4 ms·

SRE is a highly skilled job. It is actually difficult. Doing a root cause analysis or investigating an infrastructure blackhole is a very rare skill. You have t

SRE is a highly skilled job. It is actually difficult. Doing a root cause analysis or investigating an infrastructure blackhole is a very rare skill. You have to be aware of the end-to-end landscape, or atleast communicate well with the stakeholders who own the domain and resolve issues, manage expectations, huge pressure dealing with time critical issues. Having seen all of roles, being SRE was the only time when a slack message sounds would trigger anxiety in me.

lamontcg 5y ago
I mean I used to be a tier 4 oncall at Amazon and had global root access, managed the configuration management infrastructure and had enable access on all the networking equipment. I'm criticizing the SRE role from a background of having a very high level of understanding of difficult operational roles. The selling point to me 10 years ago was that it would break down the wall so that people like me could also have access to the source code and be SWEs (instead of having to strace a black box all the time), but it seems like the job has become significantly dumbed down from the systems side, and SREs tend to grow out of the software teams and are the people responsible for the pager, metrics, SLOs, hacking up turing computable YAML, memorizing the whole CNCF landscape, and yelling at Kubernetes.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  SRE is just a name for a group that Google created to fit its own purposes. It was never supposed to be some panacea. SRE is just a collection of "production support" responsibilities with authority over a product owner and some software development. > SREs tend to grow out of the software teams and are the people responsible for the pager, metrics, SLOs, hacking up turing computable YAML, memorizing the whole CNCF landscape, and yelling at Kubernetes. Yeah, that's exactly what they were created for...

lamontcg 5y ago

I mean I used to be a tier 4 oncall at Amazon and had global root access, managed the configuration management infrastructure and had enable access on all the networking equipment. I'm criticizing the SRE role from a background of having a very high level of understanding of difficult operational roles. The selling point to me 10 years ago was that it would break down the wall so that people like me could also have access to the source code and be SWEs (instead of having to strace a black box all the time), but it seems like the job has become significantly dumbed down from the systems side, and SREs tend to grow out of the software teams and are the people responsible for the pager, metrics, SLOs, hacking up turing computable YAML, memorizing the whole CNCF landscape, and yelling at Kubernetes.

throwaway984393 5y ago
SRE is just a name for a group that Google created to fit its own purposes. It was never supposed to be some panacea. SRE is just a collection of "production support" responsibilities with authority over a product owner and some software development. > SREs tend to grow out of the software teams and are the people responsible for the pager, metrics, SLOs, hacking up turing computable YAML, memorizing the whole CNCF landscape, and yelling at Kubernetes. Yeah, that's exactly what they were created for...