JC van Winkel and Brad Lipinski, Google
Hands on learning is best for adults, and we've used this principle in Google SRE since 2017. However, many oncall engineers aren't SREs and haven't gone through a full week-long SRE onboarding program. How can they learn the same skills and go oncall with confidence, but without the week-long curriculum?
We cherry picked our SRE onboarding program to create a succinct, scalable program for this audience that includes the best of orientation: the breakage exercises. This program is called "Oncall Ready!" and is completely self-service, requiring no operational work from the SRE EDU team. In this talk we will discuss the development, the behind the scenes, and the outcomes of this project. Best comment we got from a participant: "Oh wow, this is like going through a [production] escape room without having to pay for it".
JC van Winkel, Google
JC has been teaching UNIX and programming languages since 1992, working for AT Computing, a small courseware spin-off of the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. JC joined Google's Site Reliability Engineering team in 2010 and is both a founding member and lead educator of the SRE education team, SRE EDU.
Brad Lipinski, Google
Brad joined Google SRE in 2013 and worked on datacenter software. He's taught for SRE EDU from the beginning and contributed to many of the team's automation efforts. In 2019, he joined SRE EDU full time and is now the team's tech lead.
author = {JC van Winkel and Brad Lipinski},
title = {Get Your {Non-SREs} Oncall Ready!},
year = {2024},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
