The Dignity of the Trenches: Why SREs Aren’t Broken Engineers

There’s a myth in tech that never quite dies: that Site Reliability Engineers, DevOps folks, and platform engineers are just damaged goods. Failed developers. People who couldn’t hack it at writing features, so they got relegated to babysitting infrastructure and cleaning up after the “real” engineers.

It’s a convenient myth. It lets the industry treat us like janitors - invisible until something breaks, disposable when the shiny product work slows down.

But here’s the truth: we’re the ones who keep the lights on.

Firefighting vs. Arson

When something explodes - an outage, a database corruption, a production deployment that goes sideways - that’s when people finally remember our names. We’re heroes for a night, the firefighters charging into the blaze. The Slack channel fills with applause when we get things back online.

And then? Silence.

The irony is brutal: the more the culture glorifies firefighting, the more arsonists it creates. I’ve seen feature teams push half-baked releases on Friday nights because “we can roll it back if it breaks.” I’ve seen managers green-light migrations with no rollback plan because “the SREs will figure it out.” When heroics are rewarded more than prevention, chaos becomes the default operating mode.

When Success Looks Like Failure

Not long ago, I was dropped into a project that was doomed before the first line of code even hit production. You know the kind:

• The codebase was already rotting from shortcuts and quick wins.
• The engineering culture was toxic - more about turf wars than teamwork.
• The business logic didn’t even line up with the infrastructure it was supposed to run on.

I raised my hand. More than once. I asked the uncomfortable questions. I pointed out the cracks before they became sinkholes.

Eventually, the project was killed. It didn’t ship. There was no launch party. No demo. From the outside, it looked like failure. And in the corporate blame game, I was the convenient scapegoat.

But here’s the thing: killing that project saved the company money, time, and probably more than a few jobs. It was the right call. It was a win.

The problem is, most companies don’t know how to celebrate that kind of win. They know how to reward the firefighter who pulls the system back online at 3AM, but they don’t know how to honor the engineer who stops the fire from happening in the first place.

The Unseen Wins

The work that actually matters doesn’t trend on Twitter or make it into the CEO’s all-hands slides. It’s quieter than that. It looks like:

• The deploy nobody noticed. You spent two weeks tearing apart the GitLab CI pipeline, making it deterministic, idempotent, and boring. Now rollouts happen in ten minutes instead of forty, and nobody has to think about it again.
• The Terraform module nobody cursed at. You rewrote the VPC module so that new environments spin up cleanly every time, no weird edge cases, no snowflake networking rules. Nobody will thank you - but no one will spend their Saturday debugging broken infra either.
• The migration nobody remembers. That data store move from RDS to Aurora? Or the Kafka cluster upgrade? It was so uneventful that people forgot it happened. That’s the win.
• The alert nobody got. You tuned the Datadog monitors so they’re signal, not noise. Now the team sleeps through the night instead of drowning in false positives. No pagers buzzing at 3AM. Nobody writes you a thank-you card for that, but it’s dignity in its purest form.

This is craft, not custodial work. It’s the discipline of making systems reliable enough that the drama never shows up in the first place.

Dignity in the Trenches

There’s a reason soldiers write poems about life in the trenches. It’s ugly, unglamorous, and nobody outside those mud-soaked walls ever really understands it. But the trenches are where resilience is built.

Ops work is the same. It’s not punishment for failed coders - it’s a creative discipline in its own right. We design for failure. We build for chaos. We think about what it means to get paged at 3AM and architect ways to make that page never happen again.

Our work is invisible until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, the stakes are everything: people’s jobs, trust, reputations, money burning by the second. That’s dignity, not damage.

Reclaiming Pride

If you’re in this line of work, stop letting anyone frame it as second-class engineering. Wear it like armor. You’re the one who made sure the rollout was seamless, the cluster didn’t fall over, the pager stayed silent. You’re the one who kept the system alive.

The world doesn’t need more arsonists. It needs more trench-builders.

And the next time someone calls SREs “damaged software engineers”? Smile, nod, and let them enjoy the uptime they’ve taken for granted.