I'm not sure if this is the exact curriculum I'd pick but I do think it's one of the easier jobs to 'learn' and get a well paying job doing. If you want to get

I'm not sure if this is the exact curriculum I'd pick but I do think it's one of the easier jobs to 'learn' and get a well paying job doing. If you want to get hired at Google (for example), one thing I think that is overlooked is that the SRE-SE interview is actually a lot more sane than the puzzles you see in the software one in terms of practicality, relationship to actual work, and 'learnability'. To have a pretty solid shot you need to learn a scripting language and be able to do practical things with it -like opening files, regex, string manipulation, sets/maps, etc. Next is trouble shooting and linux internals (what happens when you boot a system or run a command at a relatively low level) - this may require dedicated study or just some brushing up depending on your background and general natural 'computer nerdiness' (i.e what OS are you using right now?). The design question needs a bit of preparation - it'd be helpful to read popular distributed systems white papers from the last couple of decades like the DynamoDB paper and understand some 'modern' primitives like RAFT/PAXOS or LevelDB/RocksDB and practice doing some back-of-the-napkin system sizing if you aren't great with mental math. So it's definitely a lot but at the end of the day it's just knowledge you can self study. A focused course could probably teach it in 6-8 months and give you a pretty solid chance at landing the job vs the algo-puzzle coding path which has a high false negative rate even for talented software engineers. Plus once you have your foot in the door you can always look into a ladder change if you find you don't enjoy the SRE-style work.