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Comment by yegle | Hacker News Reader

AFAIKT Google's recruitment for SWE and SRE (system engineer ladder) are separate. If you did not pass the SWE interview, ask the recruiter if you can do an SRE interview. Hope this helps!

Source: I went the process of failing the SWE interview but got an offer as an SRE.

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SE is arguably much harder. Instead of just optimizing for coding, you need to be good at linux troubleshooting, low level kernel stuff and networking. There’s a reason most new hires come in as SWE, particularly new grads with not much real world experience.

That said, if you already possess this knowledge it could be easier as it takes a bit of the randomness out of getting a LeetCode question that you can’t figure out.

It is not harder, it is different. They just ask more system topics, while focusing less on coding. There is, however, a catch. If you get hired as a SRE-SWE, you can easily switch to a regular SWE. If you get hired as a SRE-SE, you may have to reinterview to change your job ladder. SE is okay, but you clearly have more possibilities as a SWE.

You only have to take some of the coding ones though iirc

Why is there such a distinction? What's the difference in the day to day of a SRE-SWE vs. an SRE-SE?

Entirely the same job, same pay. We just want to be open to folks with DIFFERENT yet valuable experience.

SRE-SWE and SRE-SE on the same team will have exactly the same expectation given the same level.

Depending on the project you work on, you might have a code-heavy project that requires you to work closely with the SWE team, or an operability-heavy project that doesn't have much coding.

I don't have time to memorize leetcode, and I'm just not good at it. Even considering it can just take time for everyone, I'm somehow unexpectedly bad despite my experience. I'm actually pretty good at actual software engineering work though (8 years). I'm also pretty good at OS level stuff across the board. I didn't know there non-leetcode paths without completely changing careers and abandoning my dev history.

I was just about to schedule my 1st-set whiteboard style interview with the recruiter, which always ends in a flaming disaster, but maybe I should consider their other routes.

I'm a full stack (backend main) software engineer but I'm usually exceptional at fixing server stuff and fully understanding logs to debug problems or find potential exploits through logs or when reading through code reviews. Everyone else I've ever worked with struggles at these things. I can just naturally comprehend other's code / architecture even across technologies.

If there's a career path I can show this in interviews instead of fumbling on even easy LeetCode problems or the other silly things I randomly get stuck on only in interviews, maybe I could actually shine for once.

I feel like I need to add my own 2 cents to this point:

Definitely ask your recruiter and have them confirm which track you're interviewing for.

They just have numbers to hit. They will try to drop you into whichever track they need to. If a recruiter ever "seemingly misspoke" and moved you from SWE to SWE-SRE, ask for confirmation and/or insist on interviewing the track you are actually interested in.

It isn't to mean that SRE is any easier...

There are two separate tracks for SRE, SRE-SWE (same bar as SRE) and SRE-SE (Systems Engineering). While SE has a lower coding bar, it's arguably the harder of the two since they make up for it with Linux internals etc.

Any good resources to see how they interview for SRE-SE? For SWE you can find a lot of material on Leetcode and similar sites (and of course books) but "Linux internals" has a near infinite depth.

NALSD question is a required part of the interview. https://sre.google/workbook/non-abstract-design/ I did a quick search and it looks like there are youtube videos explaining it so that might be helpful.

Other than that I was asked to implement a 'tail' command using my familiar language, and explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

> explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

Because System deletes only the “pointer” to the file and not the actual file. For the exact same reason, cut+paste is faster than copy+paste

It does delete the file, as long as no other processes are accessing it and there are no other hard links to it.

Please check this one (I know you can edit Recycle Bin settings on Windows to directly deleted the file, instead of sending it in there) -

https://www.lacie.com/support/kb/available-disk-space-does-n....

I’m pretty sure Google is going to ask in the context of Linux, and isn’t referring to Windows or the Recycle Bin.

Why you said so? Google has teams supporting .net, sql server, Microsoft VMs as part of Google cloud offerings

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

I did a bunch of those panels in my time. Imo if you read 2-3 books on unix/linux/networking and can complete this wargame in a couple evenings you’ll stand out quite a bit.

In my experience the recruiters are great about helping you prep. They have a PDF called "Google Interview Prep Guide Site Reliability Engineer" that talks about SRE-SE vs. SRE-SWE vs. SWE, and links to books and topics to study.

Kirk McKusick's "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" course[1] was recommended to me, and it was excellent. But not cheap at $1495.

[1] https://www.mckusick.com/courses/introdescrip.html

No it's not easier, sorry if my reply gave that impression.

An SRE-SE requires a different skill set compared to SRE-SWE or SWE and the interview questions are different. If you have both skill sets, you effectively have two opportunities here :-)

It precisely means that.

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