Right. I interviewed for SRE at Google. It's basically a sysadmin job. You're expected to be proficient at scripting in some language (Python, Perl, bash, etc), but I would assume you're not expected to write code for most Google applications.

I would think the senior SRE engineers know enough about the code base to poke around and make suggestions ("found a bug in module.py at line XYZ that causes bad performance when thousands of users hit it"), but I got the impression that most of their top developers probably would be bored in SRE.

The thing that is ironic is that most of the people interviewing me were not in SRE, but were pure developers. How many companies do you know that let the developers interview sysadmins? I had guys asking me CompSci questions I hadn't heard since college. If the tables were turned, do you think I'd be asking a prospective developer a question about how to configure DRBD replication and heartbeat from one Linux server to another? Even though some devs might know these things from hobby-like experimentation in their free time, they are not going to be doing it on a day to day basis.

It just strikes me as a very broken interviewing system when you have developers interviewing sysadmins.