I have worked in a role as an SRE previously. It was kinda daunting at first, and then in the middle, it looked like I was doing politics instead of just shipping software.
It scared the hell out of me, and not because I don’t like software, but because I despise having to defend and prepare for situations which I hadn’t even fathomed before.
I was always on high alert, or most of the time, because I don’t know who, later on the chain of command, would then come at my throat to slit it because of some deployment. Or worse, when always having to defend for deployments that the development team prepared but hadn’t tested thoroughly and they NEEDED to have that in production because someone from upper management or a director told the rest of the staff to do.
And if you didn’t comply you would be flagged as a detractor of the operations, that hindered the whole ordeal. And if you complied and things got accepted, merged, but then went south and the server went down, you ran the risk of getting screwed.
So then, at a certain level in the middle of the processes, it seemed that we were doing more politics in the end, than merely shipping software. And I despised it, it sucked the life out of me, because I just wanted to do my job, and maybe, now thinking about it, the SRE role wasn’t fit for me… Or maybe what the company at the time was expecting of us SREs at the time was just way more ahead than what was actually supposed to be delivered.
Should we be stelwards and guardians of production? Should Ops do it? Who should be liable if a system went down? Can we have these ongoing discussions and come to conclusions? Oh, no, wait! Another critical system is down and there is a warroom starting, I guess urgent matters will have to be taken care firstly.
And then, your job is not just doing the technical part, it is going through meetings, getting behind teams and having to evangelize them of the practices that should be followed, but everyone is just too much on the fasttrack of doing stuff and shipping that they don’t have time to look at the protocols. Those? Garbage, just a bunch of unnecessary bureaucracy… that is, until a system goes down, because of an unplanned and failed release that took with it the production server and customer suffered.
Gosh, how I love working with IT, but at the same time despise having to play the babysitter role between angry managers that want features delivered, developers that know no better, and a few of mindless product managers that just care about metrics on a Jira board.
I wanted to do my job, but always, or almost always it seemed that time was against the clock and a new urgent thing surged for us to do. There was never enough time to think and consider the next steps, everything was reactive…
And then I am deeply considering if it is just a paradigm shift, a culture change, or even me, that would need to change into another more fitting role, I don’t know.
But definetly, one thing that I am not comfortable with, is having to deal with the politics when trying to ship software. Gosh, those SUCK. But then, I guess, it is just the nature if the job… or is it? Right?