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For instance Kubernetes came out in 2015 (alpha/beta, 1.0) and I've worked on it since then and I'll apply to lead K8s eng jobs from these and not hear a word. I've also worked for companies like Rancher and a few CDNs that literally make K8s distros. I've worked with companies like Google, Meta, Nasa, the USA gov, etc launching production k8s clusters across the world. Like I've seen it all including in cell towers, fast food drive thrus, military use, etc.
I hire for the same roles on my team and if I saw my resume I would have a heart attack and get them in immediately. I know how rare my LOE with distsys is, I build platform teams. 99% of the people I interview that "know k8s" don't know k8s, they know Helm or yaml, whereas I have a literal github portfolio full of 7 year old gcloud/k8s/aws tools I provided the community that's also listed in my resume.
Could just be luck of the draw, of course. But my initial "oh this person will know me from HN and look at my portfolio!" is gone from these posts and I just send resumes like a normal job that won't call me back.
When I was a kid (teens/20s) I got a bunch of my first sysadmin/neteng jobs off of IRC and it doesn't feel the same at all.
A lot of these companies also seem to be reaching beyond their grasp as well. I don't think a lot of them necessarily have the vision, nor the wisdom on their staff to recognize a well-rounded background, especially if there isn't the blaring siren of a FAANG on someone's resume. They're simply not equipped to dig in. It's probably also a matter of raw number of years, they're afraid that if you join, you'll get bored then they'll be back to square one (been there).
I've also heard of people getting THOUSANDS of resumes. I was hiring 2 SRE 1s last year and barely received any at all. Unless my Recruiter got thousands and filters that well. This WAS before a ton of Meta/G/etc layoffs though. I wonder if they've flooded the market now. I had both hired by I believe last summer, so prior to a bunch of layoffs.
I didn't expect them to know much more beyond a computer and a thirst to learn/program. I'm self-taught as is my entire team. We didn't need Stanford grads. We hired a previous IT Admin who had never touched distsys/code (me at one point) and promoted one of our customer support agents to SRE. I'm very proud of that because it was incredibly hard for me to go break into the field.
FWIW I've been hired three times by companies I found in these threads and spent more than seven years with them. Though I'm not a 10x developer by any means and keep my expectations at an average level too.
I'm not pedigreed though. I can't get hired at Google/FAANG because I'm not good enough at compsci/programming to pass any of their coding/committee interviews. I really thought I'd find my way into G, interviewed there with many referrals, etc, but they have no interest. And now I don't even want to go there. My dream companies have dropped to a handful, like Pixar, Nvidia, Arm types. But I don't have the CS. "Get better at programming" .. yeah.. I need to.
So I'm in this weird spot where my salary is basically stuck. I'm at around 17 years of experience (I turned 40 today but have worked on bsd/linux since a kid) so who knows what the next 20+ years will look like. Maybe I'm pricing myself out of work.
Senior SRE work at this level seems to be 180-250 and you're lucky to get anywhere near that 250 unless you work at FAANG/Datadog/blahblah. Datadogs one of the highest paying SRE groups I'm aware of, but non-remote.
The original job I had was "welder", for which the lower end of the pay range was about $20-$30k, and after some additional decades of experience you could dream of rising to $40-$50k.
I have had some pretty dumb programming jobs, but on the whole it seems pretty fortunate for there to be a job where you can be a college dropout and outearn dentists (or, for that matter, fleet admirals in the US Navy).
My working thesis is that there were a lot of senior/staff SREs on the market, so a normally unusual & fantastic resume was just normal.
LOE?