4 ms·

I personally think you it’s very difficult be an SRE who doesn’t come from a software engineering background. To me an SRE needs to come from a background that

I personally think you it’s very difficult be an SRE who doesn’t come from a software engineering background. To me an SRE needs to come from a background that includes extensive coding and architecture experience. To me, the worst SREs are the folks who come from the DevOps side whose experience is limited to pipelines and infrastructure as code type stuff. They invent solutions that just don’t work.

TurboHaskal 4y ago
This is why I do programming tests before hiring SRE/DevOps for our team. I don’t really care how well you know Ansible or Kubernetes, or how long you’ve been operating software components. If you can’t think like a software engineer you can search a job somewhere else. In my experience DevOps coming from a sysadmin background end up poisoning the well. They’re afraid of developing the right kind of abstractions, block any proposals to do these and before you blink you end up with a mediocre VendorOps team that can do nothing but integrate off the shelf solutions with an unmaintainable mess of yaml / hcl “code”. They will replicate, the more capable DevOps engineers will leave in frustration and your platform will be taken hostage. Don’t let a single one in.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Yes I’ve been in three places like that now that demand coding skills of their “devops/sre” candidates then proceed to saddle them with ton of ops and resist any new software from being written (the “no software is best software” crowd). Then people are wondering why they have to pay $$$ for these roles because “all they do is apply some terraform” lol Fwiw I completely agree with your second paragraph and seen it first hand in last couple gigs but I dont think ICs are to blame here - fish usually rots from head down.

4 ms·

I personally think you it’s very difficult be an SRE who doesn’t come from a software engineering background. To me an SRE needs to come from a background that

by davewritescode 4y ago

TurboHaskal 4y ago
This is why I do programming tests before hiring SRE/DevOps for our team. I don’t really care how well you know Ansible or Kubernetes, or how long you’ve been operating software components. If you can’t think like a software engineer you can search a job somewhere else. In my experience DevOps coming from a sysadmin background end up poisoning the well. They’re afraid of developing the right kind of abstractions, block any proposals to do these and before you blink you end up with a mediocre VendorOps team that can do nothing but integrate off the shelf solutions with an unmaintainable mess of yaml / hcl “code”. They will replicate, the more capable DevOps engineers will leave in frustration and your platform will be taken hostage. Don’t let a single one in.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Yes I’ve been in three places like that now that demand coding skills of their “devops/sre” candidates then proceed to saddle them with ton of ops and resist any new software from being written (the “no software is best software” crowd). Then people are wondering why they have to pay $$$ for these roles because “all they do is apply some terraform” lol Fwiw I completely agree with your second paragraph and seen it first hand in last couple gigs but I dont think ICs are to blame here - fish usually rots from head down.