I don't know if it has changed, but one thing I enjoyed about living in Finland in the early 2000s was that a janitor and a director at a company were given the same respect. If was more about contributing to the society.

Your comment on SRE -> server janitor is interesting. Especially in the land of DevOps. Companies are looking for ways out, to have people do multiple things and not necessarily acknowledge complexity, experience when things go sideways, etc.

Being able to get things to run smoothly, having the background to know when X happens and where to look, being able to plan and intelligently navigate future capacity, etc. is incredibly important. The ops roles that used to exist, places like Google keep them, but a lot of companies do not.

SREs with the time and ability (and you don't want to hire those who lack the ability) to do so will automate away whatever operations tasks being a "server janitor" entails. Hence the need of management to ensure they have the time, and that bureaucracy doesn't stand in their way.

I once had a "software engineering" gig where I found a way to reduce the labor of the tasks being asked of me by a factor of N (where N equaled their number of clients, which was around 10) for very little work (would've paid for itself with one, possibly two, of the six or so tasks they gave to me my first week). I was told not to do it, because those were client-billable hours when being done per client, and not when theybwere being done to help all clients.

I stayed their a very small number of days after hearing that. Point is, there are businesses that value operations work more than engineering, and that they should not.

Isn't there always a fundamental tension like this between people who build and people who maintain?