I can't find the post, but I base this on rachelbythebay's writing - who got hired as an SRE, and then tried to become an SWE and was told she couldn't just convert.
But fair enough, I don't work at Google, so I'll withdraw the point. Having said that, knowing that AWS engineers do oncall, and GCP don't (letting the SREs do it) makes me still think there is some sort of two-tier system.
Before you withdraw your point, I guess I have to say my experience is limited to my org and maybe one or two more. Google is a big company, so I can see that happening. I'd still presume it's not the general attitude towards SREs, though.
re: Oncall, we have two rotations:
- one manned (personed?) by SWEs, 9-5, responsible for dealing with customer issues and mandatory.
- one is mix of SREs and SWEs, 24/7, responsible for prod issues
I believe SREs also have their own rotation, but that's 9am-9pm because they are always spread among two timezones. Overall, this is muuuuuch better for everyone involved compared to the AWS oncalls. I remember barely sleeping for a week being the norm on one of the teams I worked at. Our cries for another team in a different timezone, similar to Google SREs, were shut down every single time. "Customer obsession" at AWS means delivering stuff as fast as possible and then throwing the engineers under the bus. I still remember the days I had to wake up multiple times a night to run a command manually (literally 5 minutes) because engineers couldn't take the extra 4 months to do it right.
Thanks, but no thanks. I was at a great team at AWS for ~2 years with great engineering culture and little operational load, but unlike Google, that's rare.
But fair enough, I don't work at Google, so I'll withdraw the point. Having said that, knowing that AWS engineers do oncall, and GCP don't (letting the SREs do it) makes me still think there is some sort of two-tier system.