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Observability is not logs, metrics, and traces. We need to have a control loop over our data. We also need to have appropriate observability. We need to have only the minimum amount of essential complexity relating to the features that we build and not unnecessary complexity that’s related to technical debt. No teams should have to do too many operations and scaling the machines out of control without appropriate control mechanisms is a recipe for disaster. Your team’s mission is to deliver reliable service that’s sufficiently reliable. This means that we have to think about not just, can our fleet of machines scale-out, but also are we paging our humans to death? Are we doing too much ops work in order to keep our systems running? Because chances are that doing ops work all the time is not what your team’s mission is.

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We have to understand what our customers are doing and whether we’re meeting their expectations and make sure that we’re delivering that level of service, but also not over-delivering such that we leave enough room for innovation in our code basis, rather than feeling frozen in place by excessive reliability requirements. But the short of it is that we have to measure. So ordinarily I would spend a while talking about service level objectives, but you can refer back to my talk from the LeadDev New York from last year where I talk about appropriate reliability and scalability.

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So what’s our goal as software engineers and as software engineering managers? Our goal is to make sure that we’re delivering features alongside appropriate reliability and scalability.

The consultants decide that, management decides that, but I just have to use whatever shit they give me.įortunately, there is a better way, and we don’t have to live in these dysfunctional organizations that reward mediocrity or make work work. Where the attitude is, you know what? I’m just here to do my job. Situations where people set up an environment where they’re completely disempowered from doing anything. Where people adopt resume or promotion driven development, where people almost have too much autonomy over building things that are not necessarily the most impactful thing that they should be doing. Or what about situations where people get rewarded for doing shiny things that don’t necessarily deliver impact. We’re going to build it from scratch again. So, you know what, all that old stuff, push it away. I’ve got a massively different need than anything ever invented before. I’m a snowflake, I’ve got massively gigantic scale. What do we promote them for? And how do we make sure that we’re growing and rewarding the right set of people? If your culture is one that says it wasn’t invented here, there’s no possible way this could work here. And people had, even worse, the wrong incentives. That road is paved with good intentions, no one intends to introduce technical debt, but yet, somehow when people do introduce technical debt, it’s subsequent people that come after them, that end up saddled with it. How? Well, it turns out, the focus on the user turned out to result in people having a lot of pain that was very self-inflicted. And people really did take to heart that they wanted to put the user first, but this resulted in a lot of miserable humans.

You have brains in your head, you have hands on the keyboard, you can steer yourself any direction you go toward, but which direction should you go? Once upon a time, I worked in an organization that wanted really much to take care of its customers, but it had many, many different ways of doing everything because this was a very large organization.

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