Closing keynote at QConSF 2025: Humans in the Loop
At QCon San Francisco 2025, the closing keynote, “Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry,” delivered by Michelle Brush, engineering director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Google, offered a candid look at leadership in a field defined by complexity and rapid change. Brush framed the talk around the central paradox of modern software: machines are powerful, but humans remain the ultimate safeguard against failure.
Why humans still matter in highly automated systems
The session underscored a key truth: even the most sophisticated automation depends on human judgment. Brush argued that reliability engineering is not just about building better alerting or faster runbooks; it’s about designing systems that empower people to reason clearly under pressure. In chaotic environments—where outages can cascade and priorities shift in minutes—leaders must cultivate decision-making frameworks that preserve trust, clarity, and accountability.
Decision-making under pressure
Brush shared strategies for making high-stakes choices when data is noisy and timelines are tight. She emphasized the value of rehearsed incident playbooks, clear escalation paths, and the ritual of post-incident reviews that focus on learning rather than blame. The takeaway: leadership in chaos means structuring ambiguity so teams can act decisively without sacrificing safety or long-term reliability.
Engineering leadership as a cultural craft
The talk broadened beyond processes to culture. A successful leader in a chaotic industry builds psychological safety, encourages experimentation with guardrails, and treats reliability as a product—one that requires ongoing investment, measurement, and cross-functional collaboration. Brush highlighted that SRE leadership is about enabling others to do their best work, not merely directing tasks. This involves coaching engineers, product managers, and operators to align on shared goals, metrics, and priorities.
Metrics that matter
Rather than chasing vanity numbers, Brush urged leaders to measure impact on customer experience, service stability, and team health. Key indicators include on-call quality, incident response time, error budgets, and the rate of learning after incidents. When teams see the connection between their daily actions and end-user reliability, motivation strengthens even during turbulent periods.
Tools, rituals, and the human-in-the-loop mindset
A recurring thread in the keynote was the blend of tooling and human judgment. The right observability, runbooks, and automation should reduce cognitive load, not just add more dashboards. Leaders must customize tools to match team workflows, ensuring that automation serves people, not the other way around. Rituals such as regularly scheduled chaos drills, blameless blips, and cross-team reviews help normalize proactive resilience and shared responsibility.
Practical takeaways for engineering leaders
- Design systems with clear decision rights: who decides what when, during incidents.
- Invest in incident rehearsals and postmortems that emphasize learning and accountability.
- Foster psychological safety to encourage candid reporting of issues and near-misses.
- Align reliability goals with product outcomes to keep engineering work meaningful and focused.
- Treat reliability as a product that evolves through feedback, metrics, and cross-functional collaboration.
Why this matters for the wider tech industry
<pAs systems become more complex and distributed, leadership in chaotic environments is not optional—it’s essential. The closing keynote at QConSF 2025 made a compelling case that the future of software reliability hinges on leaders who can balance technology with humane practices, ensuring teams remain resilient, adaptive, and capable of navigating uncertainty. Michelle Brush’s message is a call to elevate humans in the loop, recognizing their critical role in steering even the most automated platforms toward dependable outcomes.
In summary
QConSF 2025’s closing remarks from Michelle Brush offered a practical, human-centered blueprint for engineering leadership in chaos. By combining thoughtful decision-making, culture-building, and purposeful tooling, leaders can empower their teams to deliver reliable software in an industry that never stands still.
