throw_away_981

"I've also spoken with Googlers about their devops/SRE responsibilities and I've gotten the distinct impression that what is advertised as being the organization's "best practice" is not in fact the common practice."

--This is exactly my gripe with this article and accompanying comments - portraying the Google workplace in an almost mythical fashion and failing to see the marketing ploy behind it. I suspect that SREs who work(ed) there don't really want to equate themselves to DevOps because then they would lose their prestige and devalue their market worth. Google management also doesn't want to do that because otherwise no one would take up the job. Call it as you see it people. See my other comment about this point, which adds more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12446385

(edit:throwaway account because I am revealing personal information in the other comment)

"Teams like you describe are considered to be in "operational overload" and are actively dismantled by senior leadership.." -In theory, maybe... But with the expectation to stay in said team for atleast a year or two before switching teams and the associated difficulty in actually doing it, I think it is a pretty bad postion for said SREs to be in.

The article talks about services at Google being relatively stable and SREs there focusing on automating the instability away. A previous comment here also mentions that. In my experience, I find that to be not really true and more of a marketing image. The stress that being a Google SRE poses on family and relationships is huge and the job really is just like DevOps at other large service-based companies. The amount of code you write is orders of magnitude less compared to a software engineer since there is significant tooling available(Google being a mature company). Most of the work done is just operating those tools.

I had an SRE girlfriend who became an ex because of the stresses it placed on our relationship. Although I was the one who helped her land the job and was with her through previous hardships, there were just too many missed dates and too little respect for my time and other stress related issues that breaking up was the only way out for me to regain peace of mind.

Maybe you need a certain sort of person to handle that kind of stress.