Episode 436: Paralyzed by checkboxes and I'm on a "must keep happy" list

11 snips

Nov 25, 2024

The discussion kicks off with a playful take on software jargon, highlighting the challenges of clear communication in tech. Listeners learn about the pitfalls of checkbox-driven development and its effects on creativity in reliability-focused environments. The speakers tackle blame culture in postmortems, stressing the need for accountability without fear. They also delve into corporate dynamics during organizational shifts, emphasizing teamwork and the nuances of aligning personal goals with management expectations. Humor and insights weave throughout, making it both entertaining and enlightening.

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ANECDOTE

Blameful Postmortems

Dave recounts a post-mortem process at a previous company.
The goal was to assign blame and the dollar cost of incidents to specific teams.

ADVICE

Balancing Reliability and Velocity

The ideal number of production incidents isn't zero for most software businesses.
Higher reliability levels incur greater costs; balance reliability and velocity.

INSIGHT

Unsustainable Processes

Processes like manual spreadsheet reviews by leadership are unsustainable.
High-paid leaders will eventually stop reviewing spreadsheets due to time constraints.

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Marcus Zackerberg asks,

I work at a megacorp whose recent focus has been on reliability. The company already has mature SLO coverage outage response standards, but my org has taken it to the extreme this year. For example…

There is now a dashboard of “service health” that is reviewed by engineering leadership. In it, services are marked “unhealthy” permanently upon a failing check (think HTTP /health). To return to a “healthy” state, one must manually explain the failure with an entry in a spreadsheet, which must be reviewed and signed off.

Increasingly I feel this has the opposite effect, discouraging nuanced work to improve reliability and instead becoming “checkbox driven development”, as well as impacting our ability to ship on our existing roadmap items. Additionally, our tech lead is fairly junior and frequently fails to communicate the org’s expectations to the team, leading to us being under the gun of the reliability dashboard often.

Any advice on how to make the best of this situation?
Hi Guys! I’m a senior engineer at a mid sized software company. The company has had a couple of high level departures recently, and during that process I’ve come into the knowledge that my name is one of a handful on a list of “engineers to keep happy”. I feel like this information should be of use to me, but I’m unsure on how I should leverage it.

On one hand it’s nice to know I’m valued, but I think I’d rather be explicitly told that or better yet, receive dollars in lieu of praise. I’m also at the point in my career where I’m looking for staff roles, and the topic of promotion has come up several times with my manager. He supports me (and I believe him), but we agree that it would be difficult to make the case to the business.

What do I do with this new knowledge, and is there a way to benefit from it without accidentally triggering a preemptive search for my own replacement?