A Case Study in Community-Driven Software Adoption
I came across this 2019 report while browsing Google’s SRE Podcast called Prodcast (that’s a fun name!). I still can’t force myself to listen to podcasts.
The report is a solid read. I enjoyed the discussion of social differences between traditional product engineering teams (referred to as DEV for some reason) infrastructure/SRE teams. It quotes a specific DEV/SRE postmortem:
There is very little notion, in this SRE team especially, of an IC [Individual Contributor] being given a task without also being given the decision making for that task. Consequently, ICs are highly reluctant to override each other, just as managers are highly reluctant to override their ICs.
In the software engineering team, decision making is structured more near the top of the organization. Key decisions, even highly technical ones, are made at a leadership level, and propagated down through designated key influencers. If you are not a key influencer, you are expected to vet choices through a key influencer.
A Case Study in Community-Driven Software Adoption (Richard Bondi)
My takeaway: there’s tradeoffs. “Platform” like teams should probably prefer nimble and passably good tools that overcome barriers to entry over perfecting a tool that may or may not be adopted.