97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 57. The Human Baseline in SRE

Effie Mouzeli

Wikimedia Foundation

There’s no such thing as an SRE school. Site reliability engineering is a unique profession because the requirements to become an SRE are very broad, and the skills are not part of the curriculum of the average computer science degree. Organizations hire SREs with the assumption that they code well, have deep understanding of systems, know monitoring and alerting, can run any service, can debug production issues, can improve performance—and pull a rabbit out of their hat.

To have such range may seem superhuman, but instead requires a deep curiosity for how things work as well as the ability to learn from here and there. To be fair, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to know all that right from the get-go; we all come from different backgrounds and learn differently. Few of us can be deep experts among so many domains, so instead, we should rely on one another to keep leveling up each other’s skills.

Leveling up should be a synthesis of mentoring and personal effort. Mentoring can have a profoundly positive effect on teams, improving the knowledge of both the mentor and mentee and creating stronger bonds. However, because mentoring requires time, energy, dedication, and, of course, good will, it is considered additional work. It usually doesn’t count on performance reviews, is not recognized as delivering ...