Stop copying Google
Because it worked somewhere else doesn’t mean it’s right for you
Recently, I worked for a company that had organised itself around the Spotify model of squads and tribes. The reasoning was that this structure had made Spotify successful therefore it had to be good. It turned out that even Spotify couldn’t make their model work. It led to silos which prioritised local autonomy over collaboration. Which is crippling to a company past a particular size. As someone who spent a fair chunk of time at Google I’ve also seen Google’s name taken in vain. “If Google are doing it then it must be good” is a common refrain in our industry. The same goes for Amazon, Apple or Facebook.
Google has SREs to run their production services? Great let’s hire a bunch of SREs. Great, what do SREs do? No idea — let’s hire some people who run production services and all our stuff will work magically. Turns out this isn’t a great idea. SRE at Google has a very specific mandate to solve a very specific set of problems. The company structure is set up to provide them with a high degree of autonomy over what they are prepared to support. In principle having a dedicated group of people to run your services might be a good thing.
But, wait, Amazon say that “you build it you run it”. Now we’re saying that teams should be on call for their own services because they need to own their…
