Transforming Tier 1 Caterpillars to Butterflies

One of the Linkedin’s key cultural values is Career Transformation: Helping people you manage build new abilities and skills, work with them to define their career goals and support their efforts to accomplish them. Applying this to a Tier1 support team is challenging.

A Tier1 support manages the day-to-day operations of your business and engages higher tiers when needed. They end up with a very wide field of view but very little depth of knowledge. They are always the bearers of bad news and only noticed when something is broken. The morale of such teams is notoriously low. Furthermore, capitalizing on this experience for the business is a challenge because of retention issues stemming from low morale. This was LinkedIn in 2013.

Today, we have transformed our tier-1 into the foundation of our SRE organization as an incubator for our SREs. Our objective was to add depth to their breadth: they are part of the resolution instead of just passing on bad news, their work is more valued, and they have gained the trust of higher tiers. As a result, team morale is at an all time high. Investing in automation, training, and mentor-ship was the key to their transformation. This is LinkedIn today.

This session will discuss our roadblocks, leanings and achievements.

Nina Mushiana, SRE Manager for Production-SRE and NOC team at Linkedin since May 2013. Prior to that, Nina was project managing Business Continuity Planning for Yahoo and Assistant manager for the Yahoo NOC. Nina has 14 years of operations experience.