#66 - Unpacking 2025 SRE Report’s Damning Findings

I know it’s already six months into 2025, but we recorded this almost three months ago. I’ve been busy with my foray into the world of tech consulting and training —and, well, editing these podcast episodes takes time and care.

This episode was prompted by the 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report, which dropped some damning but all-too-familiar findings:

* 53% of orgs still define reliability as uptime only, ignoring degraded experience and hidden toil

* Manual effort is creeping back in, reversing five years of automation gains

* 41% of engineers feel pressure to ship fast, even when it undermines long-term stability

To unpack what this actually means inside organizations, I sat down with Sebastian Vietz, Director of Reliability Engineering at Compass Digital and co-host of the Reliability Enablers podcast.

Sebastian doesn’t just talk about technical fixes — he focuses on the organizational frictions that stall change, burn out engineers, and leave “reliability” as a slide deck instead of a lived practice.

We dig into:

* How SREs get stuck as messengers of inconvenient truths

* What it really takes to move from advocacy to adoption — without turning your whole org into a cost center

* Why tech is more like milk than wine (Sebastian explains)

* And how SREs can strengthen—not compete with—security, risk, and compliance teams

This one’s for anyone tired of reliability theatrics. No kumbaya around K8s here. Just an exploration of the messy, human work behind making systems and teams more resilient.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.srepath.com