What's an Anthropologist doing in Meta's Infrastructure?

As an anthropologist on Meta’s Reliability Engineering team, my job is to integrate culture to applied systems analysis and to design and conduct interventions to effect positive change. This talk explores how we used anthropological research to help Meta make a 180-degree shift from “Move Fast and Break Things” to “Move Fast with Stable Infrastructure.” Instead of trying to go from one extreme to another, we used culture and the concept of behavioral “nudges” to drive change from the bottom up and top down. 

Specifically, this talk describes an ongoing intervention to provide appropriate levels of recognition for reliability work. The second explores a novel intervention that uses AI to ‘nudge’ engineers to reduce the likelihood of risky diffs from landing.

This talk aims to provide actionable recommendations to ensure that engineers focus on social and cultural solutions in addition to technological ones as they scale.