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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

SRE-SWEs at Google are expected to be able to design and implement the same things that the developers they support are working on. If you are on Blah-SRE you would be expected to be capable of at the very least reading and understanding the code that Blah-Team writes, reviewing their code, etc. You might not _actually_ work on that code (it might be more important for you to be working on the automation, monitoring, or whatever) but you'd be qualified to do so. That's why the SRE-SWE interview is basically the SWE interview: graph coloring and complexity analysis and all that.

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In C, Java, Python?

Good question :) SRE-written system are never or almost never written in Java. However many SRE teams support Java systems.

Literally nothing at Google except third-party code (like Linux kernel) is written in straight C. C++ is very common, though.

Python sucks and is useless. Most things that were written in python are now written with Go.

I guess your question is about what happens if a C++ expert ends up on a Java team, but I don't really know. I happen to have landed in C++ world, which suited me.

> Python sucks and is useless. Most things that were written in python are now written with Go.

This is simply not true in any way.

Well it's a big company. In my area people who propose writing new code in python are either gently corrected or heartily derided.

True in my area as well. The only new things being written in Python are things that need to interop with other systems that have giant existing Python libraries.

I was an SRE who was most comfortable in C++ who changed ladders to a SWE team who was primarily Java. To be honest it was harder to learn all the team specific stuff than pick up Java.

The reason Python tends to suck is not all really nice libraries are ported to it in any reasonable amount of time. (If you need it, you end up doing the work). Go sucks in new and totally different ways.

I'm imagine an SRE needs to be fluent in at least one statically types compiled language. Would Go fulfill that in terms of getting an interviewed or hired or does it need to be C/C++?

Shouldn't matter. You should be capable of picking up new languages. You do the interviews in whatever language you prefer.

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