These guides are so basic it's remedial for anyone with experience in this role, but highlights the problems of finding someone on the market that is exceptional in such a multitude of skillsets.
I don't know what LinkedIn is doing and how many SREs they've got sitting around "writing SLAs", but I'm not sure you should even be passing an interview for an internship if your operating system fundamentals are that weak. In anything anywhere near a production Unix system.
Perhaps I just don't understand what the actual role of an SRE is. I'm fully aware of what an SLA is. What I suppose is confusing is how the role of SRE came out of nowhere fairly recently. I know what a systems administrator does, and what a systems programmer does, and of various forms of title inflation that can be applied to both. SRE remains a mystery to me that crawled out of the web title soup sometime in the last decade.
Is it operations? Is it writing contracts and badgering programmers about that time they broke production? Are they like auditors? Do I need to take the SRE out to dinner and butter them up? I'm not quite sure based off of this content.
I've got nothing against nontraditional hires. I never finished college. But I absolutely despise the idea of somebody educated in this way being put in a position of authority.
Even funnier, my extended team requires further education in the particular skills we need here. Even an internal transfer with years of Google SRE experience needs to go through it. It’s just cheaper to spend some months on probably repeated training, than to discover a knowledge gap/misaligned intuitions in the form of a large post-mortem.
That's not a good sign IME[1] but it seems inevitable, so it's crucial to make the best of it - I think standard intro curricula are a great way to do it.
It's also a pretty clear "canary in the coalmine" indicator. If a "nontraditional hire" cannot master or simply can't be bothered to learn the onboarding curriculum, that's a clear warning sign w.r.t. the viability of that hire.
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[1] To be clear I'm not entirely against inexperienced/nontraditional hires. I'm against the situation where a company wants to make the absolute newbies a majority of their hires because like, hey, they can learn from the senior devs by osmosis or whatever.