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You can be oncall from home. I found it perfect, just hanging around writing some code and get occasionally a page or two about somebody misunderstanding what p

You can be oncall from home. I found it perfect, just hanging around writing some code and get occasionally a page or two about somebody misunderstanding what production readiness means. :) On a more serious note, it is fun to work as an SRE, lots of problems you haven't seen before, many opportunities to learn about large scale systems. This sort of knowledge and view point that comes with it is invaluable for other companies too, you can move forward with your career faster after being an SRE for few years. (Amazon asks you do that for a year before you can move on to a different role).

szopa 10y ago
Yeah, being oncall for something like a well behaved backend system may be quite nice. I was an SRE for YouTube, and it was an almost constant bloodbath. YouTube's code changes at a relatively fast pace, there's a ton of developers, and it depends on a ton of different backends, and a problem with any of them would make us suffer. To make it worse I had a bit of bad luck, and was a magnet for weird and unlikely outages (bracing for my shift was a running joke in the team). So, if I was oncall at home it usually meant that shit started happening before breakfast and I didn't get enough quiet time to take my 10 minute bus ride to the office :) This said, I really enjoyed the experience. Yes, it was tiring and stressful, but it was also super interesting and exciting. Being responsible for such a huge site was incredible, and the feeling of figuring out how to overcome a big outage was exhilarating. I actually miss the pager drama from time to time (my wife does not).
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  When you say outage does it mean youtube.com doesn't work at all, like reddit does some times or just few nodes of your load balancer give out?
sateesh 10y ago
I agree being an SRE exposes one to kind of problems that can occur in large scale production systems, the problems which one might not have thought during development or not unearthed during QA. But I think being oncall is flipside of being a SRE. To me being Oncall is oncall, be it be from home or oncall from office. If you are oncall during non-working hours, except what you save for the commute to being on office, your focus is drawn away from what you are doing (might be spending time with family, or book/movie you are enjoying, sleeping, or working on your project).

szopa 10y ago

Yeah, being oncall for something like a well behaved backend system may be quite nice. I was an SRE for YouTube, and it was an almost constant bloodbath. YouTube's code changes at a relatively fast pace, there's a ton of developers, and it depends on a ton of different backends, and a problem with any of them would make us suffer. To make it worse I had a bit of bad luck, and was a magnet for weird and unlikely outages (bracing for my shift was a running joke in the team). So, if I was oncall at home it usually meant that shit started happening before breakfast and I didn't get enough quiet time to take my 10 minute bus ride to the office :) This said, I really enjoyed the experience. Yes, it was tiring and stressful, but it was also super interesting and exciting. Being responsible for such a huge site was incredible, and the feeling of figuring out how to overcome a big outage was exhilarating. I actually miss the pager drama from time to time (my wife does not).

thewhitetulip 10y ago
When you say outage does it mean youtube.com doesn't work at all, like reddit does some times or just few nodes of your load balancer give out?

sateesh 10y ago

I agree being an SRE exposes one to kind of problems that can occur in large scale production systems, the problems which one might not have thought during development or not unearthed during QA. But I think being oncall is flipside of being a SRE. To me being Oncall is oncall, be it be from home or oncall from office. If you are oncall during non-working hours, except what you save for the commute to being on office, your focus is drawn away from what you are doing (might be spending time with family, or book/movie you are enjoying, sleeping, or working on your project).