97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 4. Four Engineers of an SRE Seder

Jacob Scott

Stripe

During Seder, families recite a passage addressing the questions one might ask about the Passover holiday. The questions, presented from the points of view of four children, help pass the importance of the holiday down the generations. Here I present four software engineers asking about the importance of reliability.

The selfish engineer asks, “Why is your reliability so poor?” By using the word your and not our, the selfish engineer disclaims responsibility for reliability. Life is certainly easier when reliability is your job, not our job—but reliability is more and more frequently a collective responsibility.

To him, we must explain the importance, both to himself and to his team, of owning his code in production. As he decides what sort of observability to add to his features, which queries to make to data stores, or whether to push back on a resource-intensive feature request, this engineer—like every other—affects the behavior and reliability of production. None of us can avoid this power over production, and if we avoid responsibility for it, we implicitly place that burden on others. Given the importance and inevitability of this responsibility, we ask him to consider whether he might find more career growth and success in embracing responsibility than shirking it.

The junior engineer asks, “It works on my machine. ...