SRE hiring trends

Ashley Stirrup, COO at Shoreline.io shares his 2022 predictions about the death of the Runbook, the rising cost of outages and SRE hiring trends.

Prediction #1: The death of the Runbook

In the coming year, we will see runbooks fuse out. Our team has been surprised in the last few months with how infrequently people have had true Runbooks. Runbooks are a great place for centralizing operational information, but they are a terrible way to empower on-call teams. When a customer is down, the last thing anyone wants to do is read the manual. A major reason why Runbooks don’t work is that they are too big and too general. No one wants to read “The 15 things to check if CPU is high”. Instead, they want a checklist of 3 things to do if the CPU is high and the JVM heap dump is maxed out.

Prediction #2: Outages will continue to cost companies $100’s of billions of dollars

Affecting more than 3.5 billion people globally and disrupting what has become one of the world’s primary communications and business platforms, the five-hour-plus disappearance of Facebook and its family of apps on Oct. 4, 2021, was a technology outage for the ages.

Outages of varying scope and duration will continue to happen. The right question for every company has always been and remains not whether an outage could occur, of course, it could, but what can be done to reduce the risk, duration, and impact.

We watched the episodes, which on Oct. 4 specifically, cost Facebook between $60 and $100 million in advertising, according to various estimates, unfold from the unique perspective of industry insiders when it comes to managing outages. In assorted ways, this and other outages will serve as a wake-up call for organizations to look within and make sure they have created the right technical and cultural atmosphere to prevent or mitigate a Facebook-like disaster.

Prediction #3: Thousands of SRE’s will quit their jobs in 2022

We are continuing to see massive turnover and it is hard to find and retain folks based on a variety of reasons. According to LinkedIn, there are over 1.1M people with SRE, Site Reliability, DevOps Engineer, or Cloud Ops Engineering in their title. The average tenure of an SRE is slightly less than two years. That implies that over 500,000 SREs will quit their jobs in 2022. There are also over 300,000 of these jobs open on LinkedIn right now.

SRE hiring trends in 2022

If you assume the average job opening is available for 3 months, that implies we will hire 1.2M SREs in 2022, more than there are people with this job in the market. If you assume half of the jobs are filled with people who already have the title, that is a lot of shuffling of deck chairs on the titanic. SRE’s are becoming a critical bottleneck in the software development life cycle.