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SRE is a terrible role name both in its abbreviated and in its fully spelled out version! Just because it originates at Google, it doesn't mean it's cool. I am
by nikolay 10y ago
SRE is a terrible role name both in its abbreviated and in its fully spelled out version! Just because it originates at Google, it doesn't mean it's cool. I am terrified that it gets more and more popular these days!
- moises_silva 10y agoI like it. What do you see terrible with it? why, and what would be in your opinion a better role name?
- nikolay 10y ago"Operations Engineer", for example.
- closeparen 10y agoThe term SRE espouses a philosophy that when SRE has done its job perfectly, there is no operations work because the system is reliable on its own. If you're looking for members of that school of thought, you say SRE. If you're comfortable having a "boiler room" and just need to staff it up, the terms sysadmin and devops work just fine depending on the level of coding involved.
- nikolay 10y agoI dig a little bit before commenting (SRE vs DevOps), but SRE as an abbreviation is ugly and reliability is assumed for every subject or role, so, it's redundant.
- closeparen 10y agoSRE is about engineering systems to be reliable, which is certainly not a goal taken seriously by default. In a traditional environment the system itself is not reliable and not trying (very hard) to be; rather, the combination of system + pager-carrying operators is reliable. Many more people are paging operators to do DB replica promotions by hand, than are inplementing distributed consensus algorithms and self-healing distributed databases.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- moises_silva 10y agoI'd say that's quite more vague and doesn't quite sound like what an SRE is. You didn't answer my other questions btw.
- nikolay 10y agoSorry, I meant "Site Operations Engineer". "Reliability" is an adjective assumed to every subject or role.
- stonogo 10y agoThe presence of a "reliability engineer" raises the question of what the hell all the other engineers are there for.
- cakeface 10y agoThey are there to build features. Hopefully those features are something that solves business problems and ultimately drives revenue. Reliability is a requirement for a useful business system but is not a useful thing on its own. Your system needs to solve actual problems with software features to be useful. That is what the rest of the developers are rightly focused on.
- bostik 10y ago> I am terrified that it gets more and more popular these days! Personally I believe this is a direct result of the absolutely massive devaluation of the term "DevOps". The latter has become a synonym for meaningless mishmash of "everything in operations, and nothing in particular". Using the term SRE is a clear signal that we're talking about engineers with good understanding of systems and operations. Disclaimer: this distinction is mine, and I have come to it after making the mistake of trying to hire "devops engineers". Put those two words together and your applications pipeline gets crammed with unskilled remote hands who cannot even realise they have delusions of grandeur. It's also - apparently - an invitation for every cold-emailing recruiter to spam you to death.