[pschuegr]

I'm not exactly the right person to answer this since I haven't done SRE at Google, but I did turn down an offer to be a Google SRE, and then subsequently went to work in a heavily SRE oriented organization, and eventually landed as a SWE at Google.

Some thoughts:

- being on-call can be anything from soul-sucking to mildly annoying depending on what team you land on, but a lot of SWEs are also on-call, including at Google

- a lot of the entry SWE positions at G (any level) are things that they have trouble recruiting for internally, so unless you know exactly what team you're joining you may not find it as exciting as you would like

- Google's SREs are top notch and you can expect to develop some new skills and learn a lot

- SRE work on a good team is actually pretty fun if you like problem solving and can deal with mild stress. AFAICT most SREs are very big into no-blame culture, at least at good organizations

- retrospectively I probably would have enjoyed Goog SRE as much, maybe even more than I did being a SWE, which was: mostly