Connective Labor in SRE

The Last Human Job

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I am about a third of the way into Allison Pugh’s book The Last Human Job. It is a deep, anthropological look at the advance of technology (AI, apps, gig economy) to provide human services, seemingly to replace the humans doing it. Nurses, lawyers, teachers, trainers, social workers, sex workers, delivery drivers, even (and maybe especially) tech workers.

Pugh names a concept that resonates strongly with my own work and CPTSD recovery: Connective Labor. The idea is simple. Humans serve other humans, and when connective labor is used to create a deeper connection with the served human, it leads to more success with whatever service is being done.

The person providing a service finds that they get better results when they connect with the other human they are serving. This goes beyond courtesy and kindness, it extends into empathy and growth for both parties. Akin to complexity and resilience, connective labor is the emergence of a relationship that is achieved by being seen.

Names Mean Things

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This thing is something I can point to now! It is a skill I’ve tried to develop in my work as a sysadmin and in SRE leadership. The worst moniker that everyone knows for this is the familiar “soft skills”. For whatever reason, soft skills seem attached to the idea that only a certain type of human can be good at them. I love the name “connective labor” so much more because it encompasses so much more.

Connective labor is not only how we work together, it is how we can collaborate and coordinate for projects and incidents. A lot of my chatter about preparing for incidents through gameplay is centered around this idea of building empathy across teams. The example I like to give is the difference between a surprise call from someone you know at 3AM and one from a stranger. Building empathy like this is a form of connective labor.

When successful, half the story is that the person serving helps the person served to be seen. The other half is that the person served helps the person serving to be seen. A reciprocal relationship! It builds upon itself, an example of emergence in complexity where we move from ambiguity to adaptation to understanding.

That’s what we do in Practice of Practice sessions (like tabletop simulations for incident response) that involve participation and inclusion. We’re setting the stage for connective labor to happen! I’m so happy I have a term for this now.

Bastard Operator Redux

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Connecting to the people we’re supporting is something sysadmins have traditionally sucked at doing. It is easy to get sucked into the analytical coldness of the work and not suffer the whims of humanity, it even feels comfy there in that dark place. Even so, there’s a chapter in my original Unix Systems Administration book from the 1990s (we used to call it “The Red Book”, and I still have it!) about how important it is for the sysadmin to consider the people they are serving.

My time in tech is long. My first real job doing tech support work was in my undergrad music department. I volunteered to help build and run the first “digital music workstation” lab at Virginia Tech. I also ran the department Gopher site, which I turned into HTTP by 1992 (on an LC running MacBSD, no less). For the past 34 years in tech I have done an overwhelming amount of IT support and serving humans.

To a lot of sysadmins, the problem is the human. This still happens, believe it or not. I encounter ops people who I call “No People” more than I care for. They guard their tech or code or infra with their very lives. It would seem that way at least, because the first thing they say to any recommendation or question is typically “No” and they require being convinced before they capitulate. These are the folks that love to run murder boards and tell you how many times you’re wrong.

Jagged or Smooth?

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Social anxiety is a big part of my psyche, but so is displaying vulnerability. These traits are entwined between my Neurodivergence (ASD/OCD) and Complex PTSD (childhood trauma and abuse). I’ve had some very bad problems with interacting socially, even with my own family. So I have been working hard to escape the realm of the “No People” by showing vulnerability and leaning on gratitude. I think I have been mostly successful, it’s a work in progress. Thanks to studying Resilience Engineering, I gained an understanding that good human connections are how technical things become successful.

One of the keys to unlocking connective labor is displaying vulnerability, to show that we are human and we see the other person, too. It is these places of our humanness where others can hook-in. Where we recognize together that we are humans in the common cause of trying to survive on this planet.

An aspect of this labor that I think I love the most is that we are attracted to connect on a deeper emotional level with another human when we experience them making a mistake, especially when they own it. Yet another reflection of resilience in sociotechnical systems, where we learn the most by paying attention to complexity when we notice that it’s failing.

I like to think that these jagged edges are there so that they fit better against another human’s jagged edges. If we all had perfectly smooth edges to us, where everything on the surface appears clean and tidy, we don’t have anything for our connective labor to find purchase. Coming closer to another human is the right thing, even if it takes a while to learn how to get that connective labor flowing. Whatever calamity strikes, we must never give up our human connections.