Can anyone shed some light on what it's like to be a TSE at Google? What are pros and cons of this role?
It's ok. There's a path to SRE and SWE, and I've seen people make the jump. You work cases and write playbooks. The problems can be hard, and customers can be frustrating to pry information out of. Pay is decent. You'll see things working at huge scale and customers solving big problems with our tech. You're pretty far removed from product management, and devs will dismiss your very well researched bug because they don't consider you a real engineer. It's a good job overall, a great way to get into a tech career at FAANG with less leetcode, but not a career in itself for most people.
What's the average tenure? And how hard is it to make the switch to SRE/SWE?
Tenure is pretty long, to be honest. 3+ years is very common. You can do an in ladder transfer by taking on a 20% project for 6 months, or you can do 1 or 2 code interviews if you want to jump immediately. Both do require going through Hiring Committee, but practically speaking, the bar is lower than external candidates.
Pros: you work for Google. Cons: you'll be stuck in the same domain for a long. Won't be easy to make it back to see/sde you'll have to choose sales/solutions architect path You'll have to deal with customers, your job will be to fix shit when it happens. If you are really tech savvy don't choose this path. Btw what's the compensation like?