[philsnow]

> I've been seeing a lot of references to SRE recently. Is Google trying to market this position and acquire more engineers?

There is a bit of a gap (in terms of attitude and skill set) between what Google calls an SRE and what most other companies call an SRE.

I think Google is trying to steer the public usage of the word so that their term doesn't get diluted. One possible reason might be so that SREs at Google don't feel like they're making a bad career move by having the term "SRE" on their resume.

If you spent 5 years working for the state of California, designing safer future-proof and state-of-the-art treatment plans and plants for gray and black waste water in metropolitan and rural areas, improving life expectancy by 2% for people who live in California, but your title was "Sanitation Engineer" the whole time, you're going to be a bit put out if you learn that during that time all the high schools in the state changed the custodians' titles to the same thing.