[mjayhn]

I mean Google could stop being completely elitist with SREs needing to come from SWE backgrounds and hire the thousands of SRE/Sysadmin/Ops types who do know systems very well but have a lot/bit less SWE background and let their SWEs contribute to mentoring them on SWE stuff.

Pipe dream of mine, for sure.

There's been at least 3 G SREs that have posted in here about what they do day to day and it's literally no different from any other non-FAANG SRE/Ops role any of us do at various scales except for the gatekeeping.

[dilyevsky]

Google does hire SRE SEs and I interviewed many - the focus on coding is a lot less and they get grilled more on systems etc. it’s important to have a healthy mixture of both or you run into eng culture issues like described by many posters here

[kazen44]

Also, a systems engineer usually has a different way of thinking about a problem then a software engineer and vice versa.

This helps tremendously in troubleshooting and building stable products.

Having a combination of systems, networking and programming "perspective" on a team seems to result in very robust systems all around.

[jldugger]

> Google does hire SRE SEs and I interviewed many

For those who aren't familiar with the google acroynm soup: SE here means systems engineer not software engineer(SWE).

[joshuamorton]

Fwiw about half of the sres I know at Google come from sysadmin or help desk roles within Google.