Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. Calculating The ROI of Training Investment

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be Appendix A of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario of a company that is planning to hire 20 SREs in a calendar year and wants to assess the potential return on investment (ROI) of spinning up a training program. We need to estimate the cost to hire and onboard a new SRE for the “Sink or Swim” (no training) and “with training” scenarios (Table A-1).

Table A-1. Hypothetical ROI calculation for training investment

Factor	“Sink or Swim”	With Training
Time to find and onboard a new hire	12 weeks
Effort to find and onboard a new hire	1 week recruiter/interviewer time $10,000 in advertising, travel, relocation etc.
Time from onboarding to fully actualized and productive SRE	12 weeks	8 weeks 4 weeks = rate at which training accelerates ramp-up
Time to complete onboarding training	0	1 week
Effort to train	0	1 week mentor/instructor time per new hire
Rate of attrition within the first year	10%	5%

The annual cost to hire and ramp-up the new SREs ...