Truth about Google SRE
Don't join Google SRE because... - Promotions are harder than SWE (there's actually an internal doc discussing this issue, basically SWE L4.5 = SRE L4) - You will be doing a lot of cross team collaboration and your velocity is going to depend on SWE teams - SRE teams are inconsistent, some are heavy ops some are heavy feature work - SWE teams call the shots because SRE budget are from SWE teams - You will be oncall but you just mitigate things not actually fix them for a lot of SRE teams - You need to know a lot of cross team and high level stuff but never deep into one system. This is bad for junior folks because Google likes complexity for promotion - If you have other same tier SWE offers don't join for the Google brand - You're going to encounter condescending SWE jerks who think they are better than SRE (this is rare but if you encounter one, it's really painful) That being said, join Google SRE if... - you are really into SRE, you will have a great experience as a Google SRE because you will actually be learning how to be a good SRE - you don't have any other offer, SRE is still way better than most other roles - you like to collaborate with other teams and like to talk/communicate - you like the adrenaline rush during outages - you want the extra oncall compensation (cash or PTO, your choice) If you still want to join SRE, feel free to DM me and I can help you check if the SRE team is good or not. **Like or comment something so this post gets seen. I want everyone to know about this.** #sre #sreinterview
Does all this apply for the SWE-SRE track?
SWE-SRE will be the same work on the same teams, but it's trivial to switch to a SWE team at any point.
I was actually just wondering if switching from SWE to SRE would help me learn more than I could as a SWE and whether it might be me get promoted faster. Currently L4 SWE.
Definitely not lol
Regarding SWE condescension, it's possibly rooted in their not understanding the depth of the SRE role. I have a background similar to an SRE, although I am a Security Engineer. I'm a noogler, and I've had to explain my job function to several SWE already. It was a good opportunity to discuss threat modeling 😉
Haven't thought about threat modeling since some random class I took as an undergrad and now I'm surprised threat models aren't a common thing expected of all SWEs to include in their designs. Also, now I want to see what a real threat model doc looks like at Google.
Crimson doc. My team is beginning to require them.
As a former SRE, SWEs have always treated SRE like digital janitors even though most SRE have broader and deeper knowledge AND are better devs. SRE is massively underpaid for the required skill to be good. When I was still SRE our L4s were equal in knowledge to L6 or L7 SWEs. Yet we were compensated like L3 SWEs…. YMMV. I’m in management now, still sometimes miss ops, but am now fairly compensated
Business people value the folks who build new features to sell more than the folks who maintain and support those features long term.
This is why I've been tempted to switch to SRE. I worked with an SRE team for my first year as a SWE. They seemed like the people who actually understood the tech to a level that Google has a reputation for. And they weren't all seniors. As I went on I realized that the SWEs around me didn't have this understanding. It was like the SWEs around me just coded while the SREs understood how the whole thing worked.
You’ve pretty much just summed up SRE at every company other than the depth part. I think the only difference is that people highly regard the google SRE role because they were the ones who [poorly] defined it and wrote a book on it that they don’t even follow.
Google SRE follows the book closely to be fair.
SRE dev (i.e. not a sysadmin++) is a more prestigious title than SWE in my opinion. If SWEs at Google think they are superior to SRE in any way, I think they are delusional. The technical challenges of SREs are several orders of magnitude more interesting than yet another CRUD API or hamburger menu for a feature that will be deprecated or abandoned next year. Obviously some SWEs do interesting technical work too, but many times when they do that, they are actually working more as an SRE dev, than the typical feature dev.
the way people think SWE just CRUD, is amazing
I am a SWE btw, and yes, many of the feature teams do pretty basic work from a tech perspective that gets canceled and deprecated constantly when business (and politics) evolves. At big companies more and more of the interesting challenging tech work is done by infrastructure teams or SREs. I don't necessarily agree with this dumbification of the SWE role, but that is clearly what is happening in many of the big companies. It is usually sold as "you will only have to care about the business logic", aka basic technical challenge. The most complex work in typical feature teams is around getting PMs to actually commit to a set of requirements so you know what you have to build and gaining business knowledge so you can translate those requirements into (usually quite basic) software. And, as I mentioned, there are SWEs who do a lot of interesting technical work, but that is not typical, and when they do, it matches what normal SRE devs do as part of their daily jobs.
Mad respect for the SREs I work with. Different kind of work, but difficult and important.
To be fair, most SWE I worked with at Google were really nice and great to work with. It's the few that make my SRE life miserable.
I think most people know the difference but thanks for posting this for the community benefit. All SREs everywhere work like this only
SRE can switch to SWE right?
Depends on which SRE track. SWE-SRE yes SE-SRE not directly. Don't waste your time though, if you want to be a SWE, just ask for a SWE team match.
I'm looping for L3 SWE-SRE. Never done it before but it sounds fun albeit wlb seems tough with the oncalls. That said I don't really do anything outside of work so I'm not sure it's even gonna be a problem.