A good question! Monitoring checks and unit tests perform exactly the same function: they regularly and automatedly check that the code or system is operating within "normal" bounds.
So do we still need all these tests and checks, in a post-o11y world? The answer is yes...and no.
Yes, you still want to write tests and monitoring checks: to catch regressions, to catch or rule out all the dumb problems before you waste your precious curiosity on them.
But here's where tests and monitoring diverge. Tests don't (usually) wake you up when they fail, whereas the whole raison d'etre of monitoring is alerts, those every-alert-must-be-actionable fucking alerts.
So there's a cost to be borne. Is it worth it? 🤔
Here is where I would argue that in the absence of o11y tooling, team have been horribly overloading their usage of monitoring tools and alerts.
Instead of just a few top level service and e2e alerts that clearly reflect user pain, many shops have accumulated decades of
sedimentary layers of warnings and alerts and monitoring notifications. Not just to alert a human to investigate, but to *try to debug for them.*
They don't have tools to follow the bread crumbs. So they set off fireworks and town criers shouting clues on every affected block.
In a densely interconnected system, it's nearly impossible to issue a single, clean alert that is also correct about the root cause. (First of all, there is rarely "a root cause").
Instead what you get is a few hundred things squalling about getting slower --
none of which are the cause. However, your experienced sysadmin will roll over in bed, groan, skim a handful of the alerts at random; pronounce "redis again" and go back to sleep.
These squalling alerts -- that tell you details about the things you shouldn't have to care about,
but you leave them up because it's the only heuristic you have for diagnosing complex system states -- these monitoring checks can and should die off once you have observability.
With extreme prejudice. They burn you out, make you reactive, and they make you a worse engineer.
Use o11y for what it's great at -- swiftly understanding and diagnosing complex systems, from the perspective of your users.
Use monitoring for what it's great at -- errors, latency, req/sec, and e2e checks.
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It felt, to me, like those participating were stepping very cautiously around a few of the third rails Jaana just tripped over. (💜)
"Work-life balance"
"Working hard vs working smart"
"Meritocracy"
The intersection of company tech cultures and expectations and performance.
These are hard, complicated topics, and there are some very good reasons for speaking carefully. People can pick up a sentence and run in the wrong direction with it, and do a lot of damage.
I have abandoned god only knows how many drafts on this topic, for that reason.
The question is, how can you interview and screen for engineers who care about the business and want to help build it, engineers who respect sales, marketing and other functions as their peers and equals?
It's a great question!! I have ideas, but would love to hear from others.
I said "question", but there are actually two: 1) how to hire engineers who are motivated by solving business problems and 2) aren't engineering supremacists.
Pro tip: any time you see someone confidently opining on what all good CTOs know or do, it is ✨bullshit✨
There is no stock template for CTO, or default set of expectations or responsibilities. It stands alone among the C-levels in that good ones are all over the freaking map.
This may not hold true for publicly traded companies. But in my experience, a good CTO can be:
* over all of R&D
* over engineering, like a VP eng
* like a principal eng or architect
* team lead for special projects
* a great senior programmer
(continued... 👉)
A CTO can also be:
* a great communicator and popularizer
* on the road as a devrel
* a field CTO, whose authority opens doors to big customers
* a product visionary who sweats the details
* more of a cofounder than technical contributor, sharing "company-running" duties w/CEO
Yeah, this is a fair caveat. If you're already a decent senior engineer and manager, it's kind of possible to split your attention between managing a small team and writing code.
But you aren't going to improve at either skill set. Those cycles get devoured by context switching.
Tech lead managers ("TLMs") are a mistake we make over and over in this industry. I've written about this a bit, but the definitive post was written by @Lethain.