Could you actually get an SRE job if you went through this?
Oddly, the Linked-in SRE interview is more challenging, than this.
LinkedIn has so many tools you just have to be really good at a lot and hope the panel isn’t full of asshats.
School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
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Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#62This is less of an SRE school and more of a Systems Admin school. The Systems Design section is neat but quite bare.
Sre is a glorified sys admin for the most part.
Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good recap but it's all things I expect a college grad to just know or be able to grok pretty fast. Also why not Google?
I'm just not there from a skills perspective. I feel like being a SRE at Google is the top of the food chain which I'm no where near. Not trying to bring myself down but trying to be realistic :)
Unless you already know this really well, I'd start even at a more fundamental level than what is suggested by LinkedIn. I'd try learning Unix and a little bit of C by using The Unix Programming Environment by Kerninghan & Pike plus Kerninghan & Ritchie. It's quite timeless. Files, pipes, pointers, etc. That's the plumbing of software engineering.
Then also learn the calculus of software engineering: Logic. A good short intro is Huth & Ryan. The book covers some advanced topics in later chapters, but you don't need that if you don't want to. Logic is also timeless, and very practical. You can gain the ability to model check things, which is really really cool and used pretty often for e.g. distributed systems. This can unlock many cool positions for you.
Logic can also take you to logic and declarative programming. Something also worth investing into, and pretty addictive. For that, there's nothing better than The Art of Prolog.
Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Classic software chicken and egg problem.
It's an amazing phenomenon. In order to get industry experience using a tool/skillset you need to be part of that industry using that tool/skillset. It's becoming more apparent to me that in order to pivot in IT, you need to do something (ie a project) on your own time or just lie.
The alternative strategy is just make sure when you change jobs you're getting hired for 2x skills you know deeply well and the job offers you the chance to pivot into a new technology that is a gap in your skills.
It's harder if you're trying to get hired specifically for a technology that's a gap in your skills.
Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#65What are some projects that you can build to demonstrate SRE knowledge
Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#66with cloud being the talk of the industry these days. how pervasive are SRE roles. I would wager a good system admin | SRE can save a company thousands if they provisioned their own hardware i.e colo instead of cloud instances etc
It's the opposite. A good SRE can build a system faster and cheaper in the cloud, and only self-host the things that make sense.
You need a half dozen engineers working full time to replicate what the cloud gives you, and still buy the hardware ahead of time. That's 6 months of straight project development with 6 people and capital for a rack full of gear.. that's like $1.5M USD outlay for one year. For close to feature parity for core services I mean, nobody would normally build all that just to put a crappy web app online.
OR hire one SRE to set up a cloud stack in two months and only pay for what you use, $200K for one year or $100K for a short contact.
Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#67As a non-developer whose code would probably make your average SRE's brain implode, how competent would this 'course' make me? I started my IT career 2 years ago and my programming isn't that strong. I got pinged for a SRE job recently (my background so far is very much Linux based so I must have matched some filter) but I'm not strong in development, k8s (or even containers), or all of the other cool stuff I see on…
I'm a little confused by the other responses you're getting here. I don't have these kinds of expectations for recent college grads. The breadth of the document is impressive to me, and as someone with decades of technical experience, I see plenty that I could brush up on. And the Linux basics section seems to do a pretty good job of starting from foundations. It's a bunch of the things I had to figure out myself starting at a command line with little to no help.
I wouldn't treat this as a course to be completed. Think of it as a guide, or a map, on your journey to getting smarter about tech. And it's a lifelong journey. Don't let anybody here convinced you that you're supposed to know everything, because technology is so complex at this point that nobody knows all of it. Just keep broadening your skills, and deepening them where you are passionate, and you will build yourself an enjoyable and productive career.
Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#68Re: School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wish the article would explicitly spell it out. It wasn't obvious from reading it that traditional == college degree (or work experience).
What do you think the traditional education is for a software engineer?
Well, for the first few decades it was math or EE....