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by thematrixturtle 1431 days ago
There are two separate tracks for SRE, SRE-SWE (same bar as SRE) and SRE-SE (Systems Engineering). While SE has a lower coding bar, it's arguably the harder of the two since they make up for it with Linux internals etc.
1 comments
aeyes 1431 days ago
Any good resources to see how they interview for SRE-SE? For SWE you can find a lot of material on Leetcode and similar sites (and of course books) but "Linux internals" has a near infinite depth.
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dilyevsky 1431 days ago
https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

I did a bunch of those panels in my time. Imo if you read 2-3 books on unix/linux/networking and can complete this wargame in a couple evenings you’ll stand out quite a bit.

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yegle 1431 days ago
NALSD question is a required part of the interview. https://sre.google/workbook/non-abstract-design/ I did a quick search and it looks like there are youtube videos explaining it so that might be helpful.

Other than that I was asked to implement a 'tail' command using my familiar language, and explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

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mandeepj 1431 days ago
> explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

Because System deletes only the “pointer” to the file and not the actual file. For the exact same reason, cut+paste is faster than copy+paste

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moreice 1431 days ago
It does delete the file, as long as no other processes are accessing it and there are no other hard links to it.
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mandeepj 1431 days ago
Please check this one (I know you can edit Recycle Bin settings on Windows to directly deleted the file, instead of sending it in there) -

https://www.lacie.com/support/kb/available-disk-space-does-n....

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nixgeek 1431 days ago
I’m pretty sure Google is going to ask in the context of Linux, and isn’t referring to Windows or the Recycle Bin.
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antoncohen 1431 days ago
In my experience the recruiters are great about helping you prep. They have a PDF called "Google Interview Prep Guide Site Reliability Engineer" that talks about SRE-SE vs. SRE-SWE vs. SWE, and links to books and topics to study.

Kirk McKusick's "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" course[1] was recommended to me, and it was excellent. But not cheap at $1495.

[1] https://www.mckusick.com/courses/introdescrip.html

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