I'd really like to hear more of this story as the incredibly vague description of an SRE I was recently contacted about sounds like something I could potentially be very interested in.
SRE jobs at Google are something like a 15 month (or so, i forgot the exact number) job (after which they can decide to put you in another position, fire you, or put you there again but in a different team).
you need to have problem solving skills, program easily in different languages, solve performance issues in the code, or, anywhere they pop up really, and so on.
The interviews focuses on problem solving and optimization, you can find them by, heh, Googling around ;-)
I'd like to know more too. Steve Yegge gave a data point about SREs in his recent liberal/conservative software rant: he said SREs are extremely conservative, and that he finds it normal given their duties. So it follows it's not a good position for a liberal dev.
It certainly would seem logical that an SRE would be software conservative.
I seem to be a macro liberal who holds specific conservative positions. Perhaps not surprisingly, a friend and fellow engineer who I believe I've done some of my best work with would seem to be a complimentary opposite.
