SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) roles have been exploding for several months now. These roles focus mostly on the server-side of things, but they seem to also be absorbing frontend performance roles (i.e. Core Web Vitals) as if that field were a “sidenote”…
Curious as to why this field is suddenly exploding?
Back in my day… we called SRE DevOps, and we believed the biggest bang-for-your-buck, performance-wise, came from frontend optimizations. The Godfather himself, Steve Souders, in his seminal The Performance Golden Rule article, stated:
80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend
.
Granted, that was back in 2012, but have things really changed that much?
I know there is more stress today on the backend via APIs than there ever has been, and even more stress introduced via all of the CSR happening now-days, and of course many sites are being absolutely hammered by AI scrapers, but it sort of seems like frontend performance is being tossed in like free breadsticks anymore…
And I can personally tell you that frontend performance is an enormous field, easily as intricate (if not more so) than backend performance: I always felt that, as tricky as backend is, you at least have a somewhat known environment; I mean, you control the server(s) you’re installed on, the processor power and RAM, including your database, you have a single OS to maintain,
I also know browsers have continuously gotten better at dealing with and adjusting to bad frontend performance, so maybe people think things there are “good enough” and can be somewhat ignored? But I would counter that frontend performance is as important now as ever, and is certainly still experiencing plenty of problems that could be fixed, if you care about your users…
So, again, anyone have a good ideas or thoughts as to why this field has erupted, and seemingly absorbed frontend?
Okay, that’s my old-man-on-the-front-porch rant for today… Now get off my lawn!
Happy auditing,
Atg