What SRE Could Be
90% of SREs and SRE managers haven&#x27;t read the SRE book(s).<p>99.9% of folks hiring SREs or starting SRE teams haven&#x27;t read the SRE book.<p>The SRE book (and its sequels) say quite plainly what SRE is and isn&#x27;t. They also say that not every org is going to be exactly like google so no, &quot;we&#x27;re not google&quot; isn&#x27;t an excuse.<p>the E in SRE is for engineering. As in software engineering. SREs are software engineers. Or should be. If your SREs don&#x27;t know basic SWE principles, they&#x27;re not SREs. If your org isn&#x27;t applying software engineering principles to minimizing operational complexity at scale, your org isn&#x27;t doing SRE.<p>I&#x27;m constantly shocked by how hard these things are to grasp, even for most SREs. If the problems I (occasionally) get to solve weren&#x27;t more interesting than most regular product work, I&#x27;d get out of &quot;SRE&quot; entirely.