| 1) I have more of a sysadmin background, so someone else will have to answer this. I will say that if you interviewed in the sre-swe track, transferring to a swe role is not difficult. 2) I have been on call for most of my career, but google is the only employer that has actually provided compensation. Depending on your lifestyle, the extra pto can be really nice (for example it’s easy for me to ski on less-crowded days), but as I’ve gotten older being on call has definitely gotten more painful (now that I have a serious partner, not being able to do things on the days she has off can be frustrating.) The actual difficulty/stress of the pages you get will be highly team-dependent, but SRE does a reasonable job of training and tracking pager load. 3) This is highly team-dependent, but there are many teams where systems skills are not a big deal. You need to be able to think in a reliability-focused way, though. 4) Some teams actually develop their own code, other teams rely on swe teams for most of the code. You will read a lot more code than you will write, and you will write less code than they say you will during the interview process. This is also true for SWEs - everyone spend more time big-company-ing than computer-ing. 5) I have not done this, but I have considered moving to a SWE role because there’s more open source opportunities on that side. 6) I’ve found google to be the best place to work of the mega corporations I’ve been, but honestly if the money was the same I’d prefer a smaller company. I’m better at tasks like “chase this bug though a bunch of layers until you find some weird kernel behavior” than “explain why your rollout plan is compliant with our reliability directives.” |