Measuring Reliability Culture to Optimize Tradeoffs: Perspectives from an Anthropologist

Understanding how culture influences engineering practices is often a black box. At Meta, we focused on transforming our mantra of “move fast and break things,” to “move fast with stable infrastructure” by giving attention to the cultural elements of doing reliability work. This talk describes this process and decodes how to systematically measure the on-the-ground perspectives of engaging with reliability work so that we can have an informed perspective on how to best optimize the right degree of reliability. The audience will take away actionable practices that can be used to understand how to evaluate their underlying reliability culture, take data-driven approaches to measuring reliability sentiment and barriers and facilitators to performing the work, and identify practices that allow for a more holistic data-driven prioritization of reliability efforts that aligns with cultural values, especially when there are competing demands and increasing pressure to optimize efficiency.