Comment by swozey

I think the experience on the SWE end of things is a lot different than the SRE end. For instance, I wanted to hire 2 JR/SRE1s last year and my team are all self-taught so we wanted to focus on finding someone early in their career who we could actually teach good practices to - this is something that sysadmins/etc in the mid2000s didn't have at all. We were in that "Need 3-5 yoe" but nobody would hire you to get it and you better know what you were doing when you showed up.

We decided to bring on a current customer support agent who had no prior server/aws experience, and someone who came from client-side IT, which I remember being stuck in and DYING to try to figure out how to move up from. I've never heard of a SWE team bringing on someone who didn't already know a language. We expected to teach Terraform, go, etc.

I can't even remember what my team went to school for I don't even look at that part of someones resume beyond a curious glance.

Because the Infra/Ops people like us come from a less standardized CS background, you know, a LOT of us are dropouts and the rebellious punk youth types with face tats (/s) I think we tend to empathize a lot more for unique backgrounds over Stanford and what not.

We were treated like trash and almost everything was trial-by-fire, as in literally firing you if some big customers website went down. I got fired once for taking down a Six Flags database when I had 2 years of experience and NO other windows syseng at my company.

BUT! Now that people like us who did potentially get treated like absolute trash by NOCs or managers or whomever else stifled us in our climb up that hellish aldder are in charge we can break down the gates.

None of my job ads mention a college degree or anything of that nature and a bunch of my project friends in some major github projecfts do the same at their corps.

I HOPE things loosen up more on the SWE end of things. As an example, I hated my experience interviewing at Google.