“People don’t buy software, they hire a service” is a bullshit straw man.
That OS on your laptop? Software.
The terminal your SSH runs in? Software.
The browser you’re reading this take in? Software.
The editor you wrote your last 10k LOC in? Software.
The only “service” I buy is email — and even that I run myself. It’s still just software, plus ops.
Yes, running things is hard. Nobody serious disputes that. But pretending this is some new revelation is ahistorical. We used to call this systems engineering, operations, reliability, or just doing your job before SRE needed a brand deck.
And let’s be clear about the direction of value:
Software without SRE still has value.
SRE without software has none.
A binary I can run, copy, fork, and understand beats a perfectly monitored nothing. A CLI tool with zero uptime guarantees still solves problems. A library still ships value. A game still runs. A compiler still compiles.
Ops exists to serve software, not replace it.
Reliability amplifies value — it does not create it.
If “writing code is easy,” why is the world drowning in unreliable, unmaintainable, over-engineered trash with immaculate dashboards and flawless incident postmortems?
People buy software.
They appreciate service when the software becomes infrastructure.
Confusing the two is how you end up worshipping uptime graphs while shipping nothing worth running.
That OS on your laptop? Software. The terminal your SSH runs in? Software. The browser you’re reading this take in? Software. The editor you wrote your last 10k LOC in? Software.
The only “service” I buy is email — and even that I run myself. It’s still just software, plus ops.
Yes, running things is hard. Nobody serious disputes that. But pretending this is some new revelation is ahistorical. We used to call this systems engineering, operations, reliability, or just doing your job before SRE needed a brand deck.
And let’s be clear about the direction of value:
Software without SRE still has value. SRE without software has none.
A binary I can run, copy, fork, and understand beats a perfectly monitored nothing. A CLI tool with zero uptime guarantees still solves problems. A library still ships value. A game still runs. A compiler still compiles.
Ops exists to serve software, not replace it. Reliability amplifies value — it does not create it.
If “writing code is easy,” why is the world drowning in unreliable, unmaintainable, over-engineered trash with immaculate dashboards and flawless incident postmortems?
People buy software. They appreciate service when the software becomes infrastructure. Confusing the two is how you end up worshipping uptime graphs while shipping nothing worth running.