> It was the design of the recruiting system itself that became his problem: At some point, Google decided Watt (who was working as an associate professor at the time) was interviewing to be a site reliability engineer, despite never indicating an interest in that role himself (he was interested in a more management-focused position). > "It just never seemed to get through. They were so focused on whatever categoriza…
SRE is an odd department inside Google because they want people with an unusually wide mix of skills. They want a lot of people who are software developers and have those skills but who also have networking, UNIX sysadmin and maths skills. The requirements and interviews are/were more intense than for regular SWE roles. My interviewers tested all of those and more. At the end even if you just want to write software you get an offer that boils down to "it's SRE or nothing" because frankly, not that many people want to do SRE work, so they have to be a bit muscular about it. Normally they point out that after a year or two you can transfer if your job performance is good enough, which is what I did.
Anyway this Watt guy sounds like he's blaming Google for not giving him a free choice of roles. That's not a demand made of any normal company. Usually it's understood that companies have particular needs and are looking to fill them.