The SRE Manifesto

Another bug reported today, it’s already escalated. „Customer cannot access the service from his network.”, „Error 1611 returned, too often”… Damn bugs. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three- piece psychology and 1950’s 'technobrain’, ever take a look behind the eyes of the SRE? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am an SRE, enter my world…

Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me… Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. „No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…” Damn bugs. Probably it was copied from stackoverflow. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a SRE. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I wanted to do. If there is a mistake, it’s because I haven’t fix it yet. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or thinks I’m a smart ass.. Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here… Damn bugs. They’re all alike.

„This is it… this is where I belong…” I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all… Damn bugs. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the SRE, the beauty of the service. We explore… and you call us SRE. We seek after knowledge… and you call us SRE. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us SRE. You build your systems, you run agile sprints, you create the release notes, and ask us to deploy it and try to make us believe it’s bug-free, yet we’re the SRE.

Yes, I am an SRE. My soul is that of curiosity. My problem is that of judging systems by how they work and operate, not what they look like. I might outsmart you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am an SRE, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike. We care about production.