Hacker News Reader

Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

My anecdotal experience is "SRE" means a sysadmin who has learned Python for some automation (of course using some automated management tools, such as Ansible or Terraform). Is this the case for most "non-FAANG" and "non-startup" companies?

View on HN

This is what an SRE actually is to me, but not to G. Google seems to think they need to create SREs out of SWEs. It took me far, far longer to learn distsys, network engineering, storage and everything else that goes into a platform than it did for me to learn to write grpc endpoints in golang.

I've been in ops for 10+ years building platforms. I'd love to be able to spend 6 hours a day coding but when I'm jugging 10-20 different products that have 1-10+ different languages involved (go, python, nodejs, javascript, ruby, ansible, terraform, puppet, chef) you really have a hard time getting super good at one thing. So most of us have to get good at one language just to pass the code tests, then it languishes because when launching a product I then spend 1-3 months writing something completely different out of biz necessity.

The most important skill to me for an SRE/Ops is curiosity and pattern recognition, and #1 humility/empathy.

Google SREs are split into SWE-SRE and System-SRE. They have different interview processes and job ladders. Usually they have the same job functions day to day, but anecdotally it seemed like SWE-SREs were SWEs who got into SRE and System-SREs had more traditional sysadmin background. Disclosure: was a Google SRE

Similarly, I find "devops" means "sysadmin that uses Jenkins sometimes".

Or "Person with too many responsibilities"

I don't really get how you could possibly be a sysadmin or a system engineer or an SRE or $WHATEVER if you don't use Jenkins or any other CI tool, if you don't use tools like Terraform or Ansible (which personally don't like at tool for infra mgmt but it's OK for config mgmt or image baking) etc etc. I mean, I was a sysadmin 15 years ago moving pizza boxes and cabling switches in a cold datacenter and gradually my job changed to this new reality (while moving between 4-5 small/medium companies, no corporate or FAANG). Is there really somebody out there whose job didn't change like this?

There are loads of what you could call "classical" sysadmins/application administrator type people around that never started to do automation, cause sometimes there's no need or willingness to do so. Especially in the small-to-medium sized companies, where the business is bread-and-butter type and not anything hightech - they might have some infrastructure and processess for years, can't see the reason to move to cloud, they had the same "IT guy" doing desktops and servers since ever, stuff just works and we don't want changes, etc..

There is a massive amount of IT work being done - work that you, me or any other denizen of HN would probably rate as terrible and smelling of middle ages. But it gets the job done, even if it's being done manually. And some people just don't know any better.

i once had a junior dev sheepishly ask me what "devops" means. I thought it was pretty brave of her to ask and acknowledge some ignorance. I told her it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean and don't worry about it, concentrate on writing good code, getting better, and getting the job done.

I appreciate the humor, but I think that was a bit of a disservice for her. Because even though you have a cheeky definition, the term does get used fairly frequently in the industry, and it would've been helpful to explain how it's commonly used, even if you don't agree with it.

Yes that is what it’s like in companies whose infrastructure is not part of their value add but a cost center (e.g medical/ai startups, finance, etc) If you’re an sre either don’t go there or ask for fy money

Reply on news.ycombinator.com