SRE/System engineers at FANG please reply
Hi guys, sorry for long read first of all. I'm trying to switch from DevOps role to more SRE related almost a year. There are many guides over internet about swe interview preparation but nothing strict and clear about SRE role bar level. Couple of blogs which give you suggestion to read dozens of articles and books about linux, networking and technologies, but still it sounds like nice to have and no guarantee that it covers all the things. I know that in most of companies interview consist of 4 tech parts: - coding - linux - networking/trouble-shooting - system design But I never saw explanation of what exact level understanding is needed for each category. For example for swe role interview it seems to me that you have to read one good book about algos to learn basic concept and then resolve 100-300 problems on leetcode ( which pretty difficult but still it's clear bar) + complete system design interview course, and with such background you should be pretty confident in going on interview. With interview for SRE role I can't achieve that confidence because I don't know what is the level needed. I'm able to resolve most of medium questions at leetcode even some hard, however don't know well graph and trees related algos. Should I spend additional time learning them before going on interview? I have read famous linux/unix system administrative guide, and reading more and more articles explaining in details linux, but still don't think that know everything, even more, previously I heard questions which are not covered in that book. Troubleshooting knowledge is a blackhole, haven't found any good book which would cover main principles and tools, all articles I read are very vague and I don't think reading few articles and watching video from Brendan Gregg (from Netflix) would help with ephemeral troubleshooting session. It seems only having years of experience troubleshooting performance/networking issues would help, am I wrong? System design - I'm not sure that it's swe like session, I believe problems asked on sre system design doesn't sound like design tweeter, so no guides I found so far. Again sorry for long read. Let me know if my ideas are wrong. I will appreciate any suggestions. YoE 6 TC 110
Linux and networking rounds are typically just simple questions that have endless layers of complexity, like explaining what happens under the hood when you run the find command on Linux, or explaining how TCP works. Best way to get better in troubleshooting is just getting your hands dirty and troubleshooting network issues or handling high system load. A book can only do so much there.