Siloes and boundaries are natural and useful; they constrain the problem space, make it possible to reason in the face of overwhelming complexity, and give space for ideas and people that don’t fit within the majority. However, those boundaries can also become so deeply entrenched and solid that they become counterproductive (thus, DevOps) - and yet the cycle repeats itself, where “DevOps Engineer” becomes a new way to say “infrastructure engineer” in many companies, someone who is holed away creating the platonic ideal of a well-managed Kubernetes cluster.

At Honeycomb, our Site Reliability Engineering team does financial modeling and product management, embeds with our Customer Support team (who is critical to tuning our SLOs), and still finds time to be Terraform wranglers. In this talk, we’ll walk through the benefits and occupational hazards of breaking down barriers, why all your managers should strive to be accomplished sociologists, and how to touch grass with your SLOs.