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Wow for a hot second I even debated explaining the Subject Matter Expert acronym - Surely everyone in the PlatformCon Slack org knows what a SME is! - I’m part of the problem too! 😂😭

@Cruise Hall i believe it's this (or at least related to it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Given that you're at Capital One @Cruise Hall, your observation may be coloured by the size of the organization you work at. I work with some ex-C1 folks and have heard similar stories. Where I am, the Platform team is consulting with less experienced engineers daily to understand pain points and alleviate them. We aren't able to address every pain point, but we have good visibility into problems simply through conversations and communication I think your observation can hold true for individuals or organizations, but speaks more to culture.

@Brandon McNama you're summing up what I was about to say well. At DIT our most senior SREs work with the most junior devs to help them accomplish whatever they're trying to do. The SREs bring back pain points to the team and these are fed into reducing the cognitive load of the platform as a whole through better tooling (and docs)

In case any C1 folks stumble across this thread, I do want to clarify that this observation predates my time at C1 😉 this is something I originally noticed when working on cloud migrations as a consultant. @Brandon McNama / @Ravi Kotecha to summarize, it sounds like the feedback loop works bc there is a strong pull from the senior engs (🙌 culture win!). If you suddenly hired a handful of senior engineers who were not accustomed to doing this, is there any culture “scaffolding” (e.g. processes, training, codified best practices) that would help ensure they emulate the success of their peers in this category?

I think I would definitely have culture problems if I had separate platform team and a SRE team. I think it works because SREs both build the platform and also help users onboard onto the platform

we have separate sre and platform team - there are challenges there but i think you need to split it up eventually to scale...then again, every org is different