What's it like being an SRE for a FAANG? To me it sounds like you need to know practically everything about software engineering (network stack, linux stack, web app stack) so it appeals to me as a generalist.
It’s great, but highly dependent upon which SRE team you’re on. Google’s internal infrastructure has advanced immensely over the past 5-10 years, which has shifted many capabilities from SRE to dev teams. Over time it has become relatively easy to build the long tail of scalable, reliable services, which has changed the responsibilities of SRE. For some of the larger teams/products, SRE is fundamentally unchanged and is really rewarding, but for others its responsibility has unintentionally evolved to more of a 24x7 operator role.
Being an SRE at Google was great for a generalist at a technical level.
Fairly interesting problems from multiple areas, possibility to delve deep into understanding/fixing any internal project, fantastic technological stack, overwhelmingly smart and kind coworkers, well balanced pager/oncall load.
The only downside was working for Google. Megacorp, small-cog-in-large-machine, americentrism, contract clauses limiting side projects, etc.
