I joined Google SRE a few years ago and recently transferred to a SWE team. If I could redo team matching again I would never have joined SRE.
Pros:
1. Google SRE is really SRE and you get to really touch high traffic realiability and monitoring stuff.
2. SRE gets good oncall bonus which can be transferred to PTO(some SWEs do get the comp bonus but not the PTO bonus)
3. Best SRE training in the industry
4. Google founded SRE so there's that
Cons:
1. Google career growth is slow and SRE is slower
2. There's a detailed internal doc about the SRE ladder skew. Basically SRE L4=SWE L4.5 and the perf is way harder than SWE. SRE leadership was told about this and they said it was consistent with SWE lol.
3. Growth to L6 is really hard due to how SRE functions. Your budgets are from SWE teams so it's their call if the project get budget.
4.. Some teams are pure toil and SWE teams just throw things they don't want to work with to SRE
5. Calibration session is consisted of SRE manager so the expectation is going to be different than SWE.
6. There's an issue recruiting SRE so your load is going to be a bit higher. My previous team still has 3 openings since last year. A lot of teams are having this issue also.
In conclusion, join SRE if you are really interested to learn SRE stuff, you won't regret it but don't join because of the Google brand.
Google SRE is a good org but the perf for SRE is messed up and inconsistent with SWE. If SRE is getting paid the same as SWE why isn't the perf difficulty the same?
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comments
The context of the interview is exactly like SWE, 3 codings + 1 system design + 1 googleyness. Though in SD round, I was asked to design a system that generally used by SREs.
This is one of the link of the email recruiter sent me
https://www.google.com/about/careers/stories/site-reliability-engineering-profile-google/