Are Dirty Hands Right?

[@marcwinner567]

Great episode! Love these kind of discussions

[@wurlin_murlin]

Thanks for the episode fellas. In an SRE role atm, another way I interpret "dirty hands are right" is that what gets implemented is the ground truth. No matter what your objections and beautiful ideas are, what gets done is real and what doesn't get done is not. The trick in SRE is never be a completely separate team from the guys building the core things, getting stuck in with them helps with skin in the game in both directions and prevents the extremes of Conway's Law of long hallways. Without a social and technical nearness it devolves into whinging and gatekeeping from the operational side like in that one KRAZAM sketch, and dev becomes the villains of circumstance unwittingly creating the accidental sleep deprivation water torture nightmare pain zone. That note about "collectively having dirty hands that are right" around 27:24 is applicable I think. "Free as in free goldfish" is a clapper, stealing that immediately. It's free as in free aphorisms.

[@waelisc]

Rather than essentially "don't backseat drive", I think the original idea is basically that "your opinion doesn't count unless it's the product of experience" - the person who's actually been in the trenches will always know better than the person back at home.