This article was originally published on
Enable Architect
Many people have had the insight that DevOps is about people.
Often, they will summarize it as
“DevOps is about empathy”.
I have found,
however,
that idealizing empathy is just as bad as thinking that DevOps
is about a single technology.
I remember when I first heard Paul Bloom talking on
Rationally Speaking.
Julia Galef introduced him by saying:
“I’m writing a book on empathy,”
psychologist Paul Bloom tells people.
They respond warmly,
until he follows up with,
“I’m against it.”
Contents
SRE are different by design
Many of the people who are titled,
at times,
Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
—
or DevOps Engineers,
or Production Engineers,
or Platform Engineers,
or other terms that indicate the same responsibilities
connected to DevOps practices
—
are fundamentally and intentionally different than many of the people
they have to work with.
In order to be good at this job,
you need a reasonably solid ability to program and a
reasonably solid ability to handle operational issues.
This is an uncommon skill set.
It often is acquired by starting as a software developer
or an IT administrator and slowly gaining complementary skills.
This means there are few truly “junior” people in that role.
Gaining the necessary skills and experience takes time.
Sympathy vs. empathy
Being more senior than someone,
and having skills they lack,
makes it difficult to empathize.
It is difficult and inaccurate to guess what someone might be
struggling with or what they need help with.
Site Reliability Engineers who try to use empathy imagine
themselves in the other person’s role and will
build tools and processes that would be good for themselves
if they were in that role.
In contrast,
sympathy begins with trusting that people
have unique insight into their own lived experiences.
A Site Reliability Engineer focusing on sympathy will
start by talking to people,
understanding their problems,
and believing them when describing pain points.
A Site Reliability Engineers focusing on sympathy will
involve others in the decision process to solve those problems.
A Site Reliability Engineer focusing on sympathy will
release partial solutions to focus groups to see
how they fail when used by people different from them.
It starts with caring
Sympathy.
Compassion.
Trust.
These are the main tools a Site Reliability Engineer
uses daily to make DevOps possible.
Developing those is easy,
as long as you
care about people.
Caring about people is the only thing that can’t be taught.
I cannot teach anyone to care about people.
If you do care about people,
you already have the most important skill needed to succeed as an SRE.