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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think the traditional education is for a software engineer?
Well, for the first few decades it was math or EE....
- Reading the SRE book from Google to get a glimpse of the SRE philosophy. A lot of companies rebrand their Sysadmin or DevOps roles as SRE because it's trendy. Many businesses do not need SRE and need to make sure they understand the idea behind it before doing so.
- Learning Golang for such a role is becoming increasingly vital. So many SRE tools including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Terraform are written, and extended, in Go that it's almost a requirement next to learning Bash.
- A lot may disagree on this one, but get yourself some certifications. SRE is kind of a broad role and companies do not know how to assess the skills of candidates, and unfortunately they often rely on certifications to do so. You don't have to enroll in the most challenging ones as a junior, but just one or two basic certifications to get a rough idea of a provider or service capabilities. Choose wisely.
It can be difficult to show off any personal project in such a field, but you could try to create your own infrastructure as a side project, self-host some services and provision them with Ansible for example.
But most importantly as a new SRE, find yourself a good team and good mentors within that team. Getting into SRE without any previous experience is a hell of a ride, but a very rewarding one. Like previously said, SRE roles are jack of all trades and the field is so broad you never stop learning :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for the first few decades it was math or EE....
A math or EE... what? A degree, right? A relevant degree is the traditional education. If you don't have one - you're non-traditional. Get it?
Traditional education for practical purposes was, for much of human history, focused much more on apprenticeship-style learning than degrees. Colleges and universities were not considered a prerequisite for lots of technical jobs such as carpentry, architecture, toolmaking, clockmaking, or even banking and accounting.
If we look at the last century or so, instead of the breadth of human history, we'll see a different story. Perhaps this is a good scope to consider, seeing as the history of Computer Science and programming largely falls into this time period.
If we want to consider digital computing, the dawn of our field had plenty of people coming to programming "from industry", to use a modern term. Experienced professionals learned to program outside of degree programs, because there were no degrees to be had in computer science or programming.
Many early pioneers in programming and digital computing came from EE programs and Mathematics departments.
This is the early tradition of programming and computer science.
Today, though, if you were looking to start a career as an SRE or as a programmer, a Math degree would be a poor choice. It is traditional, in that it was a common early path, but it is much less likely to prepare you for the type of job relevant to this thread.
An individual with a degree in Literature would likely be considered a non-traditional candidate for a programming job. An individual with a degree in Mathematics may be considered the same. A Math degree may have a lot of computational focus, or none at all.
Get it?