
Ask HN: SRE vs. Software Engineer - ljim4a
I&#x27;m in the beginning stages of a career, and wanted to get industry impressions of SRE (@Google) and similar roles (ie. Production Engineer @Facebook). Has anyone worked both as an SRE and a SWE and can comment as to what they did&#x2F;didn&#x27;t like about each role? Did you mind being oncall? How does it compare to Infrastructure dev work? Would I be making a mistake taking one of these positions over a SWE position?
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stray
While I can't answer the exact question you're asking, I can offer some
thoughts that may be helpful.

I spent the first ~15 years of my career as a SysAdmin -- and imo, all _good_
SysAdmins have always done what now counts as SRE.

And all good SysAdmins have always been adept at programming.

The on-call rotation simply served as a test of your confidence in the
resilience of your systems. If you actually got called in for something
preventable it's only because _you_ had failed as a SysAdmin -- instant karma
all wrapped up in a 2:30am visit to the data center.

A SysAdmin doing a good job would eventually have people wondering why they
never seemed to do any work. Because that kind of work is invisible unless
performed poorly.

Ok, now to actually approach the questions you're asking:

In the beginning stages of your career, you'd do well to get your hands dirty.
And working on infrastructure will give you keen insights on applications
programming down the road -- a software engineer equally empathetic to
customer needs and operations reality will always be extremely valuable.

And don't fear on-call rotation. It only sucks for those who suck 9-5.

IMO, it would be a _minor_ mistake _not_ to take one of these positions over a
SWE position.

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raincom
Usually, people pick up a dev position than an SRE role. Unless u are hired
for SRE SW role, it is hard for you to move from SRE to SW.

