[georgewfraser]

Like so many things from Google engineering this will be toxic to your startup. SREs read stuff like this, they get main character syndrome and start redoing the technical designs of all the other teams, and not in a good way.

This phenomenon can occur in all “overlay” functions, for example the legal department will try to run the entire company if you don’t have a good leader who keeps the team in their lane.

[physhster]

In my experience, SREs are usually "enforcers of maintainability". If your engineers don't want to be oncall, they need to produce applications and services that are documented and maintainable. It's an amazing forcing function. SRE doesn't often redo technical designs, there's plenty enough reliability and scalability work to do...

[jshen]

Your engineers should be on call.

[la64710]

From the 90s the whole DNS on which the internet is standing today was run successfully with minimum error by a bunch of folks who used to call themselves sysadmins. Developers seems to run out of things to develop and they have been reinventing themselves as devops and SREs. They have been pushing out pure sysadmins but at the same time this trend shows how demand for developers or SWEs falls far short of the supply of developers in the market.

[tsss]

Take one look at the Kubernetes source code and it becomes clear that you can make successful software with zero clue about good software engineering.