Ask HN: SRE vs. Software Engineer

[ljim4a]

I'm in the beginning stages of a career, and wanted to get industry impressions of SRE (@Google) and similar roles (ie. Production Engineer @Facebook). Has anyone worked both as an SRE and a SWE and can comment as to what they did/didn't like about each role? Did you mind being oncall? How does it compare to Infrastructure dev work? Would I be making a mistake taking one of these positions over a SWE position?

[stray]

While I can't answer the exact question you're asking, I can offer some thoughts that may be helpful.

I spent the first ~15 years of my career as a SysAdmin -- and imo, all good SysAdmins have always done what now counts as SRE.

And all good SysAdmins have always been adept at programming.

The on-call rotation simply served as a test of your confidence in the resilience of your systems. If you actually got called in for something preventable it's only because you had failed as a SysAdmin -- instant karma all wrapped up in a 2:30am visit to the data center.

A SysAdmin doing a good job would eventually have people wondering why they never seemed to do any work. Because that kind of work is invisible unless performed poorly.

Ok, now to actually approach the questions you're asking:

In the beginning stages of your career, you'd do well to get your hands dirty. And working on infrastructure will give you keen insights on applications programming down the road -- a software engineer equally empathetic to customer needs and operations reality will always be extremely valuable.

And don't fear on-call rotation. It only sucks for those who suck 9-5.

IMO, it would be a minor mistake not to take one of these positions over a SWE position.

[raincom]

Usually, people pick up a dev position than an SRE role. Unless u are hired for SRE SW role, it is hard for you to move from SRE to SW.