Somewhat relatedly, I converted from SWE to SRE for three reasons. 1. SWE interviews are torture and no matter what I accomplish at my job, the next job I have to re-prove everything all over again. SRE interviews do not typically have this style of interview (I've heard Meta and Alphabet do however). 2. SRE focuses on lower level abstractions and therefore seems less prone to product oversight which is tiresome. SRE work is typically longer lived and deadlines less tight. 3. SRE jobs seem even more remote friendly than traditional SWE roles because of reason 2.

I'm much better as a SWE but I'm paid more as an SRE and have much more freedom. I don't actually like ops work that much but I'll take that trade off to guarantee the other three advantages above.

All that said, in my short time as an SRE I've noticed that it's very much in an identity crises because there's not really a standard job. Infrastructure is very different company to company and some companies expect SREs to be able to code as well as SWEs whereas others don't expect you know how to code at all.

In my experience, an SRE is someone who's principal goal is to maintain infrastructure and ensure code is able to be developed, built and shipped. In the "better" SRE roles, SREs are able to build platform tooling rather than just ops.