Leading the people who manage uncertainty

I’m Sebastian Vietz—pronounced like “feets”.  Officially, I am a Director of Reliability Engineering for a company called Compass Digital, which operates in the hospitality space so we deal with hospitality technology primarily. I lead a team of 10 reliability engineers at the moment, and we’re focused on the product engineering side of things. We make sure those products are reliable as they scale.

The way I like to build a team of SREs when I get the chance to—and it’s kind of my niche—every few years I get to build a team or function with a lot of greenfield opportunities. I like to compose my team with people that are more generalists in nature. I call them professional troubleshooters. People that like to troubleshoot a challenge, who like to go to wherever the problem or challenge and opportunity may be. And that’s not for everybody, but that’s usually what I’m initially looking for when I’m recruiting SREs or folks that come from adjacent disciplines into my team because oftentimes when you start greenfield, you really go into places where companies tend to hurt and you never know what you encounter there. So people that are very flexible in terms of their mindset and what they are able to do is critically important at that stage.

Primarily through coincidence. I’m doing the podcast together with a partner, Ash Patel. Ash and I started to talk and collaborate a few years ago because of a paper he published about the capabilities that reliability engineers should have to be successful in this particular space. And so I started commenting and sharing my own two cents, and we realized we were both interested in this topic but from very different angles. Ash is a former Director of Operations and I am more on the software engineering side, and we noticed we were learning a lot from the different perspectives we had on the topic. We also had a very particular interest in educating folks more on what SRE is and the value of it.

Check out the SREpath podcast and content at srepath.com!

I always loved this dish that my grandma made. It was basically a nice piece of beef, with some gravy and with whatever vegetable you would like, but the main highlight of the dish was basically a potato, first mashed—not too fine, that was important—it needed to be malleable. Then you took it in your hand and you molded it into a little bit of a ball. Then you open the ball and put little pieces of buttered toast into the middle and close it up again. You boiled those balls of potato mash with toast inside.

*Editor’s note: From my Googling, I believe these are called Kartoffelkloesse! Enjoy!

I think it’s a showcase I built. It started with an oddly shaped piece of lumber that I didn’t know what to do with. I ended up using it as a backdrop, and carved slots into it and added shelves.

Over the years I’ve collected really old wood planes—they’re tools that you use to shape wood with. Some of my planes are over 100 years old, and I still use them. I wanted to have a really nice place to put them, so I put them on this showcase. It has a really wide shelf at the bottom, then they get smaller as you go further up. I used darker contrasting woods for the shelves, and that one oddly shaped piece for the back is a light color. So it makes for a really nice interesting contrast of colors and shapes, and it has these really old pieces of woodworking history sitting on top of it.