Roles vs. Silos, Contribution vs. Technology

14 Jan 2020 Tags: Soft skills

With the developing maturity of chaos engineering techniques, I see people taking the job title, “Chaos Engineer”. Although I think chaos engineering is a truly useful field based upon important principles, I am wary of defining one’s job in those terms. It confuses technology with contribution, creates a silo where we want a role. I prefer a title like Site/Service Reliability/Resilience Engineer, which emphasizes the bearer’s contribution to the organization. An SRE may very well have training in chaos engineering and spend much of their time using those methods but their role is to improve system reliability.

The role of a role: Framing activity as contribution

An individual’s role in an organization is defined in terms of the contribution their activity makes towards the organization’s goals. The role of a salesperson is to sell a company’s products, contributing to its profitability. The role of a human resources professional is to ensure that their organization’s policies are fair in principle and applied in practice, contributing to an effective workforce. And the role of someone who uses chaos engineering methods is certainly not to increase the chaos and dysfunction in their organization but to inject chaos in a controlled manner, detecting weak points in the system. Those weak points in turn will be proactively fixed, reducing the organization’s risk of critical systems failure.

Defining a job title by techniques makes it a silo

In contrast to defining a job title as a role, defining it by techniques used and the knowledge required for those techniques creates a silo. Only employees with the requisite knowledge can have that job and the job exists independently of changes in the organization’s goals. Requirements for prior knowledge can become, consciously or unconsciously, protective walls for those currently holding the title, restricting entry by newcomers.

Such job titles can also confine the employee. If their job title is one type of technique but they want to expand into using another type, they must somehow categorize the new type as a variant of the first.

The job description matters more the title

In actual practice, the key issue is the job’s description more than its title. There is a strong path dependence and context specificity to job titles. New employees enter work in progress and change is gradual. Whatever the title, I believe that writing the job description in terms of its underlying purpose, the way this role contributes to organizational success, is better than a focus on the bundle of techniques the person in that position uses. Role-based descriptions serve both organization and employee best.