Seeking SRE

Part IV. The Human Side of SRE

• How do we keep SRE teams safe for the people in them?

• We used to think humans were the cause of most reliability and resiliency problems, but what if they are actually the solution? What is going on in their heads anyway?

• What are the mental health aspects to SRE that we are not paying (sufficient) attention to?

• On-call is a terrible idea; we should stop.

• How do people relate to complex systems?

• Can we do more with SRE than just make things better for the computers; can it be used to make our world better, too?

Discuss.

You Know You’re an SRE When…

…you get a text in the middle of the night and your partner isn’t even curious because they know your other bae is just PagerDuty.

…you text “hello” and the reply is “uh oh!”

…you get confused for a second every time HR tells you that you have “Time Off In Lieu” (TOIL) coming.

…you write a postmortem every time dinner doesn’t turn out right.

…talking with your family you use the phrase, “What are the metrics of success?” and then they look at you funny.