Thread by @sophaskins

one reason I've love being an SRE is because you get to talk to lots of people! Listen to their problems *and* the things they're excited about! Help find balance in human problems surfaced as technical ones. I think it's one of the most *socially* focused of tech roles.

Historically, that hasn't been the case: the nerds with root access that you phone when things are really crap are:

* grumpy
* condescending
* want you to go away
* think you're messing up their perfect world
* why aren't we using BSD

and that's some BS!

I was "raised" by folks to whom "DevOps" meant "caring about having a _relationship_ between developers and operators". Some cool things came out of that, but it still seems like "not being a fuckwad" is a competitive advantage

Being an SRE/operator/infra engineer is about saying:

* yes that is possible! It comes with some tradeoffs, which we can discuss!
* your intuition isn't wrong! but there's some annoying other factors - let's talk about them
* things are weird! let's work together to fix

The machoness of "the hero who gets a page and types sudo a lot" and the male + nerd-culture + "war story" dominated culture of ops is holding the industry back. If we looked at it as soft skills, about nurturing and communicating and thoughtfulness, we'd frankly be better off

In my first tech job (IT support over the summer in high school), I rapidly got praise from our users over the full-timers, because I _answered the phone_ and tried to understand their frustrations. The other employees literally locked their office so people could ask for help

That is to say: being better than the industry average only takes "caring about humans" - it makes you automatically better on day one.

From there, the sky is the limit!

What technology would we have if those that built it cared about other humans more? What good in the world could be accomplished if our teams had people who love Star Wars _and_ people who love Beyonce _and_ people who love Gossip Girl _and_ people who love them all?

At GitHub, the team that works on making features for preventing abuse and encouraging better communities is a great reflection of this: they are more representative of the world than the average dev team, and that means they're _better_ at making technology that works for all

OK that's all I got I wasn't really sure where this was going, but like:

being a caring SRE is being a _good_ SRE
being a hide-in-the-server-room-and-make-your-masterpiece SRE is being a _bad_ SRE