The Perverse Incentives of Reliability

Explore a 27-minute conference talk from SREcon25 Americas where Katie Wilde of Snyk addresses the challenges of improving reliability in organizations where it's often undervalued. Discover why reliability work frequently lacks extrinsic rewards—customers don't acknowledge outages that never happened, and investors aren't impressed by systems that simply work as expected. Learn how today's pressure to deliver features with tighter deadlines often sacrifices system resilience. The presentation offers practical approaches to overcome these perverse incentives by harnessing intrinsic motivation, sharing tactics and lessons learned that can transform reliability practices. Find out how to tap into the inherent pride, joy, and even humor in incident management to build a stronger reliability culture, even when facing organizational resistance or reliance on heroics to maintain operations.