Closing the Conference: Humans in the Loop
The closing keynote at QCon San Francisco 2025, delivered by Michelle Brush, engineering director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Google, framed a provocative question for modern engineering leaders: how can teams thrive in a chaotic industry without losing sight of reliability, safety, and human judgment? Presented on November 19, 2025, the talk titled “Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry” offered a blueprint for leadership that blends technical rigor with humane decision‑making.
The Core Idea: People as the Critical Variable
Brush argued that automation and tooling are essential, but the real differentiator for successful organizations is how leaders manage people under pressure. In an era of rapid change—where incidents, outages, and evolving customer needs collide—leaders must design systems that empower engineers to act thoughtfully. The keynote reframed the SRE philosophy from a pure reliability metric to a holistic approach that treats humans as a core variable in system performance.
Leading with Purpose in a High‑stakes Environment
Effective engineering leadership, Brush suggested, starts with clear purpose and aligned incentives. Teams should understand not only what to accomplish but why it matters for users, business outcomes, and the broader mission. When engineers see the connection between their day‑to‑day work and customer impact, decision‑making becomes more resilient during outages or uncertain projects.
Structured Decision-Making During Incidents
A central theme was the importance of structured decision processes during incidents. By normalizing protocols for incident triage, information sharing, and post‑mortem learning, teams can reduce cognitive load and minimize blame. Brush emphasized psychological safety as a prerequisite for candid post‑incident discussions, enabling teams to extract actionable insights rather than defensiveness or hero culture.
<h2 Practical Strategies for Engineering Leaders
The keynote offered concrete guidance that engineering leaders can apply across teams and industries:
- Build resilient org structures: Create roles and cadences that support autonomy while preserving alignment with strategic goals. Clear escalation paths and well‑defined ownership reduce chaos during incident response.
- Invest in cognitive load management: Prioritize tooling and dashboards that surface only the most relevant data for the moment, preventing information overload during critical moments.
- Foster continuous learning: Turn outages into learning opportunities with blameless retrospectives, tangible improvement plans, and measurable results.
- Balance speed and safety: Encourage rapid experimentation while enforcing guardrails that protect users and the system’s reputation.
- Champion diverse perspectives: Include varied voices in crisis decision‑making to surface hidden risks and encourage creative solutions.
<h2 The Human‑Centered Takeaway
Ultimately, the closing keynote reframed engineering leadership as a human practice embedded in technical discipline. In a field characterized by constant upheaval—from shifting cloud architectures to evolving security threats—the leaders who succeed are the ones who design organizations that respect human judgment, foster psychological safety, and institutionalize learning. Brush’s message is a call to embed humanity at the center of engineering systems so that reliability and innovation can co‑exist under pressure.
<h2 What this means for teams
For practitioners attending QConSF 2025, the talk provided a practical lens to assess current practices. Teams are encouraged to audit incident playbooks, invest in leadership development for engineers, and implement processes that make collaboration more efficient during crises. As the industry navigates a chaotic landscape, the emphasis on ‘‘humans in the loop’’ offers a sustainable path to superior reliability, faster delivery, and healthier engineering cultures.
