SREs work a loooot more hours than SDEs, and I feel like that's partly on SREs for just accepting that workload.
In my current position, if I get woken up at night even once, I take that as 8 hours worked and take a whole day off. The other side of offering "unlimited time off" :). This creates a real cost on technical debt, and forces actually addressing them rather than letting human capital deal w/ them.
As an SRE, your only option for climbing out of the mess is to work harder/smarter/extra, and you are always lowest on the totem pole when messes happen. You either learn to keep up with the crazy schedules, or get the hell out of dodge.
SREs are the hardest working engineers I know, but unfortunately they're not given a lot of autonomy to fix problems. Or one SREs has strong opinions about stuff and blocks fixing things.
My conclusion has been that everyone needs to be devops. SDE needs to also own the ops of the thing they've developed.
I used to think this way.
But time and time again I found that organizations treated Devops and SRE as either "developer help desk" or "hiring some person to do terraform stuff and calling them the 'DevOps Team'" or "we literally failed to hire actual technical specialists for the role we needed, so we're just going to dump these tasks on the Devops 'team'"
I no longer think the way I used to about Devops, I also no longer have any real interest in being part of 'Devops transformation' efforts. Go figure.
DevOps wasn't conceived as a new and additional role or org, but as a model, and a model whose main point was eliminating inefficiencies resulting from role/org/knowledge/responsibility separations between dev and ops.
Creating a new role, often in its own sub organization, as a distinct knowledge and responsibility silo for “DevOps" is like management instituting a rigid top-down development model without dev team ownership and control or customer participation and calling it “Agile”:
Completely missing the point and also exactly how most places do it.
I apologize for offtop, but are you British? I have only seen this word in the British literature and now I'm wondering if Americans or Canadians or Australians ever use it.
Seems a word in common use in the UK
Rota is indeed very British. It clearly comes from the Latin word for "wheel", but in Italy it is not used (nor in France, afaik) - we have the Sacra Rota (which is the Catholic ecclesiastical tribunal, typically invoked for marriage dissolutions) and the word rotazione which is "rotation" and can indeed be used to indicate shift planning. Now I wonder if "rota" in that context comes as a shortening of rotation...