5 ms·

I don't get why SRE is a job(and it was my title for years) The stuff listed is just good software engineering. If a swe cant figure out that they need to monit

by tayo42 4y ago

I don't get why SRE is a job(and it was my title for years) The stuff listed is just good software engineering. If a swe cant figure out that they need to monitor their application (or really anything on this list) you have no business being anything other then a junior programmer. These kinds of responsibilities create this weird scenario now where the team sre is the teams babysitter. Which just leads to the ops vs dev bullshit weve seen before. Toxic right off the bat.

0x457 4y ago
> I don't get why SRE is a job(and it was my title for years) The stuff listed is just good software engineering. If a swe cant figure out that they need to monitor their application (or really anything on this list) you have no business being anything other then a junior programmer. Someone has to enforce those good practices. Weak engineers hire more weak engineers and they suck and their job.
- wobbly_bush 4y ago
  That is why you have senior/staff engineers to enforce good practices.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  > Weak engineers hire more weak engineers and they suck and their job. I love meeting people from other cultures and backgrounds and experiences. It’s great to get to know each other. I perceive you to be one of those people for me. See, in my travels, weak engineers usually have no/little say in anything of import, except the yucky boring maths stuff others don’t want to/can’t do. Hiring a personality is something that our management types love to get involved in. They hire for all the wrong reasons. They retain people for all of the wrong reasons. They primitive for all the wrong reasons. We have “hiring as a service” institution here known often as HR that manages to meddle with things. It’s not that any of these bodies hire weak or strong engineers for any malicious purpose (oceans razor ya know), it’s just completely arbitrary for us and you kind of just learn to put op with and cope with the chaos. Where you’re from, is there a sort of settling function where after a while, all the weak engineers have cohired all of the week engineers? Do the strong engineers hire the other strong engineers?
  - throwawayoaky 4y ago
    Not the OP but yes absolutely. At medium sized USA companies it's common (not universal) for new team members to be discovered and or interviewed and or hired by the team that they will be working with. HR/recruiters are just trying to feed the interview pipeline. Possibly the at-will nature of USA jobs feeds into this. Bad hires are less risky without long term employment contracts. I'm interested in your experience as well. Even at the largest US orgs there's still the concept of a 'hiring manager', who leads a small team, has a big role in hiring, and can can do meaningful technical work on the system. So the interviewing ability of these people, and the people that they trust, is the main determinant of the engineering hiring decisions that get made. Like a common interview loop would be hiring manager, (2x)senior/staff dev on the team, senior dev on another team, director. Lots of exceptions and opportunities for random consultants/reorganizations from above, but the basic idea of line employees and managers being able to identify their successors is pretty baked in around here. Can't speak for the east coast though
  - 0x457 4y ago
    What I mean is: say there is a startup with non-technical founders. They outsource development to some web shop to do a proof of concept or something. Later product proved to be valuable, so they hire a CTO of some sorts or even just an engineer. They have no idea what is a good CTO or engineer is when they do hiring. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not. In "not so well" scenario, the company ends up with weak engineers that don't have a lot of experience. They might have 20 years of making marketing websites at website mil with Drupal or maybe even Django, but zero experience in software development. Those people, either don't know what a good engineer is or they are afraid to hire someone noticeably better than them - so the team ends up stuffed with not so good engineers. Maybe by luck they hire a good engineer eventually, but a good engineer will look at all that mess and will bounce really quick unless the pay is worth it. As an anecdote, I worked with a very good engineer recently, but her team was weak - on her 1:1 she was told to not be so strict during her PR reviews. Reviews she was making, unlike mine, were very polite and people still complained about her being too strict (she wasn't it was bare minimum). When a strong engineer is interviewing a candidate - they know what to look for and willing to look the other way when it comes to personality. (that sometimes end up in toxic engineering team culture, but that's another issue) I also worked with strong engineers that would refuse to hire engineers that are better than them (it was unnoticed for some time). A lot of SRE complaints are coming because they have to babysit weak engineers and hold their hands. Management thinks that the solution to this is to hire junior SREs to deal with it, but the real solution is to reduce need for babysitting. For context, I'm a sysadmin that ventured into software development and now doing SRE work and honestly, there are a lot of days when I wish to go back to software development.
- tayo42 4y ago
  if you cant hire good lead/senior/staff/fotm title software engineer why can you hire a good sre? if you can hire a good sre that knows all this stuff, then you should be identify your lacking in a skill on your teams(it'll be obvious because things are shipping slow, and breaking often) use the same skill to hire an sre to hire a good swe
  - 0x457 4y ago
    I think SRE hiring pool is much smaller and that's why it's harder to hire weak SRE. There are no "30 days nodejs bootcamp"-like courses for SREs.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  And weak SRE’s hire more weak SRE’s. You can be as great a developer as you want, if your app is built on quicksand it’s never going to be good.
  - 0x457 4y ago
    That is true. However, even our junior SRE hire that was objectively weak (we needed an extra person to deal with boring things) is stronger than average developer here. I mean, my bar is very low - can try doing what error messages in your service tells you to do without raising an issue with my team?
chrismarlow9 4y ago
In my experience outside of enterprise oracle type places it's just a label. You still work on service level code, you also work on architecture, you also do infrastructure and monitoring and really all the stuff. From the places I've worked that aren't red tape bound the title really just means "we need someone who we can give a business problem to and they will solve it in an efficient way without needing a full team or re inventing wheels, and we need to be sure it's going to keep making money for us with stability". All the other rigor is just job description fluff to attract talent.
kubectl_h 4y ago
Yeah sure that sounds great in principle but at the end of the day someone has to be in charge of tracking down where that new user_uuid label in the prometheus metrics came from and find the team responsible and explain why that is a bad idea.
- VMtest 4y ago
  it's fine, it's not like that someone cannot get another job easily, even in current market
- tayo42 4y ago
  i don't get this scenario? that would be the subject mater expert on prometheus in your organization then. why is an sre required? it sounds like your implying there has to be some weird relationship were developers cant be trusted to debug and need to be babysat by the grand sre that know and watch over everything or something. this is the toxic nonsense that exists.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hnarn 4y ago
> I don't get why SRE is a job I've met CTOs that would agree with you. I no longer work with any of them.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Sure, but how are those companies doing financially and do they still have that CTO?
  - hnarn 4y ago
    If we put aside the fact that I don't care, it's also completely irrelevant because it's anecdotal, and even if it wasn't anecdotal, I do not accept the implication that the competence of a specific company's CTO and their tenure time has an obvious relationship with the profitability of a company to begin with.

by tayo42 4y ago

0x457 4y ago

> I don't get why SRE is a job(and it was my title for years) The stuff listed is just good software engineering. If a swe cant figure out that they need to monitor their application (or really anything on this list) you have no business being anything other then a junior programmer. Someone has to enforce those good practices. Weak engineers hire more weak engineers and they suck and their job.

wobbly_bush 4y ago
That is why you have senior/staff engineers to enforce good practices.
travisgriggs 4y ago
> Weak engineers hire more weak engineers and they suck and their job. I love meeting people from other cultures and backgrounds and experiences. It’s great to get to know each other. I perceive you to be one of those people for me. See, in my travels, weak engineers usually have no/little say in anything of import, except the yucky boring maths stuff others don’t want to/can’t do. Hiring a personality is something that our management types love to get involved in. They hire for all the wrong reasons. They retain people for all of the wrong reasons. They primitive for all the wrong reasons. We have “hiring as a service” institution here known often as HR that manages to meddle with things. It’s not that any of these bodies hire weak or strong engineers for any malicious purpose (oceans razor ya know), it’s just completely arbitrary for us and you kind of just learn to put op with and cope with the chaos. Where you’re from, is there a sort of settling function where after a while, all the weak engineers have cohired all of the week engineers? Do the strong engineers hire the other strong engineers?
- throwawayoaky 4y ago
  Not the OP but yes absolutely. At medium sized USA companies it's common (not universal) for new team members to be discovered and or interviewed and or hired by the team that they will be working with. HR/recruiters are just trying to feed the interview pipeline. Possibly the at-will nature of USA jobs feeds into this. Bad hires are less risky without long term employment contracts. I'm interested in your experience as well. Even at the largest US orgs there's still the concept of a 'hiring manager', who leads a small team, has a big role in hiring, and can can do meaningful technical work on the system. So the interviewing ability of these people, and the people that they trust, is the main determinant of the engineering hiring decisions that get made. Like a common interview loop would be hiring manager, (2x)senior/staff dev on the team, senior dev on another team, director. Lots of exceptions and opportunities for random consultants/reorganizations from above, but the basic idea of line employees and managers being able to identify their successors is pretty baked in around here. Can't speak for the east coast though
- 0x457 4y ago
  What I mean is: say there is a startup with non-technical founders. They outsource development to some web shop to do a proof of concept or something. Later product proved to be valuable, so they hire a CTO of some sorts or even just an engineer. They have no idea what is a good CTO or engineer is when they do hiring. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not. In "not so well" scenario, the company ends up with weak engineers that don't have a lot of experience. They might have 20 years of making marketing websites at website mil with Drupal or maybe even Django, but zero experience in software development. Those people, either don't know what a good engineer is or they are afraid to hire someone noticeably better than them - so the team ends up stuffed with not so good engineers. Maybe by luck they hire a good engineer eventually, but a good engineer will look at all that mess and will bounce really quick unless the pay is worth it. As an anecdote, I worked with a very good engineer recently, but her team was weak - on her 1:1 she was told to not be so strict during her PR reviews. Reviews she was making, unlike mine, were very polite and people still complained about her being too strict (she wasn't it was bare minimum). When a strong engineer is interviewing a candidate - they know what to look for and willing to look the other way when it comes to personality. (that sometimes end up in toxic engineering team culture, but that's another issue) I also worked with strong engineers that would refuse to hire engineers that are better than them (it was unnoticed for some time). A lot of SRE complaints are coming because they have to babysit weak engineers and hold their hands. Management thinks that the solution to this is to hire junior SREs to deal with it, but the real solution is to reduce need for babysitting. For context, I'm a sysadmin that ventured into software development and now doing SRE work and honestly, there are a lot of days when I wish to go back to software development.
tayo42 4y ago
if you cant hire good lead/senior/staff/fotm title software engineer why can you hire a good sre? if you can hire a good sre that knows all this stuff, then you should be identify your lacking in a skill on your teams(it'll be obvious because things are shipping slow, and breaking often) use the same skill to hire an sre to hire a good swe
- 0x457 4y ago
  I think SRE hiring pool is much smaller and that's why it's harder to hire weak SRE. There are no "30 days nodejs bootcamp"-like courses for SREs.
Aeolun 4y ago
And weak SRE’s hire more weak SRE’s. You can be as great a developer as you want, if your app is built on quicksand it’s never going to be good.
- 0x457 4y ago
  That is true. However, even our junior SRE hire that was objectively weak (we needed an extra person to deal with boring things) is stronger than average developer here. I mean, my bar is very low - can try doing what error messages in your service tells you to do without raising an issue with my team?

chrismarlow9 4y ago

In my experience outside of enterprise oracle type places it's just a label. You still work on service level code, you also work on architecture, you also do infrastructure and monitoring and really all the stuff. From the places I've worked that aren't red tape bound the title really just means "we need someone who we can give a business problem to and they will solve it in an efficient way without needing a full team or re inventing wheels, and we need to be sure it's going to keep making money for us with stability". All the other rigor is just job description fluff to attract talent.

kubectl_h 4y ago

Yeah sure that sounds great in principle but at the end of the day someone has to be in charge of tracking down where that new user_uuid label in the prometheus metrics came from and find the team responsible and explain why that is a bad idea.

VMtest 4y ago
it's fine, it's not like that someone cannot get another job easily, even in current market
tayo42 4y ago
i don't get this scenario? that would be the subject mater expert on prometheus in your organization then. why is an sre required? it sounds like your implying there has to be some weird relationship were developers cant be trusted to debug and need to be babysat by the grand sre that know and watch over everything or something. this is the toxic nonsense that exists.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hnarn 4y ago

> I don't get why SRE is a job I've met CTOs that would agree with you. I no longer work with any of them.

fragmede 4y ago
Sure, but how are those companies doing financially and do they still have that CTO?
- hnarn 4y ago
  If we put aside the fact that I don't care, it's also completely irrelevant because it's anecdotal, and even if it wasn't anecdotal, I do not accept the implication that the competence of a specific company's CTO and their tenure time has an obvious relationship with the profitability of a company to begin with.