Interview with a Site Reliability Engineer

I'm interviewing a friend and coworker who is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). She's been doing some form of DevOps for many years now, and has a LOT of experience that's relevant to early- and mid-career folks.

0:00 Introduction
1:28 SRE and Devops Project Work
3:05 Company Size and Specialization
5:24 Jobs before tech
6:00 Getting into tech
6:50 University Degree and Skills
8:20 Why get into tech?
9:29 Dave's passion ninja 10x engineer rant
10:06 Applying to tech jobs
10:50 Experience as a Tech Apprentice
12:51 Advice: Starting from Zero

14:00 Core Skill: Solo Learning
15:27 Most interesting DevOps/SRE work
18:11 Different company cultures
19:13 Ideal company culture
22:52 Surprises when getting into tech
24:54 It's OK not to know everything
26:10 Skills that new tech people neglect
29:54 Tech skills that people neglect
32:35 Where is DevOps going in the future?

34:27 "I think it could get weird"
38:00 It's crazy to "plan" for the future
39:00 Erin's final advice to new tech people

[eddblake]

I love that you didn’t edit the ‘I will edit this out’ parts. really refreshing video!

[supriyanegi]

Thank you for sharing this definitely lifts my motivation . At times I would look at job description it is like 5years in CI/CD, AWS certified, 5years of professional experience...etc and job role is for "Entry level" ..just makes no sense at all.

[eftiprwtopapadakis]

Is it me or i feel that in the last years with the new shiny names on various job roles like at first "Dev Ops" and now "Site Reliability Engineer" its just that companies want their new candidate to do everything in a value for money salary?! It sounds more like be our programmer, be our network guy and be our System Administrator.

[hdotalam]

Thank you for sharing your views and experiences. As someone like me who is trying to get into devops by learning it on my own it is very reassuring to know how you got to where you have.

[FabulousFadz]

21:53 The first time it happened to me I was completely stumped so I left early. The office was close to a movie theater. So I crossed the road and saw that there was something interesting so I went in. Halfway through the movie, I had an "Aha!" moment so I left the movie, got back to the office and wrote a bit of code... Tested and I had come up with the solution when I wasn't even trying anymore.

[KaustubhMaliintothewild]

Thank you once again. Just felt like I was there with you guys and having a chat in mind. 😅 Felt more ambitious suddenly for some reason. I like your videos and content related to DevOps overall

[bezhanmukhidinov]

I'm showing this to my wife and she is also into social media marketing, guess what, she is starting to learn DevOps 😃

[Usertrappedindatabase]

had to pause at around 25:37. hit me in the feels. Just like being able to step back and realize it's fine to feel kinda lost. I was having a major issue using Neomutt(basically a curses terminal email program) and it was just a simple configuration file but I was kinda overworking myself and thought it was some deep serious issue with my actual smtp mail server on debian..

There's a weird balance of good stress vs unhealthy stress. like light a fire under ur butt, getting it done, synthwave/techno blasting, boss mode vs yelling silently at a weird /etc/ config that keeps changing.

really enjoying these interviews, your videos have definitely been in my top 3 of most helpful.

tl;dr: It's okay Fren. remember to walk, look at sunshine, pet doge. screaming quietly is never the answer.

[chixandegg]

Thank you so much for this! I needed to see this video!

[MVPMoeever]

First time seeing this. this was fun and enlightening. Thank you. You also made it fun.

[maxsterling]

I love HashiCorp products and I use them regularly. That's one place I would like to work. My current role is Systems Engineer on paper but my work is mostly is hybrid of SRE and DevOps. I was asking about level of Go needed for SRE role. I have experience with Python as I extended Openstack API to integrate with our disparate systems (LDAP/Kerberos authentication systems), however, I have not done anything concrete with Go. I asked one of HashiCorp SREs and he did not really reply to my question. I'm proactive as I enjoy learning and updating my skills. Also, can you let this lady know that you guys have a bug in your Azure API in Terraform implementation. When you assign security groups (NSGs) to subnets while creating a vnet (azurerm_virtual_network), only the first one works. It throws an error if you assign a security group to any other subnet. I had to resolve it by manually assigning NSGs to the remaining subnets in my VNET.

[gokukakarot]

Where is the interview? It’s a podcast

[ratfuk]

Man "Code divers" actually sounds really interesting, I love the concept. Did you ever upload or publish that anywhere?

[kevinbonilla]

Love the fun insight these podcasts/interviews provide! I find it super entertaining and informative as a recent graduate and full timer in the "DevOps" industry.

[sriraagsridhar]

Loved the video .. thanks for this..
P.S Even I feel all this abstraction of layers built to make things easier for us is actually kinda putting lot of us in a position where we don't know how it works under the hood and in the future those are the roles which might be in deman imho ..

Thanks again I've always enjoyed watching your videos!!

[Owned_By_Cats]

SRE's are some of the hardest working humans

[sammygun]

Hi if you have a chance today to start from the zero in tech what you will choose now with all your experience ?

[marko]

This is the kind of people I want to work with!

[davidbeckers]

@36:00: The joy of debugging ingresses and as to why traffic wont get routed properly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[matzmr]

you should split the screen when doing this kinda video.