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> SRE is Sysadmins but with better contracts between teams, and automation focused. That's not even close to true, which I think is OPs point. For instance, I

• Rapzid 4y ago
  Same, background in cloud/systems engineering, SRE, and staff full stack engineer. Or, FullStack++ as I sometimes like to call it haha.
  • pojzon 4y ago
    How do you call an Engineer that can do everything beside Frontend ?
• dijit 4y ago
  I think we misunderstand each other completely. There are many types of systems administrators; when we talk about as SRE in particular there some overlap with what I was doing as a “Linux Systems Administrator” in a Platform Engineering team, in 2009. Automating migrations, distributed job control, instrumenting the message queue system, managing cache invalidation across our entire fleet of memcache servers (which was ugly hacked with MySQL, not proud), as well as “maintenance” programs to upgrade “versions” (multi-tenant SaaS) and warm caches, dark launches, canary deployments… well you get the picture. Of course I was responsible for the reliability of the systems these things ran on, but there was a really-really strong focus on automation as part of the job, and this was when puppet was quite new, we were stuck with tools like cfengine. Coddling Jenkins sounds like build or release engineering. Which is also a separate thing. People seem to forget that systems administration has a focus on software development too- I mean for goodness sake terraform, ansible and salt all come from sysadmins; I suspect it’s because of some very foolish admins proudly exclaiming they don’t code. But they were always the bottom rung and end up being “promoted” to management at some point.
  • kodah 4y ago
    I get more of what you're saying now, but I still think that reinforces OPs point because, to me, what you described is a Systems Engineer not a Systems Administrator. OP is asking for some structuring as to what these roles require in terms of knowledge. To me, "Administrator", "Engineer", "Technician", etc all prescribe different degrees of knowledge and also usually correlate with responsibility. As for "SRE" vs "DevOps" vs "Systems Engineer", I'm not so sure. For instance, I typically expect SREs to be able to write application software and orchestration software. I have similar expectations of someone who uses the title Systems Engineer but I might expect less application software development experience. DevOps I think I'd rather forget is a word.
    • xorcist 4y ago
      Systems engineer is a title that seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor, but it wasn't unusual that it was a less hands-on role than sysadmin/SRE. Sometimes close to a system integrator but could also be what is now known as an infrastructure architect. Who do you think did the SRE work before that name was invented? Most likely it was your friendly sysadmin. It is the type of role that is not much noticed when done well, and probably that's why some feel it underappreciated enough to keep inventing new job titles. It's still the same job, pretty much the role that requires privileged access.
      • kodah 4y ago
        I was raised in the South and grew up across the midwest, so that may color my perspective. The place where I encountered sysadmins the most was people who managed a small collection of assets; the keyword being managed. I didn't see them inventing entirely new systems. Working across DCs, I would see Systems Engineers building these new systems, being escalation support for them, and at times coding up entirely new infrastructure applications. I don't really buy the idea that administrators are underappreciated, I just don't think it accurately captures what a systems person on a product team actually does, much less the distinction between a SRE-SE and a systems person. My base argument is that it's not the same job at all. A good Systems Engineer does not guarantee a good SRE-SE because the job is that much different. One of the notable distinctions is writing application code, which is much different from Terraform, Ansible, Salt etc