[mjayhn]

This is what an SRE actually is to me, but not to G. Google seems to think they need to create SREs out of SWEs. It took me far, far longer to learn distsys, network engineering, storage and everything else that goes into a platform than it did for me to learn to write grpc endpoints in golang.

I've been in ops for 10+ years building platforms. I'd love to be able to spend 6 hours a day coding but when I'm jugging 10-20 different products that have 1-10+ different languages involved (go, python, nodejs, javascript, ruby, ansible, terraform, puppet, chef) you really have a hard time getting super good at one thing. So most of us have to get good at one language just to pass the code tests, then it languishes because when launching a product I then spend 1-3 months writing something completely different out of biz necessity.

The most important skill to me for an SRE/Ops is curiosity and pattern recognition, and #1 humility/empathy.

[singron]

Google SREs are split into SWE-SRE and System-SRE. They have different interview processes and job ladders. Usually they have the same job functions day to day, but anecdotally it seemed like SWE-SREs were SWEs who got into SRE and System-SREs had more traditional sysadmin background. Disclosure: was a Google SRE