How Much do Facebook Production Engineers Code?
How much coding do Production Engineers actually do?
I have an interview for a PE role coming up, and I feel pretty confident I can pass the interview. I have around 8 years or so experience doing pure DevOps work, and around 4 doing pure product based SWE work. My personal aspiration is to spend more time coding than systems administration (not necessarily product coding, I'm perfectly happy writing code for internal applications), and I'm having a hard time getting a read on how well this meshes with the PE role. I don't mind doing some systems work, but I've spent a lot of time doing it, and would ideally like to spend most of my time honing other skills.
My recruiter tells me that 90% coding roles are absolutely available for PEs, but I worry that that is exactly what recruiter WOULD tell me. Our incentives aren't exactly aligned here. In my phone interview, it certainly seemed like everyone I spoke with did significantly more software based tasks than systems administration, but it's been very hard to gain real insight.
I'm hopeful that the bootcamp process would allow me to find a team that fits my personal goals, but again, difficult to find insight. It also seems like I could potentially move to a product SWE team at a later date (even if I have to interview for it, that's fine - certainly seems reasonable for them to want to make sure my CS fundamentals are solid), but the recruiter was a little cagey about it when I asked.
From what I read, PEs are software engineers with a focus on infra problems, which honestly sounds pretty cool. But, in the past I've been sold this same idea only to find myself primarily doing systems administration type tasks, so I want to make sure I don't get burned again.
#engineering #facebook #software #productionengineering #swe #interview
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PE is a good role if you want to solve reliability problems and only want to code as a means to solve these problems. If you want to code all the time, and in particular anything complex, then you should become a SWE. By complex I mean code related to distributed systems, compilers, ML, AR/VR, etc. Some PEs do write meaningful distributed systems code, but I'd still say it is better to be a SWE in this case.
PE’s do a lot of coding, way more than SRE’s elsewhere (Google SWE-SRE is an exception). Some teams have PE’s pushing patches to the Linux kernel.
If you want to switch to SWE then you can do so after a year and conversion interviews.
Were you able to clear the phone screen ?