LinkedIn

The company has good benefits, lots of perks, and really goes out of its way to try to ensure employees are happy.

If you're going into SRE, you might land on a team where everything is toil and there is no real coding, project, or engineering work.

There is a culture of "build everything in-house," so the tools-related skills you learn here won't be useful in the rest of your career. Imagine you work as a carpenter and suddenly, after changing the company you work for, they tell you that they don't use hammers or nails; they use combobulators and whizbangs. Every standard tool you've acquired skill in has a unique replacement in this organization. So you spend 2 years or more of your life getting good at combobulators, whizbangs, and whatchamacalits. Then you leave the company to resume your career as a carpenter elsewhere. What do you think you gained from your time at that company? Atrophy. Atrophy is what you gained. You are now less skilled at using a hammer and nails. What's more, the world of carpentry has since developed new techniques and industry-standard tools that your peers are pros in, and you've never heard of them.

Learning these internal tools is painful. There is no standard for documentation. It's all kept unversioned, outdated, with low discoverability in old wiki pages. The only way to confidently learn the tool is brute force: asking on Slack channels or email lists, inquiring if a snippet you read on the outdated documentation is still current, mixed with actually checking out the tool or project and just reading the code.

There are two kinds of SRE teams at LinkedIn: those that engineer tools and those that use these custom-engineered tools. If you are on the latter kind of team, expect to spend all your time configuring these custom combobulators and whizbangs, or doing migrations from OS to OS, kernel to kernel, Java version to Java version (yeah, they're still transitioning off on-premise infrastructure that's managed like pets, not cattle).

Dump the sunk costs and tech debt. Stop encouraging engineering projects that churn out internal tooling as the path to promotion.