[Osmf-talk] Community consultation: plans to hire a Senior Site Reliability Engineer

[Donal Hunt]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 at 12:49, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 24.07.20 12:15, Guillaume Rischard wrote:
> > The board would like to consult the community on our hiring plans for
> > a Senior Site Reliability Engineer.
>
> I find the job title strange. I don't know the backstory. Is there a
> particular reason you can't just hire a sysadmin? If I were a volunteer
> working in current sysadmin, I would find it strange that apparently my
> work is of such a standard that it needs a senior persion to make it
> "reliable".
>
> I know that in some markets job titles are important but why not say
> you're looking for someone to help with sysadmin and they can then pick
> what they want on the business card. If that person then chooses "Senior
> Site Reliability Engineer" so be it but if you start out be saying
> you're looking for someone who fits that title - would probably turn me
> off if I read it.
>

I've been both a system administrator and an SRE manager over the past 2
decades and the philosophy between the roles is quite different. There is a
tendency to interchange sysadmin, devops and SRE but I would argue that
they are distinct roles with differing end goals. An SRE will be invaluable
in helping the organisation take stock of where they are at and support the
delivery of changes that will create scalable, reliable infrastructure and
products.

I would encourage people to read the first chapter
<https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introduction/> of the SRE
book which captured the essence of the discipline back in 2016 / 2017.

Donal
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