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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

>At first I thought I would be applying for a software developer position but after we went through my skillset, the recruiter concluded that I would better fit as an SRE.

I've got to say, I've been contacted by recruiters for Google a few times, and it has always been for SRE roles. I got the distinct impression that it's less about whether my skillset fitted being an SRE, but more that they need lots of SREs and have trouble pursuading people to take that job. I'm sure some people want to be SREs, but Google seems to want Software Engineers to become SREs.

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Because a SRE is just a software engineer that’s always on call?

That's not the case at Google. The call schedule for SREs is pretty nice.

Do developers at Google do “on call”?

Some teams do.

Also one who writes more configuration than code and babysits rollouts

Why do you feel like it's less glamorous/whatever to be an SRE?

I'm speculating here, but everything I hear about google is how they _love_ people who make features. Which has been touted as the reason why a lot of projects fail to be maintained and get shuttered.

If that's the case, then it follows that SRE is less glamorous because it's "What developers do when they're tasked with operations work", and operations work is maintenance.

Not to mention operations work in of itself is unsexy to a lot of people (excluding current operations staffing because we're inextricably drawn to it).

Nobody got promoted for maintaining mundane shit. "delivering" Google+ on the other hand ...

The impression I got from talking to the recruiter is that you're spending more of your time ensuring systems work as intended and managing running systems than you are building systems from scratch, and particularly you're not working on the sexy parts of systems - the bits people actually notice,bu instead are focused on making sure those sexy bits actually turn up in a timely manner. It's not a bad thing, it's just a very long way away from what I do, and what I want to do, and the fact that the Google recruiters are always pushing me that way gives me the imipression they struggle to find people for the SRE roles.

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