The Perverse Incentives of Reliability

Are you trying to improve reliability in your company, but coming up against it not being valued unless you're in an active SEV1? Struggling to build a reliability culture in a wider organization? Relying on heroics to keep the lights on?

This talk is for you. The reality is that, for most of us, reliability work is not extrinsically rewarded: customers won't write in about the outage you didn't have, and investors aren't impressed that your site is still up. In today's "do less with more" world, increased pressure to deliver value (read: features) often comes at the expense of building resilient systems as we race to hit ever tighter deadlines. In the face of these perverse incentives, it's no wonder that having a reliability focus isn't the norm for so many engineering cultures. There is a better way: harnessing intrinsic motivation. This talk will cover approaches, tactics and lessons learned to overcome the perverse incentive problem, and how tapping into the inherent pride, joy and hilarity of incidents can transform reliability practices.