SREs and engineers debate deskilling risk and proposed safeguards
2 Oct 30 12:40 PM · 13d ago · 1 post · 10 comments · 2 sources · development 2 of 2
Hacker News commenters engage with the deskilling thesis, with some proposing aviation-style interventions (mandatory manual incident handling time, quizzes before deployment) and others questioning whether AI truly deskills or simply replaces old skills with new ones.
“Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from, they figured out a lot of things about how to keep humans from making mistakes.”
andix, HN commenter · hn ↗Lisanne Bainbridge Cognitive psychologist (1983 researcher)Signoz (via newsletter author) Observability platform / newsletter publisher
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first by HN Best, 13d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 31 · verbatim
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This was just the default where I worked. We called the exercise Wheel of Misfortune: facilitator sets up an outage / bug in a non-prod environment (inspired by real events or not), spins a wheel, picks a victim, and the problem is solved collectively, manually. That's the standard format, but it could be much more freeform than that: the point is…
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I had never heard about SRE before and suddenly it's all I see. Modern problems (slop fest) require modern solutions (someone to babysit broken systems)? Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a discipline in the field of software engineering and IT infrastructure support that monitors and improves the availability and performance of deployed…
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A (very) key difference is that this behaviour is mandated by the FAA, and consistent across all providers. There isn't a (legal) option of just not-doing-it because it's "cheaper".Modern companies generally do not have the same incentive to keep their SRE (or engineers in general) upskilled. Cutting SRE because "we don't really have incidents…
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AI isn't the only cause of deskilling. I've seen a few people go from coder to architect roles. Architects, being the decision makers, talk to vendors, CxOs, consultants,... and mainly spend their lives in powerpoints and visions.When an engineer stops coding, managing servers, ... it takes about 6 months to transform even a really smart person…
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This has been going on in other professions for a long time. See the "children of the magenta line" talk about pilots losing the ability to hand-fly.Another oft-cited article here is William Langewiesche's article on the AF447 crash (https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2014/10/the-human-fac...):> To put it briefly, automation has made it more…
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I work at a startup and often deal with every part of the stack--programming, deployment, db, cloud environment, networking blah blah. AI agents have just gotten superhuman at computer use. I will never be able to use AWS CLI as well as claude does. I can spend time poking around in AWS, manually reading logs, looking at routing tables, cross…
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I don't even know if this is an AI thing. I've worked at places that have varying levels of operational maturity, and some of the ones that had very old SRE orgs also had a lot of their SREs operating mostly in the tier 3 given by the article.One of these orgs had basically all of the noisy pages under control through automated remediation and a…
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The thing is that the learning curve for any tech has never been easier. You can ask a question and AI will help/tell you which command can answer that question. You can write that down. You can poke around the system.You can ask how your current automation code handles XYZ situation to get a better understanding, then ask if a code patch (you're…
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Aviation is a good example if you want to have zero fatal mistakes. There is a way and there is a cost to do so.The same way erlang is good example of how to run a highly available system with hot reload and observability and stuff. There is cost for that too.Maybe not all of the projects need the same properties. I'm fine if some of the stuff is…
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Terraform deskilled us too. No one is saying, "SREs should configure their infra by hand sometimes to not lose that skill".If AI can handle it, great! We have a new tool -- let's make the tool better.Let's figure out how to use AI to make us detect and resolve issues faster, and even better, prevent issues. I've always said we can't consistently…
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The thing is, without the FAA mandating something like this for SRE’s, no one will do it. In the moment, getting the broken thing back up and running is seen as far more important than the learning opportunity.I noticed this constraint a few years ago when the SRE/DevOps hiring market was really tight, but no one was investing in non-senior…
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Deskilling has been happening for centuries. One doesn't farm their own vegetables, hunt for their meat, slaughter their own livestock, maintain their own vehicles (ahem - remember the horses and carriages). We've even stopped shifting the gears on our cars. Why are we complaining about AI?The biggest problem I see with AI isn't deskilling. It's…
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> "Just as the FAA mandates manual flying time even when the autopilot is perfectly capable, SRE teams can designate certain incidents, even the ones the AI could handle, as human-practice opportunities"This is a great example. Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from, they figured out a lot of things about how to keep humans from making…
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We use AI at work, Claude specifically, and it’s faster than avg SRE for trivial tasks like cross signals correlation. But it requires a lot of effort to build a harness from your company contexts for it to work like an SRE. And it’s just a tool so if you have to build your knowledge to make it useful, otherwise it’s just a blunt. Or in other…
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SRE was always about understanding; understanding data flow, understanding bottlenecks, understanding logs, understanding application architecture, understanding end user functionality, understanding break points, SLIs, SLOs. Understanding how to mitigate, gracefully deteriorate, restart, restore, recreate, scale, etc.There is no understanding…
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It's not a great example.The plane lands in the same amount of time whether an autopilot lands it or a human, so there's no incidental cost.If you let a human SRE handle a problem completely, not only will it likely take longer than an AI, but since that SRE is now deskilled, it may take FAR longer. And that's a cost. Who's going to pay it?
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Fuck aviation, stop using it as a dead horse metaphor for safety through human protocols. I am private instrument rating holder and there's very much a top down push for single pilot ops. Your newer jets (even the jetliners) are all designed with that in mind even though they may not be certified as such.
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> Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from, they figured out a lot of things about how to keep humans from making mistakes.Aviation is used to paying through the nose for stuff. For developers, employers want to pay as little money as possible.
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Previous discussion on an extremely similar article, down to the name-checking of The Ironies of Automation:
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I don’t understand what this title is saying, feels a bit circular. You could say this about so many jobs that are or are not being replaced by AI.Do LLMs “deskill” us in general? I suspect we are just replacing old skills with new skills.
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I think people are getting funneled into a new career path of being a technologist or technology director. People who can ask the right questions at the right time and direct attention to the appropriate areas given the goals and feedback.
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Reminds me of Children of the Magenta Line: https://youtu.be/5ESJH1NLMLs?si=wozPZOKAFKNcjPSmFly the plane, not the automation.
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Aviation is different because their rent-seeking is enforced by the required legal hedging. I'm not sure the same incentive structure exists in the software side of things.In other words, we might need to find some hobbies.
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I like this analogy that I've come up with: Non-writers can produce impressive articles that are unbearable to read the same way non-programmers can produce impressive software that is unbearable to use.
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