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Comment by williamDafoe | Hacker News Reader

SREs make 5-10% more than SWEs at Google.

That’s good to know, thanks for bringing that to my attention. Is it true that SREs are more likely to have oncall rotations at Google than SWEs? That is the impression I got from reading the Google SRE book - it talks about bringing SWEs into the oncall rotation when the SREs are swamped (i.e. more than 50% of their time is devoted to operational work) as a kind of pressure release mechanism to prevent the SREs from burning out or getting mired in endless toil. It makes it sound like outside of situations like that, SREs are doing most of the oncall work.

If this is the case, perhaps the pay discrepancy is explained by the greater oncall duties and morale issues for SREs?

It’s also worth mentioning that based on my reading of the Google SRE book, very few organizations approach operations like Google does. I personally think that Google has an enlightened approach to operations, but not all companies do.

Basically, I think SRE is a good title to have, but sysadmin is not, and I encourage anyone early in their career to rebrand themselves ASAP.

> I personally think that Google has an enlightened approach to operations, but not all companies do

Perhaps because the founders were doing operations (well) in the beginning, so they know a few things about it and its importance. They famously built a reliable system with about the cheapest possible hardware.

Are SWEs at Google expected to firefight especially outside of normal work hours? This is one thing I imagine SREs are expected to be doing that regular SWEs aren't. I think this is also why they require strong development background for the role.

I worked in Amazon which has a similar view to on-call to Google. Usually one person is on-call for the team for a cycle of every week or fortnight. There is also a "follow the sun" model wherein another team in has your nights covered. I do recall that SWEs also had the responsibility of being on-call, since teams are usually a mix of SWEs and SREs.

Naturally a team with a high ops load was shit and made your life hell. After my time there, I vowed never to do on-call unless it was after hours and specifically for emergency response. My opinion is - if there's an issue during work hours, the leads or the entire team should be on it - and collectively fix it.

Anyway, Google has written a bit about this in their SRE book: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/being-on-ca...

Which kind? There are SRE that are SWEs and then there are plain SREs.

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