Hiring SREs May Be Literally Impossible
summary
Hiring external SREs is slow and lossy: GoCardless 2017 pipeline shows 160 applicants → 45 remote tests → 15 finalists → 2 offers accepted. The practical fix is grow from inside: spot people who jump at tricky problems, pull apart the stack, or show empathy; expose them with public postmortems, project work (target 20–50% development time), and reduce pager pain; pay on‑call. Mentor with disaster simulations, spin‑up labs, reverse‑engineering traces, guided tours and staged on‑call warmups. It works: five of eight infra hires transition from development.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:041. The problem
- 2:38Full of depth
- 3:29On-call is daunting
- 4:42DevOps is an approach, not a role
- 6:09The odds are against us
- 6:32i Internal hiring is a thing
- 7:38They jump at tricky problems
- 8:36They show empathy when things break
- 9:12Real talk: People learn things
- 9:45Build an open operational
- 11:05Projects as well as ops
- 12:15The weird team in the corner
- 12:55Take the sting out of the pager
- 13:15Post-mortem action items
- 17:40My favourite: guided tours
- 18:27What they bring to you
- 20:29Mentoring people is awesome anyway
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