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More a general question, but I’ve gotten pings in the past to be an SRE at a FAANG despite not doing much cloud stuff. Is it the type of role people take for a

More a general question, but I’ve gotten pings in the past to be an SRE at a FAANG despite not doing much cloud stuff. Is it the type of role people take for a tour of duty and then transfer out of? I imagine there are SREs who enjoy it and stay there, but curious why they’d invite someone heavy on the dev side to interview.

dijit 3y ago
Depends on the FAANG, Google famously throws devs at ops problems. Ironically they realised this wasn't a good idea in exclusivity, so now they hire two disciplines: SRE-SWE and SRE-SYS. SRE-SYS is as you would expect, pretty standard sysadmin knowledge from 2005 (IE; not helpdesk sysadmin, some scripting knowledge, heavy OS knowledge, heavy debugging knowledge). SRE-SWE is much more programmer heavy with a light touch on OS fundamentals (based on what I consider important for OS knowledge FWIW).
KaiserPro 3y ago
depends on the company and department. the downsides of SRE is that you tend to be super hyper specialised in something thats only really of any sense to that department inside a company. Moreover, you're dealing with real steel machines, and amounts of data that are prohibitorily expensive to just start again with. (the joy of AWS is that most of the times you can delete it all and spin it up again, often side by side) also, some SREs are really specialised software devs, others like me are sysadmins who'd been swept by the current into SRE roles. My company SREs are not like google's, where they are rock stars swanning about doing one line fixes that make everything .48% more reliable. We are computer nurses making sure that the wards of systems we look after aren't wiped out because a doctor forgot to wash their hands after taking a poo. However, they both require the same skills: murder mystery and the ability to dive super deep into the stack, go from python->c->assembly. or service->VFS->cache->network->time weirdness Also it could just be copy pasting service defs and making dashboards, then pinging devs saying "shits on fire yo"

dijit 3y ago

Depends on the FAANG, Google famously throws devs at ops problems. Ironically they realised this wasn't a good idea in exclusivity, so now they hire two disciplines: SRE-SWE and SRE-SYS. SRE-SYS is as you would expect, pretty standard sysadmin knowledge from 2005 (IE; not helpdesk sysadmin, some scripting knowledge, heavy OS knowledge, heavy debugging knowledge). SRE-SWE is much more programmer heavy with a light touch on OS fundamentals (based on what I consider important for OS knowledge FWIW).

KaiserPro 3y ago

depends on the company and department. the downsides of SRE is that you tend to be super hyper specialised in something thats only really of any sense to that department inside a company. Moreover, you're dealing with real steel machines, and amounts of data that are prohibitorily expensive to just start again with. (the joy of AWS is that most of the times you can delete it all and spin it up again, often side by side) also, some SREs are really specialised software devs, others like me are sysadmins who'd been swept by the current into SRE roles. My company SREs are not like google's, where they are rock stars swanning about doing one line fixes that make everything .48% more reliable. We are computer nurses making sure that the wards of systems we look after aren't wiped out because a doctor forgot to wash their hands after taking a poo. However, they both require the same skills: murder mystery and the ability to dive super deep into the stack, go from python->c->assembly. or service->VFS->cache->network->time weirdness Also it could just be copy pasting service defs and making dashboards, then pinging devs saying "shits on fire yo"