"SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more • Hacker News Board

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#81

Post by timacles » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #52

playingalong wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people calling themselves SREs who have never operated a server that wasn’t in a cloud Wait. Since when this is a requirement?

Because if you’ve never touched hardware, you haven’t seen the full gamut of what can go wrong. I don’t think everyone needs a rack in their house, but you can buy old tower servers for dirt cheap, and learn stuff. In my career so far, the best Ops-adjacent people all had homelabs. I view it as a huge green flag if you have one. Not necessarily a red flag if you don’t, but it warrants some more questions. That’s not…

Listen man, you’re not wrong, but you’re also Living in the past. It’s no different from saying a real programmer does low level C coding.

The field has changed, everything is in the cloud. Yeah most engineers can’t troubleshoot low level stuff, but they rarely Need to. There’s no need to be grumpy about it and just accept their jobs are mainly configuring abstractions rather than being some bare metal guru who knows kernel intricacies.

I work with like 15 ops/system engineers. None of them know anything about cpu schedulers and raid arrays. We’re just old man

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#82

Post by muppetman » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:19 PM UTC

Everyone lost respect for SREs when Elon took over Twitter and culled lots of staff. Every SRE in the land lined up to shout from the rooftops "There is no way Twitter can keep working it's going to flame out and fall over and keep crashing" and it didn't, not even once.

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#83

Post by formerly_proven » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

amonith wrote: post #23

benfortuna wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then "DevOps" emerged as a job title, which meant a dozen things to a dozen people, and the same issue happened, it was the same operational needs and the same operational solutions, just with better tools as the passage of time allowed better tools to exist. DevOps was/is not just better tools, it's the same team that builds the software, operates the software (and underlying infrastructure). Maybe when it became a…

> DevOps was/is not just better tools, it's the same team that builds the software, operates the software (and underlying infrastructure) Not happening in any of the companies I worked for as a contractor or subcontractor. In those companies at best dev teams have nowadays some additional capability to deploy to dev/test instantly (so they do their own CI/CD pipelines and manage dev infra via Terraform or whatever) b…

These setups are frankly asinine. Often come with another contractor and an entirely separate org to handle service/support. And then management wonders why relatively simple applications take forever to ship, changes take even longer and operating costs are astronomic ("back in the day four guys could do this" - they still can, you just don't let them).

Re: "SRE" doesn't seem to mean anything useful any more

#84

Post by sgarland » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 11:37 AM UTC

timacles wrote: post #81

sgarland wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you’ve never touched hardware, you haven’t seen the full gamut of what can go wrong. I don’t think everyone needs a rack in their house, but you can buy old tower servers for dirt cheap, and learn stuff. In my career so far, the best Ops-adjacent people all had homelabs. I view it as a huge green flag if you have one. Not necessarily a red flag if you don’t, but it warrants some more questions. That’s not…

Listen man, you’re not wrong, but you’re also Living in the past. It’s no different from saying a real programmer does low level C coding. The field has changed, everything is in the cloud. Yeah most engineers can’t troubleshoot low level stuff, but they rarely Need to. There’s no need to be grumpy about it and just accept their jobs are mainly configuring abstractions rather than being some bare metal guru who knows…

I’m in my 30s; is that now old?

> no need to be grumpy about it

Counterpoint: I know both cloud and metal. It can be done, you just have to care enough to learn. That’s my bugbear: people by and large aren’t learning things for the sake of learning, they’re just learning what they need for the role.