I don't know about Facebook, or about this particular job opening. But at Google, many of the "sysadmin" positions are really SREs, or "Site Reliability Enginee

I don't know about Facebook, or about this particular job opening. But at Google, many of the "sysadmin" positions are really SREs, or "Site Reliability Engineers." These positions have some pretty hard-core requirements, including a solid CS background _and_ serious sysadmin experience. So if you're applying as a sysadmin at Google/Facebook/Amazon, pay very careful attention to the position description. For more background, see this exchange on the SAGE lists: http://131.106.3.205/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg02929.html http://131.106.3.205/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg0292... > I still think they're looking for math geniuses who can write hundreds of lines of extremely complex code in their heads for every position, even what should be a sysadmin/engineer/architecture job that doesn't need it. Me, with a good 12-15 years of experience, might be qualified for a junior sysadmin job in one of their NOCs somewhere. http://131.106.3.205/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg02937.html http://131.106.3.205/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg0293... > A good proportion of the "sysadmin" positions which we (Google) advertise are for the group we call "Site Reliability Engineering". The people in this group are part sysadmins, part development engineers. Their function is to keep the Google web properties up and running, highly available, and performant. A solid foundation in systems administration is essential for this role, but the SRE group are not primarily sysadmins - they are application admins, which is quite a different thing. Any given Google application may have hundreds or even thousands of actual servers associated with it, so the kind of "system administration" with which most people here are familiar is not necessarily pertinent. Yes, sysadmin skills are essential here, however we also require a very strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics and general problem-solving. This is why the SRE candidates are grilled so mercilessly.