> It's only a leadership problem if you split the responsibility for the thing so you have A: a team that builds and maintains it and B: someone else who has to wake up at night and fix it.
A couple points come to mind here.
First, there is no reason for any employee to have to "wake up at night and fix it" if the organization staffs SRE's with a "follow the sun" model. Three complementary time zones are ideal, but two can suffice if one is first-shift and the other second shift.
Second and more importantly, splitting responsibility between a "dev team" and an "ops team" is problematic when the two teams do not communicate, coordinate, and assist each other in improving the system. Hence this situation qualifying as a leadership problem.
> If A and B are the same people, very little leadership is needed as they are innately motivated, and have direct experience.
A and B are different jobs, with different responsibilities, with different skills, and different success objectives. Combining the two is a recipe for burnout and/or failure.
>> Punitive management policies erode morale and result in retention only of those whom have no better options. See "Price's Law"[0].
> It's not punitive management. Someone will have to work when the thing breaks.
The statement I quoted was:
Pain from a problem needs to live where the problem can be fixed.
This is a punitive management policy in and of itself and unquestionably so when combined with the assertion:
If A and B are the same people, very little leadership is
needed as they are innately motivated ...
Two additional things to contemplate is categorizing team members as "they" as well as identifying "very little leadership" as a goal to achieve.