Service with an Angry Smile: Passive-Aggressive Behavior in SRE

Friday, 1 September, 2017 - 11:0011:30

Lauri Apple, Zalando

Abstract: 

Awareness and discussion of psychological safety as a key ingredient for productive and successful teams has grown recently, thanks to media coverage and pioneering research by companies and scholars. While flagrant forms of disrespect like angry shouting and insults obviously threaten psychological safety in teams, so too can passive-aggressive behaviors such as complaining, pouty silence, “forgetting” to complete tasks, and stubbornness.

In the SRE context, passive-aggressive behaviors can have disastrous consequences. These include outages and incidents that could have been avoided with better preparation or notification; narrowly focused quick-fixes instead of systemic, long-term maintenance efforts; blame instead of solutions-oriented post-mortems, and refusal to share knowledge. In many cases, few or no words are spoken; silent resistance is the hostile act.

This talk will bring attention to passive-aggressive behavior as a set of hostile acts that one can (and should) identify, manage and overcome in the tech/SRE environment. For context, it will draw upon psychological research, history, a bit of pop culture for fun, and anecdotes from SREs. And for guidance, you’ll hear some tried-and-true agile and communications methods for managing or eliminating passive-aggressive behavior in your teams and interactions.

Lauri Apple, Zalando

Based in Berlin, Lauri Apple develops and evangelizes Zalando’s open source efforts. She's also a producer/agile project manager for the company's core search engineering team and co-leads Zalando’s InnerSource initiative. Before joining Zalando, Lauri was the tech evangelist at Gilt Groupe in New York City. Her life before technology included stints as a journalist, blogger and media strategist. She graduated from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, focusing on IP.

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@conference {205570,
author = {Lauri Apple},
title = {Service with an Angry Smile: {Passive-Aggressive} Behavior in {SRE}},
year = {2017},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio