Becoming SRE

Chapter 7. Hints for Getting Hired as an SRE

This chapter is entirely written for the SRE job seeker, not the employer. I suppose you could reverse engineer the advice here to get some valuable tips as an employer, but the lovely Chapter 2 by Andrew Fong in Seeking SRE about hiring may be a more direct route. In this chapter, we will talk about how to evaluate job postings, and then I will give you advice on preparing for and then nailing your interview.

Roles That Are Out of Scope

There is a large alligator pit we need to cross before we can talk about how to get a job as an SRE. I will attempt to do so as delicately as possible. Scattered throughout this book, like raindrops from a gentle summer sun-shower, are less-than-subtle hints that not every SRE job/implementation is the same as every other one. This heads us into the identity and self-definitional aspect of the SRE field. Which jobs are SRE and which are less so?

I’ve tried very hard to avoid suggesting that there is only one true definition of SRE or what an SRE job is. I will continue to hold that line. That being said, SRE job “creation” through activities like title flipping pushes my relativism past the breaking point. I’m not going to judge anyone who is in a job like that; it just scores low on my internal game of “Is it SRE or not?” and hence, title-flip positions are largely going to be out of scope for this chapter. There is an entire Chapter 23 in Seeking SRE on SRE antipatterns if you would like to go into ...