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What Exactly Does a Site Reliability Engineer Do?
Do you just type terminal commands all day? Look at graphs?
I get this question from folks quite a lot, so I thought I’d explain it at different levels of detail, so that whatever your level of tech-savviness, something will get through to you. What I do is similar to what thousands of other Software Engineers do, which is maintain systems that allow applications to continue working or support new workflows.
(As context for where I work now… to a 5 year old)
I work for a company that helps people or other companies generate data. Data is any sort of information you can write down about a person, like how old they are or how tall they are.
A lot of the time, companies aren’t allowed to share certain data, like someone’s name. My company helps make data that looks like the original data, but doesn’t have anything like a specific person’s name or date of birth.
Explain Like I’m 5
What I do for the company is help make it so we can release new changes safely and make sure that the old way continues to work, and works well. That means making sure people don’t run into errors, or that they can make changes to their data like they want.
