Day 8 of Sysadvent - D&D for SREs
Tags: sre, sysadvent
Published: 2021-12-08 05:13:37

---
title: Day 8 of Sysadvent - D&D for SREs
published: true
description: Learn how collaborative games can give you a different perspective of your work with Day 8 of Sysadvent, D&D for SREs.
tags: SRE, sysadvent
---

<p>
In a past life, I was a full-time SRE and a part-time dragonborn paladin named
Lorarath. While at work, I supported thousands of systems in collaboration with
a team of geeks. Evenings, I tried to survive imaginary disasters and save the
world from the sorceress Morgana. I love collaborative games because they plug
into some of the real-world emotional responses and social processes critical
for successful, meaningful engagement. They provide a place to practice dealing
with critical scenarios in a safe place. When you know the stakes are purely
imaginary, you're able to look at your efforts from a distance, to gain
understanding and enjoy the process of learning and achieving goals together,
even when failing. I want to share a couple of insights D&D has given me about
my work and how this can help you.
</p>
<h2>Building your SRE Team … more than just a name.</h2>
<p>
SRE has many names: Operations, DevOps, Infrastructure engineering, System
Admin. It's someone who deploys and runs a highly available, scalable, and
secure service that meets business and partner requirements. But what does that
mean? Generally, it means someone with a wide-ranging set of skills tackling
different challenges at any point in time.
</p>
<p>
When you first start a campaign in dungeons and dragons, you choose a class to
play. This class will then have specializations that you customize based on how
you want to play. Next, you build out your character using a character sheet and
create a backstory. This character sheet has several abilities and skills. You
have several points to allocate to abilities and skills, which grants you
additional chances to handle particular events successfully.
</p>
<p>
In gaming, you collaborate with your team to ensure that you have a well-rounded
team often choosing roles to complement the team. You don't want a team of all
"magic users" or hack and slashers. Often, we stop at identifying who we are
with that single name, whether it's SRE or sysadmin. As an SRE, I depend on a
diverse team with varied skills. I am not seeking people with the same expertise
or abilities. I'm looking for people with complementary skills who can help
accomplish the goals and visions of the team.
</p>
<h2>Developing your “character sheet”</h2>
<p>
There is no equivalent to a "character sheet" when it comes to your job. The
closest might be equating a resume or LinkedIn profile to a character sheet.
Still, these don't align to all of the possible experiences you gain:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Submitting git pull requests.
<li>Participating in hackathons.
<li>Attending training or conferences.
<li>The myriad of other day-to-day challenges you face.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
Additionally, if you don't practice skills in real life, they languish. For
example, I haven't touched Solaris in over a decade, and I no longer document it
as a skill.
</p>
<p>
If SRE did have a character sheet, I think three core abilities would be:
</p>
<p>
Communication, Collaboration, and Confidence. Let's take a closer look at these
specializations and the value of spending energy on these areas.
</p>
<h3>Specialization: Communication</h3>
<p>
<strong>Communication</strong> is a fundamental building block to successful
character building. As an SRE, I faced various scenarios that required expert
communication.
</p>
<ul>
<li>The first specialty in communication is the <strong>number of
messages</strong>. How often should I remind people about upcoming scheduled
maintenance? How often should I reach out to my manager about working on the
right thing? How often should my team get together to talk about team tasks?
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The second specialty in communication is the <strong>quality of
messages</strong>. Communication can be visual, written, or oral. Visuals can
often convey much more nuanced meaning than repeating the same information in
textual format and an underleveraged method.
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The third specialty in communications is <strong>effectiveness.
</strong>Effectiveness is the degree to which your words lead to the desired
results. This specialty is the most advanced because effective communication
requires an in-depth understanding of the audience and crafting your message as
needed.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Specialization: Collaboration</h3>
<p>
The second core ability is collaboration. In any product or service, you are
working on, work needs to be understood, planned, and executed. It doesn't
matter who does the work; it just matters that it gets done.
</p>
<p>
The role I take today doesn't define who I am. If I say, "I'm an SRE at
Company," that is just one characteristic of my story and not my identity. Every
day as you go into work and tackle your challenge, recognize <strong><em>your
special value</em></strong> and what <strong><em>you</em></strong> bring to the
team. Rather than adopting and marrying your identity to a specific role,
realize some days you take on a role that may be quite different from what you
are used to, and that's part of your character development.
</p>
<p>
There is a distinction between the members of your team and the roles they play.
In gaming, you become comfortable speaking on behalf of your character while
having a separate, sometimes meta-conversation with your teammates. Social
environments seem to tend towards homeostasis, and you (may) naturally ascribe a
simplistic narrative to your co-workers' actions. Adopting this awareness that
everyone is filling a role on the team that is not representative of everything
about the individuals allows you to approach the work to do the impactful work
that needs to get done.
</p>
<p>
In other words, never say, "well, they are just the ROLENAME and can't do that,"
or "that's not my job."
</p>
<h3>Specialization: Confidence</h3>
<p>
The third core ability for your SRE character sheet is
<strong>confidence</strong>. Confidence is about the innate quality that drives
you to take risks (or not).
</p>
<p>
In gaming, sometimes you take the wrong path, or you put your squishy players
out front, and they get severely damaged. Mistakes happen. In the "real world,"
customers do something unexpected. There are bugs in the software, hardware
fails, or someone from the team enters the wrong command on the wrong terminal
in the production environment.
</p>
<p>
Collaborative games teach you to fail as a group and rise again while retaining
the group cohesion necessary to succeed. Of course, if a teammate really caused
you to be captured by a giant spider, you'd probably flip out. Still, across the
game board, one has the emotional wiggle-room to behave in a manner that would
be laudable in professional situations.
</p>
<p>
Playing teaches you about exploring challenges with imagination and a sense of
play. You have to piece things together while continuing to take action, both
keeping in mind the larger game goals and what's immediately on the board at the
same time. In addition to this enormous world to explore, there are complex
characters (non-playing characters or NPCs) to talk to, and information gathered
within each encounter. Be on the lookout for the helpful non-production
engineers (NPEs) in your environment, too; while they may not maintain
production, they may have valuable information to support you.
</p>
<h2>Wrapping Up</h2>
<p>
So, this article inspired you to add some collaborative gaming to your team
building, build out your team with complementary skills, or map out the work of
the SRE or system administration to a character sheet. Great, beyond the
"character sheet," you need the appropriate visualization. By analyzing the
particular work items that an individual completed, there could be an
incremented "skill" counter. Additional information like git commits,
distribution of package management, and incident management APIs could be
gathered and glued together to create a way to look at progress over time. That
way, you could make sure to spend time on the skills that will improve you in
the direction of your choosing.
</p>
<p>
If you want to try out D&D, check out your local game stores or related groups.
Beginner games often provide preconfigured characters that allow you to practice
the gameplay without understanding all of the nuances of playing the game.
</p>

<p>Check out the rest of <a href="https://sysadvent.blogspot.com/">Sysadvent</a> for 2021!