Any tips for the vast majority of SRE groups where people are paid a fraction of google employees and never given any time to fix things?
If your leadership declines to take you up on this, escalate. If that fails, you must choose between continuing to do the repetitive operational work as instructed or leaving.
There is never some big meeting where everyone decides that 'operations are going to change! From now on we are going to X!" Well sometimes there are such meetings, but often means merely adding another demand. Like a new years resolution, it is a strongly voiced command for better results, with no real changes behind it.
Real improvement is about adding practices and habits. Starting with the most needed/highest payoff items and gradually building on them.
Do Googlers get time to fix things?
In the parts of Google I've seen, engineers are largely given projects with a timeline of weeks or months and left to structure their time themselves. You're usually given more projects than can feasibly be accomplished in the time allotted, and learning which are high priority and which to let slide a quarter is a bit of an art, but as long as your projects are moving forward you can usually structure some time for paying down tech debt or a side project, either an official 20% or just experimenting with your area of responsibility outside any roadmaps.
I tend to structure my weeks with Tuesday as the designated day to fix anything that's broken or, if everything is running smoothly, to pay down tech debt more for the opposite reason, so that I don't get caught in a rabbit-hole of fixing things that aren't broken and neglect to make progress on the new work.
Given that the usual ration is 100% : -100%, 50:50 is going to be helpful in escaping capability traps.
Ultimately, Google engineers can move between teams pretty freely, so if we allow a team to descend into an operational or a deadline-induced death march, and we don't address that quickly, chances are the engineers will move to another team. It's sometimes frustrating not to have more control as a manager, but it's a very nicely self correcting mechanism and fixes various incentives for us managers.
(I'm a manager in Google SRE. Not speaking for Google.)
My reference to "capability traps" wasn't accidental, it's a serious risk to any business where maintenance and improvement has low observability vs production outputs[0]. In that situation economists rightly predict that effort is skewed towards what can be observed more easily ("equal compensation principle")[1].
Under those conditions it's easier to fix a time-spent target and observe time allocated, even if only approximately.
[0] https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning%3DSterman_CMR_su01...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
:)
I feel your pain.