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Murali Suriar

@msuriar@mastodon.ie
  • Open on mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin.

Do computer things sometimes.

0 Followers
0 Following
19 Posts
Joined November 18, 2022
blog:
https://www.suriar.net/
github:
https://msuriar.github.io/

Posts

Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

What's next?

  • IC: map your workflow for one week. Where do you lose 30+ minutes?
  • Team leads: 30 minute retro. What slowed us down?
  • Leaders: listen to people. coffee, whatever. Napkin math the costs of friction you hear about

more resources: https://bit.ly/frictionless-book?r=qr

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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

Friction reduction list:

  • open a runbook, see if it's real
  • talk to a peer about what makes them swear
  • start a friction log, look for patterns
  • time your MTWTF on one real incident
  • declare a toil error - inventory first, then fix
  • ask your finance team what your downtime cost number is
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie
Dave Anderson at Amazon: improve platform error rates without authority over execs Problem: he had data but no authority. The move: publish error rate by team, and owning VP. What happened: people rushed to him to get their team off the list. The measurement doesn't have to mandate change, it just makes status quo uncomfortable.
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

Strategies for making the business case:

  • Visibility and accountability: use competitive dynamics and public comparison
  • Simple data, clear action: progressive disclosure, right detail at right time
  • Dollar impact: speak the language stakeholders understand
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie
The trap: developer experience is not important. Reliability is the frame that leadership will fund. Friction --> Slower MTTD/MTTR --> Higher change failure rate --> SLA risk --> Revenue impact "We are proposing a better system - SRE satisfaction is a side effect". Anchor it to what leadership own. Don't build your cost model from scratch. Steal the one your finance team uses for downtime cost estimates.
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie
Productivity --> Experience Productivity is about measuring output. Experience is about removing obstacles. For leadership: stop caring about devs working "hard enough" and start thinking about "removing what's slowing us down".
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

Real costs of friction:

  • $1.52T in tech debt, annually (CISQ)
  • 40% of dev budgets of dev budgets are spent on avoidable rework (McKinsey)
  • $300B in lost productivity (assuming devs self reported 68% productivity feeling is accurate)

But you need to reframe it.

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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

More takeaways:

  • start a friction log
  • time your MTWTF - once
  • Declare a toil hour - log all the friction
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

Three low cost starting points:

  • incidents retrospective tagging. friction contribution field!
  • oncall survey, 2-3 questions. what slow down, what helped, why did you swear, what did you have to invent...
  • toil tracking sprint. time box one sprint for fixing toil. Ask everyone to log manual, repetitive work (not fix, just log) [ed: ideally log this all the time?]
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie
New northstar metric: Mean Time to WTF Time to alert to "I understand what is happening" [ed: or rather "I have found the first thing that is obviously broken"]
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

Your team's experience is a leading indicator of your reliability outcomes

With AI:

  • Efficiency goes up, but trust goes down (because your intuition is worse)
  • Satisfaction: can I trust the robot?
  • Communication: harder to hand off AI-generated context
  • Performance: new failure modes.
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

[missed some slides]

SPACE for SRE:

  • Satisfaction: oncall burden, tools
  • Performance: MTTx, alert precision, accuracy under pressure
  • Activity: toil ratio, automation percentage
  • Comms: handoff quality, incident coordination overhead
  • Efficiency: tool context-switching, flow interruption, time to understand...
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

AI is shipping more code

  • deployment frequency up
  • incident rate follows
  • more oncall pressure (more incidents and more friction)
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie
Friction doesn't just slow you down - it increases error rate under pressure. Jevons paradox turns friction up to 11. More complex systems means that cognitive, tool and process friction also increase, and increase much more quickly.
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

Different types of friction:

  • Cognitive load: alerts without context; opaque system states; mental model gaps
  • Tool friction: UI that fights us under pressure ; CLIs with undiscoverable flags ; dashboards that load slowly
  • Process friction: coordination lag during incidents ; approval gates mid incident ; urn books that require interpretation
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie

SREs are developers, with the same failure modes

  • Write code
  • Build tooling
  • Manage complex multi-system workflows

Failure modes:

  • cognitive overloap
  • tool failures
  • process bottlenecks

When SRE systems fail, the blast radius is often every incident the SRE is on

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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @msuriar@mastodon.ie
Have you been paged for something your tooling should have caught? How many have a runbook you don't trust? How many have had to context switch out of an incident to understand how tools/logging work? [many hands] you just measured your developer/SRE experience!
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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Mar 24, 2026
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie

Mean time to WTF

Developer experience as a reliability property

By Dr. Nicole Forsgren

#srecon

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Open post
msuriar
Murali Suriar @msuriar@mastodon.ie · Jul 25, 2023
Murali Suriar
@msuriar@mastodon.ie

From London, live in Dublin. Do computer things sometimes.

mastodon.ie
Replying to @garius@mastodon.me.uk
@garius hoooly shit. it's literally "all of this has happened before"
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