SRECon2017 Training New SRES Panel

Skills To Look For SREs

  • Engineer background
  • Should be able to teach themselves*
  • Focus -> Learn about the tech
  • Shouldn't resistance to change
  • Impose changes
  • Being able to learn new skills
  • Good reverse engineers
  • No backward thinkers
  • See the big pictures
  • Jack of all trades
  • Make decisions with data

Good SREs

  • Finding the root cause
  • How are you going to software yourself out of the problem
  • Follow the scientific method for solving an issue
  • Ability to say No

New SREs

  • Read documentation and updating it
  • Understand what skills you need to learn for your day to day operation
  • Ask questions
  • Everyone is doing SRE. Learn what your team is doing first and the work yourself outerwear.
  • Trust everyone to be doing the right thing.
  • Learn the tools
  • Make sure you join a company with SRE training
  • Find friendly Sr. SRE to learn from them. A SRE should want to share all his knowledge to grown other people.
  • Learn how engineers develop. Learn their tooling

Most Important Training

  • Bootcamps
  • Make them use your product
  • Teach some of the soft parts.
  • Working with a distributed team.
  • Make sure people can run the scary scripts. Make it easy to rerun script in production and feel safe.
  • Chapter 28 in SRE book
  • Allow people to fail.

Team Factors

  • Guide to the answer, don’t give them the answer.
  • Don’t assume they know everything.
  • Feedback is very important
  • Be ready to take the feedback
  • Don’t give the a task. Give them a problem
  • Give them solutions and make they can pick between them.
  • Over Explain
  • Reverse engineer a service
  • What would it happen games?
  • Share wars stories with new SRE. It will make the feel that is okay to failed.

Other

  • Training new SRE is valuable to finding holes.
  • What is the learning plan for this before
  • Things that are important for SREs need to happen a cross an organization. If this is not the case you don’t really have a SRE team.
  • Start working on things that you don’t want to be doing 6 months down the line.
  • Make sure the CEO knows what the SRE team is and doing for the company.
  • Use software engineers to help with the backlog.
  • Tell people the benefit of a SRE. Use case studies
  • Make it easy for engineer to rotate through SRE (Catch and Release)
    • Most of the time it’s will be a catch.