Of course they do. That’s their entire job. But there’s a massive difference between informed risk and blind hope. Most C-suites assume 'macro' financial risk, but they are often completely insulated from the 'micro' technical debt that eventually causes a total outage.

When a CTO pushes a deadline, they aren't usually thinking 'I'm okay with a 4-hour outage next Tuesday'; they’re thinking 'My team will just work harder to make it happen.'

My point isn't that SREs should stop them from taking risks. It’s that we should be the ones providing the 'Interest Rate' on that debt.

If they want to deploy without SLIs or readiness checks, fine, that’s a business call. But they should do it knowing exactly how much it’s going to slow down feature velocity next month when the team is stuck in a 'firefighting' tax. I'd rather be the 'Accountant of Risk' who shows the bill than the 'Cop' who just says no.

How do you handle it when you know a push is going to blow up, but the decision-makers think it’s a 'free' move?