I am a SWE and recently read on Blind that SREs make as much or sometimes even more than SWEs. Apparently companies like Google and LinkedIn compensate SREs very well. Wondering if I should stay as a SWE or switch. Any thoughts?
Stay as SWE. There’s more jobs overall.
How's the difference in work? Do you think SWE is more fun/interesting?
LinkedIn has no clue what they’re saying. The job market for devops is growing at an insane rate. What do you think will get automated first? Building a client or running a company?
No, they make the same as SWE mostly. A few of them make more. SRE is fun if you join the right company, otherwise it’s just a glorified Ops. Companies that I know are implementing SRE right: Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Indeed. SRE fucked up: Microsoft. SRE deal with really interesting problems which are really valuable in the job market if SRE are done right in the company.
Who leads SRE in Microsoft? Why is it ducked up?
I have SRE friends there and they are saying that the SRE mindset there is like devops + sysad. Not really SRE, MS just rebranded the position to SRE to trick people.
Don’t listen to the people at the top. SRE has way more impact in the overall business than just writing a feature. Plus, you’re quite literally working on automation which is exploding right now. You can always work as a SRE and moonlight as a SWE on a side project. Why not?
Don't listen to an engineer from Cisco lol
Switching based solely on compensation would worry me a bit. These jobs are similar but different enough that you could be happy as a SWE and unhappy as an SRE. I would not be surprised that SRE make more because they need to have a wider knowledge. They are also frequently on-call.
Stay as SWE