Finding the Heart of SRE – How to Build an Empathetic SRE Practice – The SRE Show EP 10

it Hi everybody. And welcome. We are here for the SRE show SRE shows repeating series on Textron DB sponsored by our friends at lightstep and we have some friends from lightstep joining us here in particular my co-host Austin Parker.

How are you, Austin? Wonderful as always. How are you Mitch?

Yeah doing well good good to hear we're recording this leading up to the holidays as you can see from my Star Wars Star Wars for you. So I think we're already like let's just jump to the holidays. Everyone's in the the holiday spirits.

Yeah, we are getting ready looking forward to 2023. That's for sure. Again light step is our sponsorship.

It's this series please check out past episodes. So we have on Textron dot TV a lot of great content there with Austin and number of folks from my step but also people from other companies and practitioners things like that. So I think you'll see some of that today as well.

So before I get into kind of doing introductions love to have you share a little bit. I know we talked about this topic about the heart of Essie SRE and I'd love to Austin. Have you say just a little bit about why this topic is so important and we introduce our guests and kind of jump into it.

Yeah. I think the you know, it's been a really interesting couple of years here for the tech industry hasn't it? And what we are seeing over and over is that at the end of the day, you know, you can invest a lot in technology.

You can vest a lot in tools and hardware and and all sorts of things but the difference between, you know, really successful and organizations and ones that are less successful. I believe comes down to people and how you treat them and how they feel so Let's talk about how SRE can help enable the sort of empathetic workplace that we would all like to be a part of. Hypothetic workplace empathetic for each other as well as leaders for their people, right?

Yeah. Good. Well, let's jump right into this.

I'd love to have our town introduce themselves a little bit about them. And also we're there from Paige winner. You start out.

Sure thing. Hi everyone. I'm Paige Cruz.

I'm calling in from Portland, Oregon the beautiful Pacific Northwest. I'm a senior developer Advocate at chronosphere and open source observability solution at scale and this topic is really near and dear to my heart because I think we over rotate on testing sres for their technical skills and their Linux know how and I think we could do a lot more testing of the EQ as light step calls it the emotional intelligence and growing our sres communication skills. So I'm very excited to get into this topic today.

Very good and Adriana, welcome good to see you here as always once you jump in names. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

My name is Adriana. Villela. I'm a senior developer Advocate at lightstep.

Yeah, this this topics is also near and dear to my heart because you know, I've managed teams have been that have been on call I have been on call before so it's yeah, I can't wait to dig into the topic. Excellent, excellent and last but not least Steven towns and welcome Steve. Hi, how's it going?

I'm Stephen Townsend. I am also a developer Advocate at squid up. I'm from Auckland New Zealand.

I have a background in performance engineering and more recently SRE and a couple of years ago. I I burned out and so this topic is pretty dear to me because I I just think there's enough human suffering in the world and I don't think we should be adding to it in the world of technology. It was supposed to be reducing toil not and burning people in the SRU role.

I'd love to go back to you Austin and have you kind of start the conversation? How do you as a leader as well as a practitioner yourself? How do you think about how to care?

We keep the empathetic the people go to front and center of we're trying to eat a lot of things done. We're under a lot of pressure sometimes. Yeah situations.

you know, I think it's actually it's really interesting that this is the That we have recorded there were recording this one. We are right because not only are we, you know kind of close to the holidays and there's a whole Spectrum. of you know This is the slow time right?

This is when for a lot of people at least we get to actually unplug for a week or two and you know have that traditional sort of Christmas to New Year break. I think for many people at least that work for West Coast at companies or just any kind of like, you know, non-consumer facing Tech at least, right? but what we also are in the middle of is a whole lot of bossism happening over at everyone's favorite Social Network Twitter and I think you know to kind of skip ahead to the end almost you can connect them quite a bit of the Gospel of you know empathy and SRE.

to sort of broader Trends in it's effectively not being a a******. Like this sort of generalized. Hey, we want workplaces that are diverse.

We won't workplaces that feel like they actually give a crap about people, you know, and we want to do it for sort of the gazi, you know, feel good reasons and not just the business value reasons right one thing to sit back and say, You know diversity inclusion High EQ all these sort of things improve business outcomes and their studies that show this right like we can go you can go and look it up. This is why people that whose jobs are to make money will do it, but there's a reaction there's been a reaction to that and we see that right now especially Visa V Twitter or it's like, nope, all that emotional stuff all of the heart and empathy and everything just needs to be thrown out the window pause it to the to the wolves that doesn't matter where it's we're here to do hardcore software development hardcore operations. And that is I believe we're actually looking at you know, what's gonna probably be a multi-year sort of.

tension between these two extremes right like For a long time the sort of emotional argument has had a lot of Sway and now you're starting to see people react very strongly to it. So with that in mind. Let's jump back to the beginning, you know.

Beyond sort of the Generic. Hey, we don't want to be jerks to our co-workers. Right?

We don't want to burden people and burn them out because we believe that People that are burnt out don't do good work. Like what's the reason? What is our rationale or can we Define a rationale?

for empathy from the SRE perspective to both customers, you know coworkers, whatever right like Where do we think the value in this approach lies? business value as it were lies and like if your employees are happy because they're not tired and pissed off that they're tired. Then I feel like the want to give you more like I've always felt.

I'm the type of personality when if someone says like Thou shalt do over time work. My immediate visceral reaction is no but if I feel like I'm valued the work that I'm doing is interesting people have my back. Then I'm gonna be a lot more giving, you know, all it won't even be a problem to get more workout of me because I'm I'm content and I feel respected and I think that's the worst part like my first job out of school was at this company where like we were told we had to work the weekend and we're told on a Friday at like 5 PM like that's not cool.

So I I developed some like pretty early like over time work PTSD as a result of that and and for me like I don't that kind of behavior is not cool at all. I mean that did not make me want to work harder for those guys. I think that technology work and the business that you know, the world that we live in is so complex now that it's full of unknowable unknowns, right?

And so technology workers, ultimately creative work and in a way and that context because people can only really function in that domain if they're relaxed and feel calm and Trust the people around them and the only way to succeed and like the digital era is sort of through trial and error experimentation learning from failure. That's the only path forward. So that's for me.

That's the value proposition. If you can't do that safely experiment and fail and learn from it then how are you supposed to get ahead are you supposed to find a path that leads towards your organizational outcome? It actually drill in on that for a second.

Sorry to because I think you're like you actually hit on something really important there right that this is a creative feel. This is a create, you know, even and and any aspect of building software, especially or running like Running software systems is creative like it's not even. I don't want to say even SRE because that feels like it's diminishing it somehow but I think anything where you're You know working with software working on software building and/or operating it like those are all sort of creative endeavors.

And we dismiss that at our peril. Conversely you can also see a whole bunch of people that are like walking around with their chat GPT transcripts arguing like look this is gonna put you out of a job, right? This isn't creative.

This is just wrote, you know, you just know the magic incantation to spit into the machine to get the right answers out. I think there's a exam. There's a tension there that We need to figure out how to resolve like is it how do we prove that it's creative, right?

And I think some people hear the word creative and think about people good, you know doing painting or making music but isn't just creative tackling very complex fuzzy situations, which you can't just follow a right process for But again contend just troubleshooting right trying to figure out what's going on. That's like whether you're an engineer or you're an SRE or software person or someone in the field troubleshooting a device that takes some creativity it takes skills and there may be a set of steps to kind of help you but even you know, that doesn't work nine times out of 10 at least my experience. So and that's just one of you know one small facet of the SRE role.

I should think about SRE more as like being Bob Ross. Okay, kubernetes clusters happy little yellow. Happy animal.

I'm so Jeff. That's an oxymoron. I feel like empathy is really that foundation for creating.

The kind of environment where people feel open and they can trust you to give the hard feedback. I think the burden of SRE is we have a captive user base people have to use our tools at the company and sometimes that means Our users won't feel comfortable sharing feedback. If they think we're going to take it some sort of way.

So I think sres need to have them empathy for their end users and be aware of their blind spots and I would also say from like the catch Point State of SRE 2022 survey, which said like shockingly senior engineering leaders are really out of touch with the SRE individual contributor experience. So I I think empathy kind of goes both ways one for the sres to have empathy for their internal users and then for leadership to have empathy to listen and empower the sres to hear what it is like to carry the pager and to hear and look back at what the last two years to your point Austin. It's been a wild couple of years.

We need to be looking at the impact to our employees cumulatively. We can't just look on a quarter by quarter or look forward basis. I think it's by Yeah, showing a little bit in my age.

I remember going to a personality tests and Conference and one of the things we always talked about was type A personalities. Those are the leaders and But they don't care about people right? They're only about results and they're only about the numbers and only about the outcome and they're definitely are people like that.

But that was seen as what a good leader should look like you could be a leader in one of the other. Other categories but that was clearly where they came from and you know, there's since there's been Enneagram a lot of different things to talk about people who tend to go into CEO roles and all of that and a lot of it doesn't involve the empathy skill. And so I think sometimes that's kind of a natural things that happens with people who come leaders they have to figure out or hopefully they have to figure out how to compensate that say for that and then there are people who don't know not gonna become the CEOs and that comes the lead architect or the lead SRE but they have those characteristics too.

So you have everybody on the spectrum of Who are very empathetic and in tune with what's happening with people? What a great skill to have but you have folks that are clueless and maybe even need people around them to help them kind of give them signals, right? I mean interject some signals here and there.

so to to build off of that and to kind of take this in a slightly different direction, I think when we talk about empathy for Rhonda series, we we often and I think most people have done this on this conversation so far where we're impulse are our Are snap sort of framing is internal right? It's about how are we empath? How are we showing empathy for our users?

So Engineers, you know in this kind of on call Cycle that now one thing I want to just throw out there is that I think sres are also uniquely placed to have high levels of empathy for customers. And for like the actual, you know. not sort of an engineering end user but the external user of a product and it's because they're in a place where they usually have you know, where they can see the 30,000 foot View and they can really understand, you know performance and and sort of the problems that whatever the product is doing is maybe they don't know.

Not saying they have to be like an expert on every sort of customer use case, but they can at least understand they at least have that visibility in terms of top of a performance. So, how can we have you know? one what should the role be of sres in helping take that empathy for customers and then broadcasting it to you know product to CS to other like finding allies in these other sort of customer facing roles to help.

Again, like kind of bringing the entire organization up with them. You know, how do they find those allies? How do they communicate that to both peers and Leadership big question?

I feel like I went in a weird Direction with this one. Not really just to validate that there's only things I really appreciate in a lot of more recognition of is that kind of slides in slos around customer experience or user experience coming from the SRE perspective? Maybe it's from reference sometimes in or unservability tools, but It's interesting that the SRE role is seen or increasingly seen as kind of a voice of the customer at least part of that voice of the customer because we can now start to measure what some of those experiences are.

So I think you're seeing. Yeah, and just to tag on to that like I want to say I was talking to Alex a dogo who's over at Noble nine and they do slos obviously. but we had some conversations about Oh gosh, I cre roles is sort of a specific offshoot of this.

You want to give a quick tldr on the CRA role you you should because I probably do adjust this and you seem prepare more prepared. Oh boy. Okay.

I do not represent Google. I do not represent the origin of the cre role but as I understand it, it stands for customer reliability engineer and it is the concept of taking an SRE and giving giving them lending their time and experience to a case one specific customer to shore up that customers reliability practices or help them out. I don't know I don't think it's a I think it's temporary thing.

Yeah, I think it's like A point it's like a like. Oh you go in and then you have this. Big ball relaxing Consulting Arrangement or like it's it's mmm more Target.

Narrowly scoped might be the better way to think of it. Like you have specific sort of goals and targets and it's just like But it's it's that role. I thought it was cool idea.

Yeah, it's it's a very interesting idea. I think a lot of places. I mean it's also on this tangent like a lot of places do this to sort of in um calling a cre but they do it through It's actually interesting right because a lot of times it's done through the perspective of like oh, this is a consult like this is explicitly a Consulting Arrangement.

So you you know customer X when you sign up and you know, we we provide 25 hours of like expert. Support or you know, like implementation support or whatnot and a CS person and like a or a technical account manager some some customer success rule. Parachutes in sets you up and there you go.

I like the cre idea because it's a little it's It is more continuous in that right and it's not necessarily tied to the sort of explicit like oh we're gonna get you set up. With the tool, we're gonna get you set up on the platform. It's more like hey you what?

What are the problems you're having? Where are the problems that we can see that you're having because we can tell you know, like how do we blend our expertise and then like really help you kind of up level your thing? Create platforms do SRE stuff basically, right?

Yeah, like that's that's where the overlap is. I think it's I think it's a really interesting concept because I think there are situations where bringing in somebody totally outside to the organization to shine a light on things. There are certain conditions where that is more valuable than having someone on the inside who's maybe been focused on the problem too long or are themselves burned out in cynical and not able to to bring that fresh perspective, but I'd be curious for the group one.

Do you think it is helpful to have an outside perspective come in versus having the sres sort of lead the show. I think I'd agree with you that having someone who's you know, just a second pair of eyes is very helpful. Actually.

It could be even interesting if you could have them alongside the SRE so then you've got like the dueling perspectives and yeah, you know, you never know what you can get out of that kind of combination. Totally and Steven. I know you said you were burned out would a cre that would have come Sat by you saved you at the end of the day or no go they're doing today.

She have not in any sorry perspective, but more of a performance engineering as part of delivery perspective. And yeah, but I've generally because I worked in government and get the prices for most of my career and seeing external organizations come in and provide Consultants to do things and like nine hour 10 times. It's an absolute waste of time because it's just not that actual going in and understanding the context properly and we were part of an essay enablement team for a while.

So we were internal but essentially Consulting out to the rest of the organization to help uplift skills. And yeah, it was challenging because you go to a team you don't know anything about their technology, you know, not that much about the team and how they work. So we really have to figure out how we're going to do it.

So we would embed in the team for months we would do on call with them to go through their shared experience with them before they were trust us before you enough to put like to make observations and share with them and say, hey there's an opportunity here. So I think it's there's a lot of work to go in for an external person to to get to the point where they can be valuable. Yeah out of sense because we think I'll like you know as an external person you have like big Ideas, right but it's not until you get into the nitty-gritty of the organization where you're like, oh this might not actually work and I think there's nothing worse in terms of, you know, getting people to buy into your ideas and coming in and saying your stuff's crap and and people are like well have do you even like fully aware of why we did X and Y so, I I think it makes a lot of sense like what what just even in that role because like there's no way that you can get any movement otherwise, right.

So I mean, I guess it shows that it's it's a it can be a bit of a journey, but I'm curious was it worthwhile in the end. Do you feel like there was like value about it? After all that embedding time.

No, I really do. I think that we gain trust we we actually did get traction and find Opportunities. Yeah, but I think yeah, I think that's part of it as an SRE having empathy in an enablement context.

Anyway, having empathy for the team you wanting you might try to go and going it's so many issues but you got to go on and say they got to their place for a reason or maybe they inherited a bunch of stuff just go on with empathy and just you know, listen first before you start speaking. Yeah, I mean I would. Maybe take it not different side, but I think there's like two parts this as well.

Right? Like part of being empathetic is being able to do that listening right and do and and understand trying to understand things and not just kind of have talked but another part of empathy is being able to be direct and like Being able to kind of give the the important hard feedback sometimes right? So one thing that I have found just locally is you know people some people will hear empathy and they think that means that you are very, you know, Conflict adverse or it means that there's everyone has to agree or that everything has to be, you know Care Bear stare.

It's like no. that's like conflict is different than These are these are orthogonal Concepts you can have conflict with other people professionally about you know, technical things about all sorts of things and but you can do it in a way that is trying to build people up right like you can do it in a way that is you know safe versus unsafe and I would argue, you know, one of the things that I see derail so many teams is when people get into that habit of like, oh, this is a very, you know, I people talk about safety and they talk about like emotion that I am just gonna like keep stuff inside right? I'm not going to say the thing things that I think is I am convinced that they are like hurtful because they like off and you let this everything build up or you let resentment build up you let negative emotions and feelings kind of You know Drive interactions and that leads to much bigger problems down the line.

So it's yeah don't. Yeah, empathy is not. Conflict Free right like yeah, there's no sympathy you think you do is to like point out our our truths and like Elevate those hard truths to people right?

Like at least at that point then when you you say like, oh This is bad for X Y and Z reasons. This is hurting people for you know who and bar and q's reasons like we need to actually come out and put something down on paper. That's like this is why we're not doing it right.

It's like this is why the way the world is the way of the world and we can come back and reevaluate that later. But as long as there's something that can show like oh, this is why it's this way. It's the prioritized for this reason and that reason then at least there's a reference point, you know, at least there's something to go back to and say like, yeah.

Well, we don't have to read litigate this every two weeks because um, he decided right it's decided for now and we've put a tent, you know, we've put a timeline on it, but a deadline and we've put a decision good before X date. I wonder if is I went to a lunch and learn about how in the Pacific Northwest of America at least you'll meet a lot of people who are polite and nice but they are not actually kind which is kind of that distinction. I think you're drawing of it may feel polite to not bring up that builds are taking 20 minutes.

It's causing like daily health for you and your team but it would actually be the kind thing to do to maybe bring up the data in. A weekly meeting where it's expected to talk about things and to not, you know go off on slack about it, but to find the time and the place to actually address it and that's curious cuz in general I was gonna say how much of it is just us coasters. Are we the ones causing all y'all interactions didn't I worked at an organization?

It was a large financial institution and and it was that sort of attitude as well like people valued being, you know, nice over, you know sharing hard truths and I think it ended up hurting Folks at the end of the day because Everyone's just so scared of like stepping on each other's toes and stepping on each other's many kingdoms right like oh that's gonna offend VPX. Well, we can't do that and I think it all comes back to like fostering this environment where you feel like it's okay to like. Speak the truth.

Obviously don't be an ass about it. But speak the truth and like to feel comfortable to speak that truth and not feel like someone's gonna reprimand it reprimand you for like if I call out an issue, I don't want it to be to affect like my my mission my employee valuation because I try I tried to do the right thing. And and I think that's what end up becoming problematic in a lot of organizations is you try to do the right thing, but you don't have that safe space to be able to do the right thing you get commanded and then you you bottle it up like Austin was saying and well that's not good for anyone.

I'm gonna jump in because I have a recommendation. Well, first of all, let me say this there's a lot of ways to think about it empathy and defining it and you know to your point about nice oftentimes just being nice doesn't come off as being genuine. If you're not gonna follow it can be passive aggressive.

And a few years back. I met a person named Kim Scotch. She worked at Google and she was in charge of Google ad AdWords when they first rolled it out.

Anyway, I think is this definitely a place to leaders, but she has a really good book called red. Radical Candor. Mmm.

Yes, it's just being about how to be direct but be kind and you and actually not giving somebody tough feedback is actually more harmful. Then letting them know there's something kind of not working or let's figure out what we need to help you right or you know, hey, Hey Stephen I could tell about pay attention to the people side, right I could tell this is tough. But let's talk about what's going on.

You don't need to tell me everything. The last that thing I would say is I've always bristled at this saying of keep working personal life separate and don't bring personal into we're into work leave everything at home. And while they don't necessarily mean that you should come in and explain everything that's happening in your life to everybody and make it all about personal.

It's actually physically impossible for us to separate what's happening in our personal lives true or work lives. If you are having some tough things going on with the health of a family member or relationship Finance or whatever you're gonna bring that in with you to work with you talk about it or not. So I guess ultimately we just have to understand we're all people and we're bringing those things with us, whether we within we're that they're kind of seen or disgust we're not at all and it's just you need to give each other a little bit of room Grace and forgiveness to to work when those things are affecting us more than not so I think that actually full circles the conversation a lot of ways because that's really what the car that that's really the you know.

That's the line right? Like the people the group of people that think that you should that you are at work to work that none of this other, you know that we can all just be like little robot robots and what you do outside of nine to five or whatever is completely your business and has no impact on it versus people who don't believe that You know and I also life is another feature Flag by the way, so just turn it off. Right like I think and I think that there is you know, obviously everyone's different right like not everyone like I'm I am a type of person that when like certain types of like Bad things around my life makes me want to work more right because it's a great it's a way to you know.

Keep me from like spiraling off and some other direction. There are some people they're like that some people that don't I think it's really about I mean and this is like if I had to have like one really hot take to close out this whole thing on is I am a huge. I actually believe in like corporate D growth.

I think that they've keep reason that 90% of the problems that we talk about exist is because products and companies and organizations in general are way too big Like that is the fundamental problem. The there's a bunch of studies on this right about like what's the maximum social group for like one person? You know, there's I guess there's a Studies have shown like there's a fixed number right like 20 50 people whatever like you can only know this many people and they think beyond that it's like you start having sort of these fall off effects.

Well, why is it that we can like that people can sit around and say like, oh, yeah. No one person can only really know like really really know like 2050 people but we look at a company where it's okay for like one manager to have like 25 to 50 to 60 to 100 report, you know, like when you start getting these reporting change, right you're like well This seems like the same problem. Right?

Like that's the reason that things get all messed up because we are making these big big big big big big big you massively huge companies. Of course, there's gonna be an efficiency right? Of course people are gonna like, of course, we're gonna have to be nice but not kind because we're in Ace the these organizations these very large organizations are just socially intractable with human life.

Like our brains can't handle it. So we build in all this other stuff and you want to quick way to fix it. Just make the organization smaller.

Make them make them less big. That's all. It had 9,000 people.

Right like face how many people's meta have how many people does any of our companies have right like we don't probably need. We should probably be more okay with software that is like smaller and does less and maybe works less well. in trade for like people being able to not go crazy every day of their lives.

Okay, I'll take you up on that one. I will say I hate the platformization of everything. I hate that I don't know a meditation app that I loved and use now is trying to sell me freaking yoga videos.

I wanted audio only put me to sleep meditation now it wants to run my whole freaking life and I'm really over that so I'm with you there, but I'm like Up. I'd like to see some of these companies have a little bit better organization internally or not to solve a problem with tech but like gosh how much miscommunication could be solved with a simple service catalog. Even if it's just a spreadsheet with the name of the service and who owns it and what language it's in.

I mean there's I think I think a lot of the inefficiencies of a big org come from people having silos of knowledge and having their preferred tools and then a company not reigning those in to say no we all will love and use Confluence and we will make you all Confluence power users. So you know how to use it. Yeah.

I I totally agree with you on that because I've worked at organizations with you know, you've you've got the silos and and it's not just like each Silo does its own thing, but then you've got like The Silo has its own kingdom, but forbid if you try to like interfere with the kingdom of one Silo now you're threatening them. And we gotta like stop with this mentality and we gotta like just be a little bit nicer to each other like little more caring a little more a little less like ooh, there's hidden agendas like we got to stop with this crap. That I think it's interesting applying Conway floor this as well.

So if you've got an organization with lots of silos, then how's the architecture the software going to look like probably lots of communication required and lots of dependencies between things which you didn't know of course makes the life of any so much more difficult when there's an issue order understand what's going on. So it'll sort of this connected in this kind of horrible way. My own Pepe is the biggest silos email actually.

It's a plate that we've Unleashed to upon human kind. You can't get rid of but that's all better topic. Let's do this as our rap of Boston.

How about each of us kind of what what's one takeaway that we've had either from this conversation or from our own in our own work about the you know, kind of keeping the human the people part of it as part of the equation as we do. Yeah. was to start out Yeah, all God.

That's maybe a little different. I think that I'm thinking about the empathy for sres and the work that they do because that's the perspective I'm interested in and I think the biggest thing that we can do is an industry is for organizations to you know, do things to enably sorry to move to facilitate actual success. And if I just pick one thing it would be around the funding model.

So if an organization is funding capital expenditure, like all new fancy stuff and not investing anything and maintaining and improving what is existing. Then SRE is pretty much doing from the start. That's my perspective.

So that's one example, so yeah, I think there's lots that organizations can do and should do for a Serie to success and that will make the lives of esari's and every engineer in the organization beta I'd like to offer a what might be a slightly controversial perspective which is like we talked about, you know sres interfacing like they're they're the interface with the customer. They have the empathy from the customer. I wonder though if you know, we need to train our customers to have a little more empathy for the work we do because I think back to like this past summer in in Canada.

I'm from Toronto Canada. We had a major outage of one of our wireless carriers and like yeah, it was super inconvenient because I had like no cell service. No, no internet.

Nothing for like the better part of the day and like while it was irritating. My thought was like, oh my God those poor Engineers who are scrambling to get this thing fixed and those freaking managers that are on their asses who are putting pressure on them to get this thing fixed and all of the customers who are like Dreaming at them and we gotta like, you know, like I wish there was we need to work better at educating consumers on the fact that like we have complex systems and the fact that maybe every so often you experience a hiccup man. That's a miracle because it hurts some people doing some wonderful work behind the scenes to make sure that you know at worst.

Sometimes you get a little hiccup and you know, yes, you know and in the horrid Horrid scenario things go down, but like Be grateful that we've got these services that are on the most part working. So yeah, that's that's my thought on this. Oh, I love that that have customers having empathy for us.

I'm gonna think about that for my last take I will share a story of the first time. I realized I needed to get some empathy or that I had not been acting and empathetic manner. I was working on an SRE team that was getting ready to migrate between cicd vendors all of our deployment pipelines and I had brought an engineer into the meeting to represent the devs point of view.

I was there to represent how we were gonna stand up and operate it and our vendor said, you know, how much of how much of what is work how much of what exists already do you want to bring into the new world? How much of the paradigms do you want to carry over and I said, oh my God, none of it. We do not care about this old system because it was something that had been waking us up causing us problems.

I followed as this huge operational headache and the whole reason we're moving was because Crappy, it was my Dev sitting there little did I know had been one of the guys that worked on the initial system and stood it up. And so after that meeting he was like, hey, can we hop on a zoom? Like sure totally and he shared he's like hey when you said like we didn't want to bring any of that Paradigm and when you you know, when you said that stuff it felt like really dismissive of the work that I had done and it hurt and I was like, oh crap.

Oh my God, that wasn't you know from my little lens. I was thinking about what a headache it was for me and I really didn't pay homage to the fact that it that was the deployment pipelines that had got that company to where they were to even pay my paycheck. Right?

And so since then I've been when I approached new orgs or new systems or new teams, I definitely go and listen mode first, even if I'm brought into to clean up a problem or to change things in a different direction always go in with listening mode first because whether or not the people that are still there, Built the original system the people who have been holding it up certainly are there and you've got a factor in their their effort. None of this stuff comes for free these 24/7 highly available systems are just out of the goodness of our hearts, you know. It's cool about Mastodon.

Maybe it's cool that person felt like they were comfortable enough to even bring that up though. That's that's really awesome. Because if he hadn't done that how you wouldn't have even known, right?

Yeah. Oh my God be a huge jerk to this day. I think I'll Echo Pages point though about listening.

It's not only professionally the personal life as well. It's when my I don't do New Year's resolutions, but it's something that I am trying to get actively better at is this I think it's one of the I don't know. I feel like I've met many I feel like I've met a lot more good listeners in life than good talkers, but I think at all aspire to be better listeners.

Very hard skill to learn though. Oh my God. Yeah.

What is it to two years one mouth something like that. I think that's the aphorism. Oh, there's something about best way, you know, I don't open your mouth because you might be improving the ignorance that you have or whatever something like that.

You know, my rep thought is I guess I'll speak to leaders because Or something that I have heard repeatedly in my life and still hear it today is the only thing matter of the results one thing matters Revenue. The only thing matter is the is the is the project result. And and what that says to people is nothing else matters.

You don't matter your work doesn't matter all that matters. It doesn't matter whether you make it over the finish line or not. Likely cheat.

They're all doesn't matter. If any of us, do we all Creator, you know, well, actually that is not a good outcome because we all need to be there. We need to be there for after the result is there and we work on the next thing so I think leaders have to you know, you're not on it that it path or your EQ needs some major tweaks.

If if you're thinking of all the matters is one thing because a lot of things matter and different things matter to different people so I'll leave it there. He just got a message better to remain silent and we thought a full event to speak and remove all down. That's the quote.

Thank you to our goodness. You exactly producer Jeffy. So Austin anything to wrap it up before we leave today.

You know, it's been a great season of the acceleration real exciting getting to kind of meet everyone have all these great conversations and I wish all of our viewers and listeners the happiest of happy holidays and a wonderful New Year. Actually, I think this is gonna be out in January, isn't it? Yeah, great.

I hope you had a great holiday. I hope you're having a great New Year. We're looking forward to 2023 having a great year exactly.

Thank you very much to Austin to you and Adriana and Anna who've been a big part of the show, and of course major part the lightstep for sponsoring and Paige and Steve Steven representing the mini guests that we've had on and creating conversations like this. So we appreciate it very much. We hope that everyone has a fantastic 2023.

Please check out Textron dot TV. You'll see the SRE show under the series menu you also see if you scroll down you'll see never episodes. com under the webinars tab.

So check this out. Thanks again. It's been a great time.

We look forward to seeing you in 2023.