
SRE as a Lifestyle Choice - mbellotti
https://medium.com/@bellmar/sre-as-a-lifestyle-choice-de9f5a82d73d
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CobrastanJorji
This was a fantastic and enlightening read, thank you.

I'm always impressed when I read about the exploits of the US Digital Service.
As I understand it, they have basically no direct power. They can walk in, say
"I'm here from the White House," and anything beyond that is chutzpah, effort,
and nightmare-difficulty cat herding. Getting whole departments to volunteer
to try a different hiring program from that humble starting point is
staggeringly impressive, and I think the author's underselling it.

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oftenwrong
>There was a really interesting talk at Strange Loop this year about how
quirks in code layout fool programmers into chasing their tails thinking
they’re improving performance when they’re not.

I think the author may be referring to this talk:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TLSBdHe1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TLSBdHe1A)

~~~
robocat
Absoluteky astounding take on optimisation - one example uses techniques to
get 25% speedup in SQLite - wow!

I couldn't find discussion on HN - maybe because YouTube doesn't have
canonical link addresses for videos?

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petard
"White House HR once tried to reject a candidate whose previous employer was
Github because he didn’t specifically list experience with version control on
his resume."

This happens in the private sector too, had this with an internal recruiter
that had no idea about the role and was only checking for keywords.

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twblalock
This is why those stupid lists of skills are important to include on resumes.

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martius
This is why I explicitly avoid these lists and highlight some core tech which
should be meaningful for other engineers. I try to use terms specific enough
to implicitly include several skills.

My intuition is that if my CV is ignored by a recruiter, it's because
engineering is not involved enough in the sourcing process for the company,
and that is a terrible signal.

~~~
FooHentai
From the other side of the screen, I see a lot of people inside organisation's
trying to hire and becoming annoyed when their recruiters send them CVs that
aren't ideal matches.

So this cuts both ways. If you want engineering to have eyes-on early, that
necessarily means they're gonna see some CVs that don't fit. Recruiters tend
to avoid this because of the 'signals' they're getting back from their client.

~~~
martius
Relation between engineering and sourcing also works the other way:
engineering can teach recruiters to read CVs better.

A minimum would be to have the recruiter explain why they thought the CV was
worth a review and the engineer can then correct them.

Also, in the companies I worked for, recruiters where checking GitHub or
LinkedIn when they needed more signal.

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teaachrighr838
SRE is a framework of critical thinking applied to computing.

Our society seems more interested rigidly regurgitating a customized framework
and avoiding critical thinking of their own.

It’s better for business, they say, saves money.

This is what folks like Cal Newport discuss in Deep Work, and Feynman meant by
ignoring other people’s work. Paulo Freire warned about importing others
models.

This feels too much like thinking SRE is some literal thing. Label life stuff
in your own way. That’s having work/life balance, IMO.

I don’t want to cart that shit around all the time.

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hunter-gatherer
Working in tech in the government, this resonated with me. The author
summarized things well. Another problem in my agency is that only HR is
allowed to construct job postings. We provide inputs, but they put it all
together. I have seen this work against us consistently. We also aren't
allowed any variance during interviews. All interview questions must be
identical across all interviewees. This rule prohibits follow-up questions.
Believe it or not, it is difficult to have a meaningful interview and to
properly guage one's experience with thid handicap.

Apologies for errors. I'm on mobile.

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peterwwillis
The lens is that of an SRE, but what the author is basically doing is applying
an iterative improvement process, or learning cycle, or decision cycle. There
are many examples of them in many industries. Many of them are used to improve
quality, but they can also be used to fix crappy process. I find they work
best when implemented asynchronously (e.g. an outsider who is pissed off
decides to fix the broken thing, and goes around and helps improve different
parts of the process)

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klyrs
Tenth paragraph defines the acronym, "Site Reliability Engineering." Is there
enough room to expand that in the title?

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warent
I think it's very common knowledge that's what the acronym means. I've never
worked at a company that didn't just say SRE

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Fnoord
SRE has a lot of different meanings, even in the science & technology world
[1]. (I'll refrain from claiming that such is "common knowledge".)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRE)

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walshemj
Very interesting read as I am considering a Grade 6 or 7 Technical role in the
UK civil service (right at the top end of the GS scale) and am looking at how
they recruit and to tailor my cv to suit.

I am lucky in that I have done board style interviews before and have contacts
who know how the system that most UK techies wont have.

I think Marianne ought to touch base with Loren DeJonge Schulman at War on the
rocks as She has written on the hiring challenges the US government faces

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cagenut
I thought this was going to be about error-budgeting your carbohydrate SLO in
your dietary SLA.

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jedberg
tl;dr: We applied the principles of root cause analysis to a non-technical
process (hiring) and it made things better.

You should still read the article though, it has a lot of eye-opening info
about how broken government hiring is.

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pram
Some more blog ideas:

Can you apply DevOps thinking to things that don’t involve computers?

Can you apply Agile thinking to things that don’t involve computers?

Can you apply the UNIX philosophy to things that don’t involve computers?

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wlesieutre
The UNIX philosophy comes down to making tools that each do one thing and do
it well. It's already the same philosophy as a workshop full of hammers,
screwdrivers, squares, saws, planes, etc.

Put them together and you can build a cabinet. But you probably wouldn't want
a "cabinet making tool" that tries to do every job required in the cabinet
making process.

If anything, all of the philosophies that we apply to computers and
technologies are taken from other areas. Of course you can take them back out
and apply them elsewhere! Computers are a very recent addition in the grand
scheme of things.

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jkoberg
What the hell is SRE?

~~~
adrianpike
Site Reliability Engineering

