Google folks, what’s the difference between SWE and Software Engineer Technical Infrastructure (SETI)
SWE vs SETI what’s the diff
SETI is a career dead-end.
Were you a SETI earlier at Google?
SETI is SWE (same level, salary etc) that focus on internal tooling like infra or ci cd. You can easily switch between the two.
That's good to hear. Know anyone who did switch?
Know few. If you are not into consumer facing products and love working on internal tooling (Google has tons of them at their scale) - that's a good place to be. Very dynamic allocation, you will be paired with SWE from different teams and work together on different tasks with them.
SETIs are Testers
Were you a SETI earlier at Google?
No. But I have heard
I've been a SETI for a few years, and never in my career I had to allocate time to write tests for a product (except for the systems/tools I build, of course). I've worked with ill informed people like some of the commenters above who wanted me to do it and I was like "lol bitch of course not. Here's the framework, write your goddamn tests". Most of my work is: 1) Make sure important parts of the servers/apps can be tested. In order to achieve that we might have to create a separate tool, service or change the service/app code/architecture in order to make it testable. 2) Build tools to extract and visualize important system metrics. 3) Identify performance bottlenecks in the systems and fix them. 4) Build tools to make the development process faster (for example, optimizing build and testing scripts). 5) Create test/release automation services and tools. Among other things (and writing tests for things I haven't built is not one of them). I've considered transitioning to SWE and have even been offered that by another team, but then I remember how much time I used to spend on endless meetings with multiple PMs when I was a regular product SWE and think "nah, nope". As a SETI my customers are engineers and the technical challenges are just as good as when I was a backend SWE, plus I don't get to be oncall, ever. Yeah, I don't get to go home and say "hey honey, look at this feature I worked on", but I'm really passed that phase in my life, I just want to minimize the bs now.
This! Thank you so much.
Thank you. This is awesome insight. We had this SETI vs SWE question come up once a month and most of the answers were from know it all people from other companies saying it's a testing role. Your answer is the only one which was on point. Thank you. I am curious about promotions. I read in google you need to provide data points like made so and so faster by x%. Is it easier or hard for a SETI?
SETI means SE - tools and Infra, not Technical Infrastructure(which is a division of its own)
SETI is a glorified SWETest The ideal role for SETI is to build infra to enable tests to be written for a given product but practically, in many teams, you end up writing integration tests yourself
Have you worked at google as a SETI?
I worked at Google as SWE.. dealt with SETI in my team and other teams