What SRE Could Be
I think this is the point where we&#x27;re getting too serious about the discipline. We need to be a little more grounded in reality. SRE is basically a highly polished, best-practice, telemetry-and-automation-focused sysadmin. And a sysadmin doesn&#x27;t really have a say in the business. They can make suggestions, like error budgets. But what about sales contracts? The contracts define what kind of guarantees you have to give and on what timeline. And what about customer experience? How is SRE supposed to quantify if the users are happy if they can&#x27;t tell the UX and customer support how to build the product to better collect user happiness? Or tell the devs how to design their apps to fail less often?<p>If you keep optimizing and focusing on all the ways to improve satisfaction, you literally end up an executive director of product. If we really want to make products that users are happy with, we need to teach executives how to achieve it, not SREs. SREs shouldn&#x27;t be driving the bus from the back row. They should be rotating the tires and checking the fuel and oil gauges and telling the driver when to stop for gas. Let&#x27;s teach executives how to set everyone up to succeed, and then SRE doesn&#x27;t have to get all existential just to keep the bus running.