[asuffield]

(I'm an SRE at Google. My opinions are my own.)

> core subjects, like container management (this happens...everywhere nowadays) or cluster management

Curiously, these are subjects which most Google SREs won't know much about. One team deals with all that stuff as a service so the rest of us can get on with something else.

What would I pick out as our core skill sets? Ignoring technology-specific details that won't apply anywhere else: troubleshooting a system that you don't understand (reverse-engineering it as you go), and non-abstract large system design.