Becoming SRE

Appendix B. Advice from Former SREs

It may seem a little strange to include information from people who have exited the door marked “SRE” to those who wish to enter it, but in my experience, the people who have left a field often have a unique perspective that only a little distance can offer. Plus, I have heard that while you could take the person out of SRE, it wasn’t nearly as easy to take SRE out of the person.

To hunt down this rare view, I’ve sought out and talked to some ex-SREs and have asked them about what they are doing now and key questions such as “What things continue to stick even after your departure?” and “Now that you are out, what would you suggest new SREs pay attention to as they are entering SRE?”

Here are some notes they made on the topic that I believe will be helpful to you.

Dina Levitan

SRE background. Google Ads SRE, Pittsburgh, 2012–2014; Google Apps SRE (Gmail/Calendar), Mountain View, 2014–2017; Google Cloud SRE, 2017–2018; Google SRE EDU, 2018–2019

Post-SRE occupations. Product management; consulting; problem solving to broader societal problems, including opioid epidemic; COVID vaccine distribution/capacity planning: formed a nonprofit (JitVax) at early stage of vaccine rollout; parent (see blog posts on SRE and parenting at https://www.dinalevitan.com)

Lessons learned from SRE:

• Reducing single points of failure (SPOFs). Pay attention to when there is a SPOF and what can be done proactively to mitigate it:

  • Systematic/global versus localized ...