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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Have you considered Site Reliability Engineering as a path?

I wanted to point to this podcast appearance by my colleague @molly_struve, DEV's Lead SRE.

play pause CodeNewbie

It's not always clear when and how to make a career leap, and I feel like this episode covers that in spades and gives a lot of insight into what qualities might make site reliability engineering right for you.

Happy coding!

Top comments (11)

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leirasanchez profile image
Leira Sánchez

I have not considered a career in SRE because I like to come up with solutions to problems customers/users deal with directly. As a Mechanical Engineer, I wanted to do the same thing. I feel like SRE is more like maintenance/utilities is for ME which I have never been interested in.

I still have a lot to learn though, so we’ll see ☺️

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liquid_chickens profile image
Chris Dodds

I would say SRE is more analogous to industrial engineering than ME; it can be almost overwhelmingly broad in scope. It isn't user-focused in the feature development-sense, but there is a high focus on UX (latency, reliability, etc).

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Sounds like you are suited to be a Solutions Architect 🚀

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

It seems like you're on a great path with your more user-facing work!

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torianne02 profile image
Tori Crawford

Becoming an SRE is part of my 5 year plan. ❤️

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buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas • Edited

Yes! Starting on April 🙂 very excited.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

The way I see it is that SRE is closer to business logic and consulted in feature development concerns whereas devops is closer to the metal, and underlying operations.

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liquid_chickens profile image
Chris Dodds

SRE implements DevOps as part of our work. SRE also tends to imply a very Googlish approach to service reliability (a focus on SLI/SLOs, for example). You will often find us embedded in development teams.

DevOps as initially defined is a practice, not a role. Most companies who have "DevOps" engineer roles aren't actually practicing DevOps and have siloed off "operations" as a separate concern. DevOps in that context usually equates to "sysadmin + cloud" with little to no shift in culture or process.

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buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas • Edited

That is so true. DevOps is firstly culture, only then processes and tools 🙂

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lordrahl90 profile image
Alugbin Abiodun Olutola

I have considered it a lot of time and would really love to transition soon. However, starting and getting detailed knowledge aside from the google published resource, has been really hard.

I try as much as possible to carry out some basic things in my pet projects. eg, containerizing the applications, adding metrics, using prometheus and grafana for visualization, trying to learn about reporting and all.
But it's depressing if done without the needed scale and motivation.
I'll appreciate any resource/help i can get though.

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Daniel Starner

I didn't consider it, I just kind of ended up in it! 😃 But its been pretty awesome so far! I've been at it about 2 years now.