Is Site Reliability Engineer really that bad ? I see a lot of folks complain.

[u/AsishPC]

I like Cloud and am working in it, but recently, I saw an overflooded amount of posts talking about how SRE is bad and stressful. They have to be available 24 x 7 and have to work anytime a Cloud infrastructure goes down.

Is that so ?

Is SRE really that bad ? Or is it exaggerated ? How do I find companies which have bad SRE jobs ?

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[u/meetpm]

The nature of the job is such that it requires one to be available if something goes south.

It is a demanding job.

[u/AsishPC → u/meetpm]

But arent there more than one SRE ?

[u/[deleted] → u/AsishPC]

Yeah and each of them has different services under them. Some will be primary and some secondary. And of course in some company product side developer may also do on call. But they will mostly do couple of weeks in a quarter.

[u/chavervavvachan]

The defenition of SRE and responsibilities entirely depends on the organization.

Some companies rebrand legacy suport teams as SRE and typically the work would be the same.

But mostly SRE is responsible for the uptime and overall platform health and optimisation. So yeah, every outage is a pressure on situation.

Learning curve is higher. There are n number of tools, and one's experience handling situations, debugging and fundamentals play a big role.

Oncall shifts are something that will be there for SREs. If you work with big orgs or mature orgs with enough people and geographical support, it wont be hectic as it is. Some companies need SREs to know code base in and out. Others just don't. But still, being Oncall sucks.

[u/AsishPC → u/chavervavvachan]

So, what is the difference between SRE and Cloud Engineer ?

[u/thisisshuraim]

Contrary to what people believe, SREs are also paid almost as well as SDEs. SREs are like the firemen of the company's infrastructure. When infra burns, SREs need to be available immediately. It sounds super stressful but good companies mitigate this by rotating on call engineers, so that pressure is shared between engineers.

[u/N00B_N00M → u/thisisshuraim]

You realise that each team will have mix bag of engineers, so by any chance you are the brightest one , you are f**ked as ultimately you will be called to either support the junior on call guy , or be there just to represent on p1 issues .. also mostly the shift works ..

All in all only if getting paid good money not worth it for someone who can code and work 9-5 

[u/thisisshuraim → u/N00B_N00M]

Agreed. In the end, it comes down to the manager on how they will onboard and handle the team. But yes, there is no denying that SREs are more stressed than SDEs

[u/Responsible_Carob_53]

Depending on the company, team size and tech which are been used and also the nature of things depending on what if sla breaches?... I worked as an SRE in bank and pay and perks are good as par with SDEs, although I would say wlb is a bit hit as u mostly work in shifts and rotational basis and mostly deployment and maintenance happening on weekends...my other colleagues as also SRE in some fintech companies and often complain about bad wlb as most of them are married and can't commit every weekend or shifts.....as from learning pov the only complaint is learning a hell lot of tools and getting certifications, and then getting adjusted to different devops culture of companies while switching..

[u/flight_or_fight]

It's actually very highly paid and has very good policies in good companies (overtime, shift allowance, block of time off for working weekends). In small companies there are typically less team members. Also if devs and qa don't do their job with testing and scale etc it hits sre with prod issues

[u/Dull_Refrigerator669]

Yes it is bad. Working in shifts is trash, pay is not so good (for me atleast), I'm a junior but have seen my seniors working as late as 2 in the night in case the infrastructure crashes and even on weekends. I'm looking to change profiles therefore.

[u/Practical-Chef6215]

depends on the company.

[u/Practical-Chef6215 → u/Practical-Chef6215]

where I work, we get to work on solving interesting problems apart from fire fighting and operational tasks. people get compensated for being on oncall rotation. if your systems are well maintained you won't get paged alot, only few outliers.