Comment by smugglerFlynn
1 day ago
I see aviation sentiment raised from time to time. In aviation failure is catastrophic, and systems you operate do not change on the fly (pun intended).
You can probably drill SREs that way but you are only teaching them how to _react_ efficiently, not how to _fix_ unique unicorn root causes of these failures. Aviation analogy would be an airplane engineer that tries to drill himself for in-flight engine failures AND engine debugging / engine redesign both at the same time.
It never made sense in software engineering, and never will. Minute spent on drills is a minute better spent on reworking codebase to reduce changes of future incidents. This post is very SRE centric.
In aviation all code and doc are available to inspectors when a catastrophic failure or near miss happens.
It's not the case for other industries, and in particular car industry is able to hide about everything software related from inspectors.
Pilots aren't expected to be design engineers and SREs aren't expected to be software developers.
At least in my experience, operators and on-call engineers aren't necessarily responsible for remediation and validation.
Before you take me too literally, there is, of course, an overlap of skill and trade, but I believe the pilot analogy is more apt than you argue. I do agree that the difference in consequence and stakes is meaningfully important, however.