SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa

I strongly believe that the commonly proposed bogey-man of "automating ourselves out of a job" betrays a simplistic and highly incomplete understanding of the SRE field. SRE teams can always grow and develop.


The Dreyfus model is a model of professional expertise that plots an individual's progression through a series of five levels: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. The idea in this talk is to take aspects of SRE practice (such as monitoring, measurement against SLOs, incident management and postmortems, etc) and provide indications of what these look like at the different Dreyfus levels - not so much at an individual level as at an organizational one.


Often, companies and teams will show uneven levels of proficiency - frequently due to pressures to develop some areas more than others. The intent of this talk is to provide a framework within which attendees can gauge their own company's progress and anticipate/plan for growing weak areas.


The concepts for this talk have emerged through exposure to companies at different skill/experience levels. It is not by any means definitive, but I hope to provide a useful rubric for discussion.