97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 69. Heroes Are Necessary, but Hero Culture Is Not

Lei Lopez

Formerly Shopify

Building healthy, sustainable cultures requires understanding the difference between heroes and hero culture. Heroes are made in crises, when people perform extraordinary tasks to save the day, but that doesn’t mean you should encourage the catastrophes to force people to become heroes—that’s what hero culture does.

Think about when your SREs receive widespread praise. In my experience, it’s usually in response to a nighttime incident when someone has sacrificed sleep to save the day. Events like this garner praise from coworkers inside and outside of engineering. Yes, we must recognize incident responders performing heroic acts, but it becomes dangerous when it veers into glorifying this work.

True heroes spring to action when they are needed but wouldn’t wish anyone else, including themselves, into those awful situations. SREs in a hero culture push an organization toward an operations-versus-development mindset, the very mindset site reliability engineering is meant to move away from. Developers neglect sharing responsibility for their services with SREs. Why worry about shipping the more reliable option when there’s an SRE on call to save the day?

Hero culture therefore discourages preventive work. If work is only recognized when resolving an emergency, people are encouraged to focus on work ...