[dpbriggs]

As always your team matters the most. I went into SRE to learn how to make gigantic and complicated systems reliable. I've learned a lot.

1. It was an interesting adjustment. The work is qualitatively different but it's still software engineering. Just at a higher level.

2. On-call is the best I've ever had at any company. It's 12h a day max and overtime is compensated. You won't be woken up in the middle of the night. There's different tiers as well. I'm tier 1 so that means a five minute response time. That's too much for some people and I don't blame them.

3. My team is ramping up people straight out of university. You'll be well trained and have half a year or longer depending on how critical the service is.

4. In my org it's something like 25% of your time on-call at most. Depending on the size of your team it's less.

5. Not applicable. My first SRE job.

6. None so far. Google is very nice to work for. Like all jobs it'll be stressful at times but it's better here than anywhere else I've worked.

[bergenty]

What do you mean you won’t be woken up in the middle of the night? Someone is going to need to wake up in the middle of the night.

[wikibob]

There’s another team in the opposite timezone that handles on-call, for the majority of Google SRE teams.

Additionally as noted elsewhere, on-call time is directly compensated.

With a 5 minute response time service: you are credited 2/3rds of the hours that you are on-call outside of local business hours. These can be used as additional paid time off, or paid out in cash.

With a 30 minute response time service the hours are credited as above, at 1/3rd time.

[bergenty]

Oh that’s cool. I should consider that for my org.

[wikibob]

One big benefit of directly compensated on-call time is it removes much of the difficulty of covering shifts.

Instead of everyone feeling like they have to keep track of who owes each other a shift covered, it’s just paid out. In vacation hours or cash. So if you pick it up, no stress, you’ve been paid for it.