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SCADA built on GTK+ is somehow more terrifying than SCADA built on top of WinXP at least if you airgap the WinXP poo poo it can be relied upon to work
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May 27, 2020 14:46
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Sapozhnik posted:SCADA built on GTK+ is somehow more terrifying than SCADA built on top of WinXP Motif is more like Win2K era at best (I mean it's not a Windows framework either way), but yeah I can see why they don't switch everything over and it's on RHEL, formerly BSD
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May 27, 2020 15:02
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I worked at a defense contractor like that when I was fresh out of college. Overall it was a really great experience, and I was also glad when I moved on 5 years later. Pros: pretty loose on deadlines, low stress level, learned a bunch of interesting stuff about esoteric dev topics. Lots of latitude to improve the tech stack after they grew to trust me. Wore lot of hats, got to explore lots of engineering topics. Easy to impress the other employees without too much effort. Cons: I slowly stagnated there. They hired new people only to replace old ones, average employee age was 20 years older than me. I didn't get to work with anything high-tech or modern, and I felt like I was falling behind as I bashed my head against forgotten problems in obsolete technologies. It felt like an elephant's graveyard but for engineers
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May 27, 2020 15:05
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Progressive JPEG posted:getting paid around 30% less in wellington than i was getting in the bay area, but life is way better and we're living like kings as dual income programmers. for example, using the proceeds from selling the shithole in la honda, we just bought a 2br apartment in the middle of the city with views all around, plus cash left over that we're thinking of using to buy a few hectares an hour out of town within biking distance of a train station How was this process? Wife and I are seriously thinking about doing it. I know things are shut down now but I'm curious how it was interviewing and all the govt stuff to get set up. The remote gig thing seems dope but all the stuff I got was about working for firms in NZ do you know how those folks got that set up? Did they come over and work a local gig first or were they able to come in with the remote gig? KidDynamite fucked around with this message at 15:31 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 15:27
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I'm attempting to transition to being a remote contractor. I have an initial call with a recruiter from a large tech company tomorrow and I realized I have no idea what sort of questions to ask or what red flags to watch out for. Anyone have experience here or know of good resources I can use to educate myself? I don't wanna get ripped off and I'd like to look like I know what I'm doing.
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May 27, 2020 16:39
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Kind Friend posted:remote contractor this seems like a bad time to become a variable expense
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May 27, 2020 17:44
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yeah, its a risk i'm taking. i pushed myself to the point of total burnout at my previous salaried job. that taught me an important lesson. i was supposed to be taking 6+ months off to hike the pacific crest trail right now but that aint happening. figured i might as well make an attempt at finding flexible work. i've gotten a pretty good response so far from recruiters, so that's encouraging. plus ive got a good amount of savings and relatively low cost of living atm, so this won't put me on the street or anything.
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May 27, 2020 18:02
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yeah, i'm following a similar route. computer touching pays plenty, so i try to basically have work for half the year, having my own company pay me out at a 50% over the whole year to qualify for benefits and government pensions and such. then doing my own projects (e.g. research) the rest of the year. also gives me room to wait out especially interesting projects.
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May 27, 2020 18:45
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drat that sounds like the dream!
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May 27, 2020 20:51
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yay, looks like i get to choose between a tiny startup and a more "boring" company wondering how long the honeymoon period is between "this stack is insane but would be quite interesting to work on" to "this stack is insane and i want to murder the guy who wrote it"
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May 27, 2020 21:37
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welp looks like my first choice pulled out, they claim that the contract I'd be working on was cancelled I'd believe them too, they were pretty stoked about me and they haven't advertised the position again (or for the last two weeks it seems) and expenses on consulting agencies are probably the easiest thing to cut right now looks like it's SCADA time then
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May 28, 2020 14:27
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welp. my linkedin inbox has now completely dried up. not even getting the bottom of the barrel mass-recruiters who can't even proofread their mass copy/pasted spam
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May 28, 2020 15:53
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hello fellow computer touchers, me and my buds in operations just got “re-org’d” (let go) this morning. if they say the company is doing well, run away
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May 28, 2020 22:10
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my company said they are doing well and also they started hiring leads and senior devs again still going to start looking because work sucks and dangit i just want to code not argue with the same 3 teams every week about who owns what but yeah if any y'all hate you self and want to move to indy lmk gotta get that sweet referral money while the getting is good
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May 28, 2020 23:29
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PIZZA.BAT posted:welp. my linkedin inbox has now completely dried up. not even getting the bottom of the barrel mass-recruiters who can't even proofread their mass copy/pasted spam this poo poo is super cyclical, your inbox might blow up in three days when the month rolls over or in a month when the quarter rolls over
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May 29, 2020 00:29
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I need some quick final advice, turns out the medical device giant does have a spot for me, but only from October (I'm unemployed currently). I have enough in savings that it's not a concern, and there's a sign-on bonus large enough to cover the difference, but I'm still a bit concerned over having a large gap on my CV (I've spent a while living on my savings already, albeit I did some freelance work in the meantime) there's a good chance a third company will get back to me today too why do they all wait until literally the last 30 minutes ffs I kinda just want to go with the SCADA place just because they got to me right away and still were happy enough to wait 2 weeks for everyone else Private Speech fucked around with this message at 12:39 on May 29, 2020 |
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May 29, 2020 11:26
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Nobody in the future is going to care about someone being out of work during the biggest pandemic in living memory.
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May 29, 2020 12:39
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I'm thinking I might pull bit a of a dick move and accept the position with the SCADA company and wait and see what it's like before making a final decision; I mean that's what the probation period supposedly is for too, right? (lol, but checking the contract it's fine and they're a tiny company so it probably won't bite me too hard) it's not like ones who want me to start in October can complain too much about me taking a month to make a decision Private Speech fucked around with this message at 12:43 on May 29, 2020 |
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May 29, 2020 12:39
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and you gotta assume the earlier job would cut you without a moment's notice if they had any reason to...
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May 29, 2020 12:44
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I'm guessing the medical company will probably know what's up but hey I've already got a job lined up starting next week
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May 29, 2020 12:48
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KidDynamite posted:How was this process? Wife and I are seriously thinking about doing it. I know things are shut down now but I'm curious how it was interviewing and all the govt stuff to get set up. The remote gig thing seems dope but all the stuff I got was about working for firms in NZ do you know how those folks got that set up? Did they come over and work a local gig first or were they able to come in with the remote gig? sorry about the slow response, wanted to wait until i had an actual keyboard and wasn't just phone postin since i knew it'd be  --- moving to nz: the main thing to check is the immigration NZ website and see if there's a visa option that you can qualify for. in our case we squeaked through with being able to apply directly for a "resident - skilled migrant category" visa, since we had the required points (160 last i checked) without requiring a job up-front. but applying without a job triggered an additional requirement where they'd give me a temporary work visa to find skilled employment before they would then grant the full resident visa. overall the full process was something like 1.5 to 2 years, start to finish from sending the EOI to getting the resident visa issued after showing evidence of skilled employment. but tbh the move itself took just about as long, with all the things that we needed to do in parallel like sell cars, fix up and sell the house, import the dog (expensive and very difficult, use an importer because the tests/paperwork must be perfect or the dog can be refused at the border), get all the stuff moved (just go full service to avoid customs/biosecurity headaches - i recommend "conroy removals" who are based in nz but have agreements with full service movers overseas), etc but its not typical for people to have the needed points to go straight to a resident visa - and i assume this is intentional. a normal route would be to start on some kind of temporary work visa and then upgrade to a resident-class visa afterwards. once borders have reopened in a year or two, a reasonable starting strategy would be to book a flight, THEN contact a bunch of companies and recruiters and tell them the days you're available for interviews. the reason for getting the flight booking in advance is to let them know you're serious. they get a constant stream of flakes who are "thinking about it" and they quickly learn to ignore those. depending on if your visa situation needs it, the recruiters may also know of companies that are willing to sponsor a work visa, which from my impression isn't a big deal, e.g. see visa processing times. i used seek.nz when looking for jobs but there's probably others. --- getting remote work from nz: working for a US west coast company is pretty straightforward since the timezones aren't that far off. it's 3-5 hours (plus a day), varying due to DST changes over the year. for example 9am friday in NZ this time of year is 2pm thursday pacific, while the other half of the year 9am friday NZ would be noon thursday pacific for the previously mentioned people working remote from nz, i think they generally fall into one of these two categories: - for places that dont usually hire remote, they're very senior roles or otherwise a big name in their field where somebody at the company was willing to fight with draconian HR bullshit to hire them - for places that hire remote anyway, they at least have some experience and seem good at computer but aren't necessarily a big name or anything it might be hard to bring an existing job with you, since the company would probably need to set up an HR/tax presence in NZ to employ you against. i've heard that its very straightforward to set up an LLC in NZ but that'd still be another hoop for the company to deal with if they wanted to keep you an alternative strategy that would avoid the employer needing an NZ presence could be to work for them in some kind of contract role. however this might conflict with the requirements of the visas you qualify for, like immigation might want you to be employed at an NZ entity specifically to show that you are locally employable. but i just went with getting employed locally so i don't know one way or the other if it even matters. this would be something to check by contacting immigration nz but aside from the visa and such, there's other downsides with moving to a whole different country in the middle of the ocean and then just continuing to work for your current company remotely. for example it'd be proportionally harder to get to know the locals and otherwise integrate into local society. i'm actually pretty happy that i just found something local that happened to line up with my field, and the bay area company i was leaving behind was already in the process of imploding anyway so hopping to a local employer was a pretty easy decision to make --- summary the main thing to figure out before anything else is the visa stuff, at immigration.govt.nz. the site is pretty well organized and the instruction packets they give are usually pretty straightforward. so the first step is going and figuring out what options fit your situation. also its worth pointing out that giving immigration advice without a licence is illegal in nz so the govt are really the ones to ask if you have particular questions about visas or whatever. there's also licenced immigration agents but we didnt feel they were necessary in our case, so we just went direct and contacted immigration nz whenever we had questions also its worth pointing out that the only hiccups or issues i had in the process of moving over involved getting things set up at local companies, whereas every interaction with the government was pretty much as straightforward and convenient as it could conceivably have been. off the top of my head there was the one time where i waited an hour or so on hold to ask immigration nz if they'd started mailing back a passport yet because i needed it in a couple weeks for a flight, then they put it at the front of the queue and i got it back in time. thanks nz Progressive JPEG fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 10:33
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Private Speech posted:it's not like ones who want me to start in October can complain too much about me taking a month to make a decision tbh i wouldnt be surprised if that job got retracted by the time october rolls around not necessarily due to covid or anything but just because drawn out contracts like that can easily fall through when things change for any reason
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May 31, 2020 10:56
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forgot to mention in the post that immigration processes in general are a pita even in the best of times. you very quickly find yourself trying to fit your square life into the round hole that was arbitrarily defined by some bureaucrat. from their perspective they generally want to make sure people meet some qualifications to get in but it quickly results in a bunch of arbitrary requirements that are defined as much by politics as by actual needs as an example of this, the application for the resident visa only considered skilled employment experience that was preceded by some kind of related credential from a recognized institution, or something to that effect. you'll want to check the exact language for yourself and see how it affects your situation, it might have even changed over the last few years in my case, this requirement had meant that my many years of working as a programmer, including at a FAANG, wouldn't have counted for visa application purposes if my career hadn't happened to start with a csbs at an institution recognized by NZ. I assume they did this to avoid someone saying they were a "programmer" for their uncles company or whatever, but i know a lot of programmers better than myself who probably wouldn't have met that and may have instead needed to go with a different visa instead but ultimately, even under the friendliest and fairest systems, citizens have rights while immigrants have privileges
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Jun 1, 2020 00:55
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Is there an equivalent set of The Questions for the other side of the table? Hiring a Phraggah fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 18:37
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what a td?
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Jun 1, 2020 19:50
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Tournament director for poker tourneys, clearly.
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Jun 1, 2020 19:54
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Boiled Water posted:what a td? technical director
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Jun 1, 2020 22:30
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Progressive JPEG posted:sorry about the slow response, wanted to wait until i had an actual keyboard and wasn't just phone postin since i knew it'd be This is incredibly helpful and appreciated. I hope to start the process asap because I can't take it here anymore. I think my wife and I had 155 points in the estimator so hopefully that works out for us.
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Jun 2, 2020 04:09
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defense contractor work made me really depressed. there were quiet types who seemed genuinely interested in helping employees and problem solving and then the generic type A scapegoats union shops in manufacturing but never would consider the moves at the top or the sickening scope of the work
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Jun 2, 2020 19:00
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Anybody got insight into what it's like working as a SWE-SRE for Google? I'm in the process of converting after a SWE internship, and there's a possible match with an SRE team at my office. I have no background in ops.
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Jun 4, 2020 07:22
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Rude Mechanical posted:Anybody got insight into what it's like working as a SWE-SRE for Google? I'm in the process of converting after a SWE internship, and there's a possible match with an SRE team at my office. I have no background in ops. Oncall at Google is well compensated; you get 2/3 an hour of comp time for every non-business hour you're oncall, whether or not anything happens. Shifts are 12 hours x 3-4 days (or a whole week, depending on what your team wants). So you go oncall one weekend day, sit by your laptop playing video games, and then you get an entire workday off as compensation (or an entire day's pay). Some people find it stressful. You may be a first responder to a mega outage of some critical piece of infrastructure for a lot of people, even ones outside the company. But you're never alone, and blameless postmortem culture is really strong. You will be doing less "pure coding" than a fulltime SWE role. But this is also true as you progress in the SWE career - more system design things, more coordinating different teams, etc. Even if you decide you want to do the full-time SWE thing after a year or so, you'll get a lot of "production experience" that will be useful basically anywhere you transfer.
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Jun 4, 2020 08:02
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Thanks for the rundown. What's the ramp-up like for a graduate SWE? I'm not sure yet whether the intern team put me forward for the role, or the hiring manager pulled me out of the candidate pool, but I have no special expertise in stuff like networking or Linux internals. I hadn't thought about SRE as a possible path, since my internship was straight-up SWE, so it's a bit of a tricky one to wrap my head around.
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Jun 4, 2020 12:31
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I would highly recommend against taking an SRE role unless you want to become an SRE and do that type of work. In general switching back to a SWE will be difficult and require jumping through hoops and probably being de-leveled. From what I've heard Google treats their SREs better than most companies and values the role and I'm uncertain how easy it is to switch internally, but you are taking a risk if you want to leave and switch back. A rotation as an SRE would be useful for all SWEs to understand what is required to support production systems and how to design systems that are easier to support, but there is a large difference between that and taking a permanent role.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:51
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yeah, once you get tagged as an Ops Person its really hard to get out again. i've seen it happen to a lot of people
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Jun 4, 2020 23:31
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Rude Mechanical posted:Thanks for the rundown. What's the ramp-up like for a graduate SWE? I'm not sure yet whether the intern team put me forward for the role, or the hiring manager pulled me out of the candidate pool, but I have no special expertise in stuff like networking or Linux internals. I hadn't thought about SRE as a possible path, since my internship was straight-up SWE, so it's a bit of a tricky one to wrap my head around. You really don't need much specialized knowledge at all (like networking or Linux internals) unless you want to be dealing with that specific infrastructure. There are a lot of SRE teams for just various products. You're also not taking a "weird" career path here - something like half of SRE-SWEs are just pulled straight from the SWE hiring pipeline the same way you are. As an SRE you are almost surely to be working on something "big that matters" with somewhat mature codebase, rather than some experimental prototype or untested new thing. This may be a pro or con depending on how much greenfield you like (early in your career you should probably gravitate towards established things). Career-wise, I've found the SRE project bits of my job surprisingly easy to quantify. Do this efficiency project that saves <dramatic multiples of your salary> worth of cores and ram. Do that quality project that results in 10% less error rate. Reduce latency by y. Often the opportunities are much broader and there can be surprisingly low-hanging fruit compared to pure code changes, as SRE teams are often substantially smaller than the SWE ones they work with.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:38
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asur posted:I would highly recommend against taking an SRE role unless you want to become an SRE and do that type of work. In general switching back to a SWE will be difficult and require jumping through hoops and probably being de-leveled. From what I've heard Google treats their SREs better than most companies and values the role and I'm uncertain how easy it is to switch internally, but you are taking a risk if you want to leave and switch back. quote:A rotation as an SRE would be useful for all SWEs to understand what is required to support production systems and how to design systems that are easier to support, but there is a large difference between that and taking a permanent role.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:45
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asur posted:I would highly recommend against taking an SRE role unless you want to become an SRE and do that type of work. In general switching back to a SWE will be difficult and require jumping through hoops and probably being de-leveled. From what I've heard Google treats their SREs better than most companies and values the role and I'm uncertain how easy it is to switch internally, but you are taking a risk if you want to leave and switch back. I would strongly disagree as a (not google) SWE hiring manager. I mean, I work in infra software, not webapps/product, but we heavily bias towards SRE/prod/ops experience when hiring. definitely colored by my area of specialization -- If you want to write product software, IDK, maybe it's hard to switch back. But if you want to write infra software, you better know how infra works, and SRE (like, who can program) is a real good look on a resume. some of this is just stupid terminology -- SRE can mean anything from "people who write and operate platforms" to "a person we have that knows puppet real good". in my mind (and googles afaik) the second one isn't an SRE.
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Jun 5, 2020 01:43
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Google has a few SRE books out there. This one was the first they wrote and is meant to explain how they view SRE work. It's worth a look and definitely dispels the notion that an SRE is not an SWE.
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Jun 5, 2020 02:12
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Like ShadowHawk said, Google has two categories of SRE, and SRE-SWE has full mobility to transfer to an SWE role throughout the company without re-interviewing. SRE-SysEng is the other and while my understanding is that the work is indistinguisable, they aren't eligible to transfer to a "pure" SWE role without going through the interview process again.
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Jun 5, 2020 04:01
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Thanks for the thoughtful responses all. I did some distributed systems stuff in my final year of uni, and enjoyed it, so I'm interested in SRE in principle. It's just a bit of an unknown for me. (At the same time, my real-world SWE experience amounts to a three-month internship, so…) The other side of this is that with hiring slowdowns what they are, I'm inclined to take a job if it's offered.
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Jun 5, 2020 08:09
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