3 ms·

i would think most people object to calling SREs sysadmins.

by arccy 3y ago

dijit 3y ago
thats unfortunate, I think that means they arent aware that the job of SRE is functionally identical to a sysadmin from 2005 in terms of responsibilities and required knowledge. We just live on a higher level of abstraction and have better tools & processes now.
- rvnx 3y ago
  Compared to 2005, we live in a society where a lot of people are very sensitive to words. For example, "developer" is considered offensive, because for some people it's very important to be called "software engineer". Really good developers don't care about titles. They don't have time to worry about such, or they have so much money / experience that even if you call them "smart monkeys" they'll be happy with it. Same goes with sysadmins, SREs, devops, or whatever role you choose. For some people they have shitty jobs: they don't have such recognition (whether for a good reason or not). No recognition from work, no recognition from colleagues, no recognition financially, etc, that, if you remove them the title / prestige, obviously they would feel bad. Source: my experience in a school calling itself "engineering school", and all other schools calling it a "place where to pee code"
  - dataflow 3y ago
    > Really good developers don't care about titles. They don't have time to worry about such, or they have so much money / experience that even if you call them "smart monkeys" they'll be happy with it. That's about the money, not about being good at your work. Ask anyone on the street if you can call them a rat in exchange for a million dollar salary and they'll say yes. It's quite simple.
  - darksim905 3y ago
    As someone who always knew I didn't really need to know code for what I wanted to do, I'd posit that a developer comes across as someone who may not be formally trained. Maybe they're a hacker, maybe they know a language or two and dabble. A software engineering is someone who is comfortable at various levels and understanding machine level code in so far as also being comfortable with software patterns. -shrug-. That's what I feel like in my org at least.
- achiang 3y ago
  I was a sysadmin (at uni, in the early 2000s) and I am an SRE today (at Google). The two jobs are nothing alike, at all, whatsoever. Sysadmins are support roles. Their functional role is to provide a healthy substrate to run the application layer on top of. SREs work at the application layer itself. If the system can't scale due to internal architecture, an SRE would be expected to propose a new, scalable design. That would be in addition to maintaining the substrate. To be clear, there is also nothing inferior about performing a support role. No org can succeed without support. But the two roles are not the same, and if a job's set of responsibilities don't include shared ownership over application layer architecture, then it can be a great job but it's not an SRE role.
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  This seems unlikely to me solely from a growth perspective. That is, it is possible to reach "Principal" or "Distinguished" SRE as an IC, the equivalent of a director (or similarly: SRE Director). I don't recall companies having, or desiring to have large organizations of sysadmins. I think one of the key differences to highlight is that usually SREs are engaged early in the design process of new features, and are often driving their own feature changes to the product for reliability or scalability reasons. Those aren't responsibilities or expectations that I've really ever seen in the context of a sysadmin.
  - wlonkly 3y ago
    One one hand there were definitely support-staff system administrators, but on the other hand there were people writing USENIX papers. Large system administration was system engineering. The people who wrote Nagios, RRDtool, bcfg3 and cfengine, and so on, were solving their own problems first. I think people like Evi Nemeth, Tom Limoncelli, Æleen Frisch or David Blank-Edelman would have been the equivalent of Distinguished Sysadmins at the time. But they weren't at startups. The places that needed that level were universities, research facilities, telecommunications companies, and the like. I was fortunate to work under Geoff Halprin early in my career, who while not as well known as those names was a SAGE and USENIX board member and who definitely planted the "don't just do task, engineer yourself out of a job" seed in me.
dilyevsky 3y ago
there's a sort of bifurcation of SRE responsibilities with one branch focusing on software-enabled automation and the other on "systems engineering" aka sysadmin. Both are called SREs at Google which seems to cause widespread confusion externally (and even within Google). Also see so called "Ben Treynor Curve"[0] [0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_07_jones.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_jun...
- lrem 3y ago
  Within Google: Treynor’s curve is a hiring concept. Once in, you’re doing literally the same job. Being in a team doing greenfield development it took me three years to notice that my TL, with whom we’ve been defining the mathematical model, designing and implementing the system, is on the SysEng ladder.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    > Once in, you’re doing literally the same job ok, but you don't tho (i'm sure there are exceptions). if you do, you will have issues with promo (ask me how i know) so if you don't care about that then sure. also if you're se, you had to interview to transfer out of sre to a pure swe role. i personally didn't have this particular problem but saw a few folks that did.
throwaway5752 3y ago
This might be an age-related perception. I think if you're over 40, you'd consider this complementary to SREs. The role of sysadmin, as it existed in 2000, is almost unimaginable now.
ozr 3y ago
As someone that has had those titles for many years in the past: I'm only going to object to the one that's paying less at the time. A good sysadmin was always doing the same thing as a good SRE.

i would think most people object to calling SREs sysadmins.

by arccy 3y ago

i would think most people object to calling SREs sysadmins.

thats unfortunate, I think that means they arent aware that the job of SRE is functionally identical to a sysadmin from 2005 in terms of responsibilities and required knowledge. We just live on a higher level of abstraction and have better tools & processes now.

rvnx 3y ago
Compared to 2005, we live in a society where a lot of people are very sensitive to words. For example, "developer" is considered offensive, because for some people it's very important to be called "software engineer". Really good developers don't care about titles. They don't have time to worry about such, or they have so much money / experience that even if you call them "smart monkeys" they'll be happy with it. Same goes with sysadmins, SREs, devops, or whatever role you choose. For some people they have shitty jobs: they don't have such recognition (whether for a good reason or not). No recognition from work, no recognition from colleagues, no recognition financially, etc, that, if you remove them the title / prestige, obviously they would feel bad. Source: my experience in a school calling itself "engineering school", and all other schools calling it a "place where to pee code"
- dataflow 3y ago
  > Really good developers don't care about titles. They don't have time to worry about such, or they have so much money / experience that even if you call them "smart monkeys" they'll be happy with it. That's about the money, not about being good at your work. Ask anyone on the street if you can call them a rat in exchange for a million dollar salary and they'll say yes. It's quite simple.
- darksim905 3y ago
  As someone who always knew I didn't really need to know code for what I wanted to do, I'd posit that a developer comes across as someone who may not be formally trained. Maybe they're a hacker, maybe they know a language or two and dabble. A software engineering is someone who is comfortable at various levels and understanding machine level code in so far as also being comfortable with software patterns. -shrug-. That's what I feel like in my org at least.
achiang 3y ago
I was a sysadmin (at uni, in the early 2000s) and I am an SRE today (at Google). The two jobs are nothing alike, at all, whatsoever. Sysadmins are support roles. Their functional role is to provide a healthy substrate to run the application layer on top of. SREs work at the application layer itself. If the system can't scale due to internal architecture, an SRE would be expected to propose a new, scalable design. That would be in addition to maintaining the substrate. To be clear, there is also nothing inferior about performing a support role. No org can succeed without support. But the two roles are not the same, and if a job's set of responsibilities don't include shared ownership over application layer architecture, then it can be a great job but it's not an SRE role.
joshuamorton 3y ago
This seems unlikely to me solely from a growth perspective. That is, it is possible to reach "Principal" or "Distinguished" SRE as an IC, the equivalent of a director (or similarly: SRE Director). I don't recall companies having, or desiring to have large organizations of sysadmins. I think one of the key differences to highlight is that usually SREs are engaged early in the design process of new features, and are often driving their own feature changes to the product for reliability or scalability reasons. Those aren't responsibilities or expectations that I've really ever seen in the context of a sysadmin.
- wlonkly 3y ago
  One one hand there were definitely support-staff system administrators, but on the other hand there were people writing USENIX papers. Large system administration was system engineering. The people who wrote Nagios, RRDtool, bcfg3 and cfengine, and so on, were solving their own problems first. I think people like Evi Nemeth, Tom Limoncelli, Æleen Frisch or David Blank-Edelman would have been the equivalent of Distinguished Sysadmins at the time. But they weren't at startups. The places that needed that level were universities, research facilities, telecommunications companies, and the like. I was fortunate to work under Geoff Halprin early in my career, who while not as well known as those names was a SAGE and USENIX board member and who definitely planted the "don't just do task, engineer yourself out of a job" seed in me.

dilyevsky 3y ago

there's a sort of bifurcation of SRE responsibilities with one branch focusing on software-enabled automation and the other on "systems engineering" aka sysadmin. Both are called SREs at Google which seems to cause widespread confusion externally (and even within Google). Also see so called "Ben Treynor Curve"[0] [0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_07_jones.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_jun...

lrem 3y ago
Within Google: Treynor’s curve is a hiring concept. Once in, you’re doing literally the same job. Being in a team doing greenfield development it took me three years to notice that my TL, with whom we’ve been defining the mathematical model, designing and implementing the system, is on the SysEng ladder.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  > Once in, you’re doing literally the same job ok, but you don't tho (i'm sure there are exceptions). if you do, you will have issues with promo (ask me how i know) so if you don't care about that then sure. also if you're se, you had to interview to transfer out of sre to a pure swe role. i personally didn't have this particular problem but saw a few folks that did.

throwaway5752 3y ago

This might be an age-related perception. I think if you're over 40, you'd consider this complementary to SREs. The role of sysadmin, as it existed in 2000, is almost unimaginable now.

ozr 3y ago

As someone that has had those titles for many years in the past: I'm only going to object to the one that's paying less at the time. A good sysadmin was always doing the same thing as a good SRE.