Is Our Team as Reliable as Our Systems? - SREcon22 EMEA

Are our teammates learning from each other? Are our teammates comfortable to ask literally anything? Does our team have heroes? Are they overwhelmed? Are our new members getting the support they need to succeed? Are new members living up to the team’s expectations? Is our team growing but not scaling? Most importantly, is our team ready for future challenges and changes?

Our organisations may set their own sets of skills and characteristics that define us as SREs, but we must not forget: The path that led each one of us here, is different, and we need our paths to converge. In this talk, we will discuss what threatens an SRE team's well-being, as well as what we can do to bring some balance, and make it resilient for the future.

Transcript

1. SREcon22 Amsterdam @manjiki effie mouzeli
6. * A Colleague that Makes Everything
8. ⨳ One onboarding fits all ⨳ Hiring faster than we can onboard ⨳ “Will learn on the job” ⨳ No onboarding process revision and/or retrospective @manjiki
9. ⨳ Same expectations from different people ⨳ ⨳ Assumed knowledge ⨳ ⨳ “Work harder” ⨳ ⨳ Longer tenure, more assumptions ⨳ ⨳ Fear of getting caught ⨳
10. ⨳ Undocumented knowledge ⨳ Includes technical debt, and bad habits ⨳ May become lost @manjiki
11. ⨳ Pick up more work ⨳ Pick up the HARD work ⨳ Intimate knowledge of the infra ⨳ Are expected to step up ⨳ Unwillingly, prevent growth
12. ⨳ Pick up more work ⨳ Pick up the HARD work ⨳ Intimate knowledge of the infra ⨳ Are expected to step up ⨳ Unwillingly, prevent growth
13. ⨳ NOT about age ⨳ ⨳ People hired at different “eras” of the org ⨳ ⨳ Generations have similar habits, and run on different gears ⨳ ⨳ Different treatment by the org ⨳ @manjiki
14. ⨳ Louder voices are more heard ⨳ Opportunity to push personal agendas ⨳ Team gets used to self-managing & self organising @manjiki
15. Power & knowledge imbalance Super heroes still carry the team Low bus factor Low confidence Lack of initiative, creativity, and sense of responsibility
17. ⨳ Create a safe for learning environment⨳ ⨳ Our paths are not the same ⨳ ⨳ We are equal, but different ⨳
18. ⨳ SRE curriculum ⨳ Provide courses or create them @manjiki
19. ⨳ Incentives to promote mentoring ⨳ Mentoring hours or office hours ⨳ Team sponsors each other ⨳ Knowledge index
20. ⨳ Do pair site reliability engineering ⨳ Share tools and processes ⨳ Builds trust, creates bonds ⨳ Best things come in pairs
21. ⨳ Make a short visits to other teams ⨳ ⨳ See how they work ⨳ ⨳ Interface with, form relationships ⨳ ⨳ Learn! ⨳ @manjiki
22. ⨳ Bear in mind different backgrounds ⨳ Career milestones ⨳ Be explicit of what’s expected
24. * with some management buy-in
25. @manjiki
26. SREcon22 Amsterdam @manjiki All images were generated by the Midjourney Bot https://www.midjourney.com/home/
27. ⨳ Poor onboarding ⨳ Unrealistic expectations and assumptions ⨳ Tribal knowledge ⨳ Super Heroes ⨳ Generational gaps ⨳ Lack of leadership ⨳ Knowledge is Key ⨳ Address knowledge gaps ⨳ Mentorship & Sponsorship ⨳ Pairing ⨳ Expose members to their surroundings ⨳ Realistic Expectations @manjiki