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School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI'm going to have to check this out. My knowledge concerning some of the topics is relatively ragged, and this could go far in strengthening that base.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoTitle nitpick but this curriculum is for not just for non traditional hires— > At Linkedin, we are using this curriculum for onboarding our non-traditional hires and new college grads into the SRE role.
- DarkContinent 6y agoThanks for the comment! I updated the title.
- qntty 6y agoCan someone decode the term "non-traditional hire"? I'm sure I knew what this meant at one point but forgot.
- fractionalhare 6y agoTypically means someone without traditional credentials, such as a college degree or any work experience.
- itsmemattchung 6y agoWish the article would explicitly spell it out. It wasn't obvious from reading it that traditional == college degree (or work experience).
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhat do you think the traditional education is for a software engineer?
- greggyb 6y agoWell, for the first few decades it was math or EE....
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 6y agoA math or EE... what? A degree, right? A relevant degree is the traditional education. If you don't have one - you're non-traditional. Get it?
- greggyb 6y agoOh, thanks for spelling it out for me. Being incredibly stupid, it's valuable for me when people treat me as such. (: Traditional education for practical purposes was, for much of human history, focused much more on apprenticeship-style learning than degrees. Colleges and universities were not considered a prerequisite for lots of technical jobs such as carpentry, architecture, toolmaking, clockmaking, or even banking and accounting. If we look at the last century or so, instead of the breadth of human history, we'll see a different story. Perhaps this is a good scope to consider, seeing as the history of Computer Science and programming largely falls into this time period. If we want to consider digital computing, the dawn of our field had plenty of people coming to programming "from industry", to use a modern term. Experienced professionals learned to program outside of degree programs, because there were no degrees to be had in computer science or programming. Many early pioneers in programming and digital computing came from EE programs and Mathematics departments. This is the early tradition of programming and computer science. Today, though, if you were looking to start a career as an SRE or as a programmer, a Math degree would be a poor choice. It is traditional, in that it was a common early path, but it is much less likely to prepare you for the type of job relevant to this thread. An individual with a degree in Literature would likely be considered a non-traditional candidate for a programming job. An individual with a degree in Mathematics may be considered the same. A Math degree may have a lot of computational focus, or none at all. Get it?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoTraditional = CS degree
- treeman79 6y ago20 years traditional often meant dropped out of CS to join/start your company. Gain useful skills. Well placed like MIT were actually good
- vsareto 6y agoCould you actually get an SRE job if you went through this?
- jedberg 6y agoYou could probably at least get a phone interview if you did...
- vsareto 6y agoThis is just positioned weirdly. They use it for on-boarding, which means you already got the job without knowing it or only partially knowing it, so it's not a hard requirement. The real requirement is the ability to learn. But if that's true, they shouldn't have much trouble finding people to train into SREs: >Because of the lack of these resources, we felt that individuals have a tough time getting into open positions in the industry
- RMPR 6y agoI don't really understand, how going through this will get you a phone interview? I mean, it doesn't change anything on your resume... Source: I'm a new grad, I went through almost all this, but my application wasn't shortlisted. Not a native speaker, so maybe I just don't understand what you're saying.
- jedberg 6y agoMy implication is that you either somehow indicate on your resume that you've done all this work, or better yet, take up a small project that lets you apply some of the skills. As a hiring manager there is no way to know you've done this unless you somehow demonstrate it.
- pm90 6y agoClassic software chicken and egg problem.
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- alexott 6y agoNoticed in the NoSQL section that they still call Cassandra as wide column DB. It’s not true for a long time - CQL requires schema definition, and although it’s possible to emulate old behavior, it’s not wide column anymore - people just copy old things...
- dzonga 6y agowith cloud being the talk of the industry these days. how pervasive are SRE roles. I would wager a good system admin | SRE can save a company thousands if they provisioned their own hardware i.e colo instead of cloud instances etc
- chucky_z 6y agoFor LinkedIn that number can be 7+ figures saved per year by a single employee.
- xionon 6y agoYou still need SREs for using cloud services at large scale, and they can manage more cloud infrastructure per person than if it was colocated
- _jal 6y agoYep. We run almost all our systems on our own hardware. (We do use cloud VMs for random things.) It is much cheaper. Running our primary DB cluster in AWS for a month costs more than the purchase price of the hardware the cluster runs on.
- unethical_ban 6y agoDo you think SRE talent isn't needed for cloud? There is an incredible number of metrics around every AWS service, and the decoupling of things via queues, topics, APIs etc. mean there are a lot of moving parts.
- arcturus17 6y agoThey could also cost the company ludicrous amounts if they built a Frankenstein at the software layer which made a mess of operations, security or performance. It’s unlikely that a “good” sysadmin / SRE, or even a team of them, could efficiently replicate the versatility and reliability offered by cloud services.
- jonfromsf 6y agoThats true. But you don't need that versatility or reliability a lot of the time. For a bog-standard webapp that talks to a database, gets decent traffic, and is growing at a reasonable pace (say doubling every year), dedicated hosting or colo will save you a LOT of money.
- markus_zhang 6y agoI'm not sure, but maybe this is only for internal transfers? I mean this is obviously less difficult than the interviews of the big ones, or maybe Linkedin doesn't have difficult interviews?
- sushid 6y agoWhere are people getting that this is their interview process (or a prep book of some sort)? This afaik from the intro page is that they use this for onboarding. It’s to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
- markus_zhang 6y agoNo, what I meant is, since the interview is more difficult than this onboarding doc (I could be wrong though, so if I'm wrong the whole thing doesn't stand), why did they bother to introduce this onboarding doc to anyone who already familiar with each part of it?
- kodah 6y agoWhat is a "non-traditional" hire?
- paxys 6y agoSomeone who hasn't done a 4-year bachelors degree in CS/CE or a related field, or doesn't have previous industry experience in the role.
- 0xbadcafebee 6y agoThis is less of an SRE school and more of a Systems Admin school. The Systems Design section is neat but quite bare.
- tayo42 6y agoSre is a glorified sys admin for the most part.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- suyash 6y agolooks pretty good but still missing a lot of other things such as CI/CD, Software Testing, Bug management, Feature Development, Code Review as per Styleguide etc that should be taught to any newbie SWE based on the team/company workflow
- chapium 6y agoWhy does this exist?
- sanketplus 6y agocan you elaborate?
- chapium 6y agoWhy are there curriculums for post-grads? They have already completed a curriculum.
- sanketplus 6y agothis focuses on SRE parts which are not taught explicitly/comprehensively.
- yellow_pen 6y agoa quick search for LinkedIn SRE jobs returns: - Senior SREs - Staff SREs - Manager, SRE - SRE Intern assuming senior, staff and manager roles would not accept non-traditional candidates...so this applies to interns?
- nojito 6y agoThere are Senior/Staff SREs with non-traditional backgrounds at Linkedin
- bxji 6y agoWe hire entry level SREs (new grads) as well. The job listing might have been closed already for this year, though. I also saw a couple junior SRE listings (as in not new grad but not senior level either). Disclaimer: work for LinkedIn
- igotroot 6y agoAs a non-developer whose code would probably make your average SRE's brain implode, how competent would this 'course' make me? I started my IT career 2 years ago and my programming isn't that strong. I got pinged for a SRE job recently (my background so far is very much Linux based so I must have matched some filter) but I'm not strong in development, k8s (or even containers), or all of the other cool stuff I see on HN. I know I can lab stuff out, but that's not anywhere close to doing it live. I don't want to be a SRE for Google, but I'd like to learn some more on the reliability side of my world and bring things like Git, Puppet, System design, etc and not be left behind in this wave that's approaching. My organization isn't too involved in the cloud, so a lot of upcoming tech seems out of reach.
- 908B64B197 6y agoIt's a good recap but it's all things I expect a college grad to just know or be able to grok pretty fast. Also why not Google?
- igotroot 6y agoI'm just not there from a skills perspective. I feel like being a SRE at Google is the top of the food chain which I'm no where near. Not trying to bring myself down but trying to be realistic :)
- nextos 6y agoUnless you already know this really well, I'd start even at a more fundamental level than what is suggested by LinkedIn. I'd try learning Unix and a little bit of C by using The Unix Programming Environment by Kerninghan & Pike plus Kerninghan & Ritchie. It's quite timeless. Files, pipes, pointers, etc. That's the plumbing of software engineering. Then also learn the calculus of software engineering: Logic. A good short intro is Huth & Ryan. The book covers some advanced topics in later chapters, but you don't need that if you don't want to. Logic is also timeless, and very practical. You can gain the ability to model check things, which is really really cool and used pretty often for e.g. distributed systems. This can unlock many cool positions for you. Logic can also take you to logic and declarative programming. Something also worth investing into, and pretty addictive. For that, there's nothing better than The Art of Prolog.
- mraza007 6y agoWhat are some projects that you can build to demonstrate SRE knowledge
- obynio 6y agoAs a junior SRE that got hired in this role as a new grad, I find these resources quite handy for anyone that would like to step into SRE. I would like to add three other ideas - Reading the SRE book from Google to get a glimpse of the SRE philosophy. A lot of companies rebrand their Sysadmin or DevOps roles as SRE because it's trendy. Many businesses do not need SRE and need to make sure they understand the idea behind it before doing so. - Learning Golang for such a role is becoming increasingly vital. So many SRE tools including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Terraform are written, and extended, in Go that it's almost a requirement next to learning Bash. - A lot may disagree on this one, but get yourself some certifications. SRE is kind of a broad role and companies do not know how to assess the skills of candidates, and unfortunately they often rely on certifications to do so. You don't have to enroll in the most challenging ones as a junior, but just one or two basic certifications to get a rough idea of a provider or service capabilities. Choose wisely. It can be difficult to show off any personal project in such a field, but you could try to create your own infrastructure as a side project, self-host some services and provision them with Ansible for example. But most importantly as a new SRE, find yourself a good team and good mentors within that team. Getting into SRE without any previous experience is a hell of a ride, but a very rewarding one. Like previously said, SRE roles are jack of all trades and the field is so broad you never stop learning :)