I've been looking to move over to a role as an SRE and have some interviews lined up. I think I'm solid when it comes to the coding portion of the interview, and am leetcoding hard to prepare as much as I can. However, I know that SREs need to know Linux and networking really well and even though I currently work with linux a lot (Software engineer on a dev ops team) I am by no means a Linux guru and my networking knowledge is just enough to do my job at best. Any tips on how to best prepare for interviews with Google and FB (at FB it's a production engineer role) or any FAANG company for that matter? TC: 165k
You should be spending your time studying sysadmin stuff instead of leetcode. Linux admin knowledge/skills are the base level of SRE - doing so-so on that often won't get you past the phone screen. Beyond that, system architecture/design with an emphasis on failure points and how the system behaves in a degraded state, troubleshooting (hard to study for?), styles/techniques for observing a live system
From what i've read online and researched, it seems that google separates SREs into an SRE with an emphasis on sysadmin and one with an emphasis on software development. I'm aiming for the one with an emphasis on software. I'm sure sysadmin stuff is crucial but should I really slow down on LC?
I interviewed for SRE at Google, but ended up taking a SWE role in the matching phase. The interview was identical to an SWE interview, with nothing specific to SRE. I believe only one of my interviewers was an SRE, the rest were SWE. This was for L3.
Yeah, I'm an SRE but went the SWE interview route. All algorithm questions. Which is kinda funny cause I do very little coding in my actual job now. But yeah, for those interviews, leetcode is all you need. Also try to study for the G&L interview, at least think of what you want to get across there.
How long ago was this? Would you say it's possible that at the time there just weren't enough SREs available to interview? Or is it more likely that Google simply prioritizes algorithmic knowledge and ability for anything that is even slightly related to programming?
Go for Google sre-swe if you're comfortable with LC hard Decent Linux/nw skills should be enough but you gotta have solid design skills along with that