[achiang]

I was a sysadmin (at uni, in the early 2000s) and I am an SRE today (at Google).

The two jobs are nothing alike, at all, whatsoever.

Sysadmins are support roles. Their functional role is to provide a healthy substrate to run the application layer on top of.

SREs work at the application layer itself. If the system can't scale due to internal architecture, an SRE would be expected to propose a new, scalable design. That would be in addition to maintaining the substrate.

To be clear, there is also nothing inferior about performing a support role. No org can succeed without support.

But the two roles are not the same, and if a job's set of responsibilities don't include shared ownership over application layer architecture, then it can be a great job but it's not an SRE role.