an expert on everything, and if you focus your hiring around very narrow markers- e.g. ability to work with algorithms to solve a coding interview- you may not buil…

> I think it's true that you want everyone to be good at everything

You can't fix unrealistic expectations.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#22

Post by jonaf » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #6

I've come to the conclusion that drawing these distinctions is actually harmful in the long run. Software engineering requires operational understanding. If you hire programmers that do not know how to spin up a VM and codify their deployment processes then hiring SREs is not really going to fix anything.

While I share your sentiment, don't forget that there is a very large pool of prospective employees who may be beneficial to a company in spite of a more narrow skill set, even if they don't grow their skill set. Take college grads for example. They're relatively inexpensive and have a moderate skill set as they begin their careers. Are they useful to hire? Yes. Do they know anything about operations? No. Is it necessary for them to? Not from day 1. They have a lot to learn, and early on, they may be more effective to an organization in a more narrow role. Let's try not to stereotype all engineers who are looking for employment into "already has all skills" and "cannot hire because lacks all skills" buckets. There's a scale, and some set of skills can be very effective for some organizations, even if they aren't quite where you are.

I'm probably being pedantic, but I felt it necessary to highlight the implicit assumption.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#23

Post by moises_silva » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:50 AM UTC

nikolay wrote: post #20

SRE is a terrible role name both in its abbreviated and in its fully spelled out version! Just because it originates at Google, it doesn't mean it's cool. I am terrified that it gets more and more popular these days!

I like it. What do you see terrible with it? why, and what would be in your opinion a better role name?

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#24

Post by moises_silva » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:51 AM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #8

lukasb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you don't know what an SRE is, you're not the intended audience. probably half of the articles posted to HN are unintelligible to non-practitioners of that particular subfield, don't see why this should be different.

That just makes this a problem with HN rather than with the blog. HN's audience is not narrow, and it's annoying to see so many interesting titles leading to incomprehensible articles. It really helps when HN posters either clarify things a bit in the title, or if that's not practical, make a comment when you post the link.

Finding a balance is hard. Should you define SQL? DB? HTTP? where do you start and stop defining acronyms.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#25

Post by dannypgh » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

dannypgh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's true that you want everyone to be good at everything- you want engineers writing tests for their own code, you can't just hire software engineers in test and make it their problem. The distinction is practically useful because not everyone is an expert on everything, and if you focus your hiring around very narrow markers- e.g. ability to work with algorithms to solve a coding interview- you may not buil…

> I think it's true that you want everyone to be good at everything You can't fix unrealistic expectations.

It's not that unrealistic, as long as you have a wide enough definition of "good."

I don't think you want to hire someone for an SRE role who doesn't understand algorthims well enough to do detailed analysis of the codebase, including, say, rudimentary big-O analysis of the code. Good SREs read quite a lot of code and if they're debugging a performance issue and the code contains portions that are obviously exponential or factorial in time, you want them to be able to see and recognize that quickly as a potential cause of the problem being debugged. The same is true of problems caused by bugs or anything else. Likewise, good understanding of what's possible and not possible with software is necessary for area to file (or potentially close) reasonable PRs for the codebase.

The person who thinks in terms of page faults and systems analysis may take a little more time to find the optimal algorithm for an abstract problem than someone who only thinks of abstract problems. But they should know enough about software and computers to recognize the limits of their knowledge, and that's the hard part.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#26

Post by moises_silva » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:59 AM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #7

mark212 wrote: post #2

not once does the writer explain what she means by "SRE" -- yet uses it repeatedly. Spend a few words early on to define your term and then go ahead and abbreviate away. That's just writing 101.

It stands for "site reliability engineer" but the term is as meaningless as "full stack engineer".

I honestly don't see a problem with it in particular. Not anymore than with other titles in the industry. The title gives you a clue, but it's far from being a very specific way to find out in detail the skills/responsibilities of a given person, and because no one enforces what it means companies will use them for similar but significantly different purposes sometimes (and yeah, sometimes just to be 'cool'). It does not come as surprise to me at all that specially relatively new titles are vague.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#27

Post by nikolay » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

moises_silva wrote: post #23

nikolay wrote: post #20

SRE is a terrible role name both in its abbreviated and in its fully spelled out version! Just because it originates at Google, it doesn't mean it's cool. I am terrified that it gets more and more popular these days!

I like it. What do you see terrible with it? why, and what would be in your opinion a better role name?

"Operations Engineer", for example.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#28

Post by mark212 » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

techman9 wrote: post #12

mark212 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had to go all the way to her Google+ bio to find out that she's a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, so I'm guessing that SRE in this essay means that.

It's also in the title of the link on HN?

it wasn't originally

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#29

Post by mark212 » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 4:03 AM UTC

pkaeding wrote: post #9

mark212 wrote: post #2

not once does the writer explain what she means by "SRE" -- yet uses it repeatedly. Spend a few words early on to define your term and then go ahead and abbreviate away. That's just writing 101.

I've modified the title to expand the acronym. Apologies for the confusion; I forgot that not everyone's head is where mine is. (I'm not the author of the article; I just found it interesting and wanted to share.)

oh no apologies necessary. It's becoming increasingly common on HN lately and I can't fathom why people take the time to write a thoughtful piece to advocate a particular view and then immediately lose a massive amount of the audience with unexplained acronyms. Especially when it's so easy to just lay it out once.

Re: Maslow's Hierarchy of Site Reliability Engineering Needs (2015)

#30

Post by closeparen » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 4:17 AM UTC

nikolay wrote: post #27

moises_silva wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it. What do you see terrible with it? why, and what would be in your opinion a better role name?

"Operations Engineer", for example.

The term SRE espouses a philosophy that when SRE has done its job perfectly, there is no operations work because the system is reliable on its own.

If you're looking for members of that school of thought, you say SRE. If you're comfortable having a "boiler room" and just need to staff it up, the terms sysadmin and devops work just fine depending on the level of coding involved.