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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 di

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.