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Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

sre.google

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Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#21
I imagine a conversation with this individual as team lead would go something like this:

"So, you worked overtime to save systems across the planet from crashing due to a botched update?"

"Yes, sir. We're 'Site Reliability Engineering', after all."

"And people in airports don't have to sleep on the floors because airlines can actually schedule flights?"

"Yes, sir. Site Reliability Engineering, at its finest, sir!"

"No, you played the hero. That's bad for the team and normally for you, really. You should have let it break."

"But our team...is 'Site Reliability Engineering'?"

"You should have let it break."

"But, Site...Reliability?"

"You're fired."

Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#22
I really dislike the way this slide deck is written. It's rewriting a failure of management (bad project planning, too few people for the workload) and presenting it a failure by all the team members.

"The Hero decides that, despite this, ..."

"No matter what they're told about not doing this."

"The team doesn't realize..."

"Heroism is low risk, and easy to do."

"Help the Hero figure out what they should do instead."

"But the Hero won't let it go."

I suspect the likely scenario that prompted this document to be written was something like a manager facing low morale from his team, and has just been asked to explain why there was a catastrophic failure that he hadn't communicated upwards. Likely, he hadn't been doing his job properly, had no idea how much work his team was actually doing, the team was massively overloaded and worried about the job culls in other departments, worried because their boss kept saying things like "this was due yesterday", and so had been doing everything possible to stop the proverbial hitting the fan... and one day it reached bursting point, and they simply couldn't cope with all the work, despite already being forced to do overtime. Maybe some of them had even quit as a result, and complained to HR about the work-life balance in the team.

But the team leader can't possibly be at fault. This is the management spin on it: it's all the team member's fault, and the poor manager had no idea what was going on, not because he was a terrible manager, but because the team had been deliberately hiding all the work they were doing from him, they didn't want to go home to their wives and kids, but were choosing to spend their evenings working on secret projects to stoke their own egos or deal with their own insecurities, and concealing all the extra work from their managers.

Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#23

Not sure if heroism is bad. [1] All teams should have a Jordan, a kobe, a shaquille or a combi. One needs A players and supporting cast. It is not the culture or the org who decides upon the evolution of the heroism. It is the hero who builds a team around him/her. [2] the scrum or agile saga that promotes that all team members should be able to do what all team members do is just excel-minded-nonesense. Cant win cha…

What you're describing isn't at all what the linked page is discussing.

[deleted]

Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#26
post #8

"No matter how many hours they need to work." "No matter that they need to work evenings and weekends." I don't call these people heroes, I call them idiots. Also, not being able to copy/paste text from text slides is a pretty terrible design choice, but we shouldn't be surprised knowing what the source is.

They're not idiots if they're paid by the hour.

They (SREs) are not, generally, paid by the hour.

Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#27
post #21

I imagine a conversation with this individual as team lead would go something like this: "So, you worked overtime to save systems across the planet from crashing due to a botched update?" "Yes, sir. We're 'Site Reliability Engineering', after all." "And people in airports don't have to sleep on the floors because airlines can actually schedule flights?" "Yes, sir. Site Reliability Engineering, at its finest, sir!" "N…

More likely: "You worked overtime to save systems across the planet from crashing due to a potentially botched update?"

"Yes, sir. We're 'Site Reliability Engineering', after all."

"And nothing has changed. Updates are a smooth as usual."

"Yes, sir. Site Reliability Engineering, at its finest, sir!"

"You're fired."

Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't run into this person but I'd love to hear about problems you've seen people create - I can't even think of a problem I could create and fix.

one instance I can remember immediately - lead SRE turns off an alert for some DLQ that has been finicky and experiencing periodic issues, often requiring intervention from the on-call team. he doesn’t tell the on call team he turned this off, suspecting that after a day or so something downstream will blow up. Then it does, he appears out of nowhere to save the day with the precise solution and looks like a genius f…

At my place we would wonder why the alert was turned off which would most likely have been audit logged in some way. Perhaps they only play chaos monkey in systems where you can change things anonymously.

Re: Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It

#30
post #13
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroism as described in this slideshow prevents anyone from realizing/accepting that they need to hire the appropriate headcount.

Not really. At a mature org, if anyone is putting in over 40 hours a week, management should he investigating. It's a warning flag either way.

Management frequently does not care so long as nobody is complaining hard enough.
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