Reliability found through curiosity, not a career plan

Key Topics Discussed

The curiosity that led Gastón into site reliability engineering
Career advice aspiring SREs are better off ignoring
Learning beyond work through books and unexpected interests
The kind of job that would be a terrible personal fit
A reliability engineer’s plan for surviving the zombie apocalypse

Where to Find Gastón Rial Saibene

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Transcript

How did you first become interested in Reliability?

While I was working as a sysadmin engineer, there were a lot of repetitive tasks, routine tasks—toil—that could be automated and customer impact could be minimized. As I was digging into this idea, I discovered the [Google] SRE book, which was basically my first encounter with SRE as a craft. It was mind blowing. I changed my way of thinking about how to architect systems and how to instrument observability to gather actionable data and react in time and prevent any potential incidents and outages. I was excited about the idea and started applying to SRE positions.

What’s a piece of advice aspiring SREs should ignore?

That the only “good” way of doing SRE is to focus on SLOs. For a small or medium company to put too much focus on SLOs, it’s often at the expense of being able to deliver new features faster, which is essential at that scale. A small company still needs to position themselves in the market and prioritize velocity. So what works at Google—a massive company that is already known and trusted—doesn’t directly apply.

What’s one job you could never see yourself doing?

Anything that requires manual labor or precision, like placing a server on a rack. Handling expensive stuff that could break, or the work of a surgeon where you need to be very precise and the cost of error is high. I like that software is more abstract, and uses the brain rather than the hands.

What’s the best book you’ve read this year?

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

How long do you think you would last in a zombie apocalypse?

It would depend on the scale of the epidemic of zombies, but if they came here to Copenhagen then I’m doomed. I don’t think I would last more than a day.