A few jobs ago a coworker of mine, a fellow Senior Site Reliability Engineer who-like I-was frustrated with how our company manifested 'Devops', and also-like I-had zero interest in trying to play the 'hearts and minds' game of undergoing a devops transformation did something stunning (to me):

Because we were embedded with different development teams, we attended their stand ups and got intimate knowledge of what they were working on.

This friend of mine decided one day he'd pick a random ticket from this team's backlog, and assigned it to himself. He worked it, he wrote the code, followed all the same testing and QA steps the dev team did, merged it in, it got deployed.

Some would argue "this is what SRE's ought to be doing in the first place" and I agree, but lived experience has shown me the philosophy of Google's SRE way either gets perverted and bastardized entirely, or just completely abandoned for reasons that are taken entirely out of the hands of the SRE practitioners by engineering managers and org leaders (Warning, cynicism ahead: In my opinion for reasons due to poor capacity and resource planning by those very same managers and leaders)

Anyway, my friend started doing this more and more. To the point that he messaged me one day saying he was leaving the team. I asked him where his new offer was. He said "no I'm not leaving the company, I'm leaving the team".

The dev team manager noticed his work contribs, and when one of their developers left, grabbed our guy and pulled him onto their team proper.

My questions: - Is the a thing that anyone else has seen happen? - Have you done this/had this kind of internal "poach" happen to you (or someone you care about?) - ....would you do it?

user:	bobbygunderson
created:	January 13, 2022
karma:	11