[kodah]

Real SREs are great. Who wouldn't want a Systems Engineer that codes and can interrogate kernel issues or a Software Engineer capable of writing their own compiler running your operations?

Most companies, even if they hire these people, don't know how to use or listen to them though. What usually happens is they get lumped in with a bunch of Application Operations folks and it sours the idea entirely.

[vosper]

Yeah, this. There's a gulf between people like Brendan Gregg (my go-to example of a "Real SRE") and those I've actually worked with, who anointed themselves with the same title...

As a side-note, is any tech group more keen on title inflation than SREs? In the time I've been a developer / software-engineer I've seen sys admin, DevOps, Cloud Ops, SRE... it's literally the same people.

[dijit]

> As a side-note, is any tech group more keen on title inflation than SREs? In the time I've been a developer / software-engineer I've seen sys admin, DevOps, Cloud Ops, SRE... it's literally the same people.

That's not the fault of people doing the work, that's what the industry is doing to us.

I get increasingly irritated with the myth that 'DevOps' are any different than the sysadmins of 10 years ago.

"But DevOps can code", yes, so could sysadmins, in fact, terraform, ansible, vagrant, saltstack, chef, puppet etc;etc;etc are all made by people who held the title of sysadmin when they were written.

In fact the term "DevOps" was originally from a conference, where the idea was that "we can do systems administration in an agile way" -- NOTHING to do with coding, everything to do with getting developers and sysadmins working closely together in an iterative fashion.

I would personally be very happy being called a sysadmin, but doing so is career suicide, because we as an industry have decided that sysadmins are somehow braindead, and that you really need "SREs" or "DevOps" -- despite the fact that these are the same people.

What gets my goat even more is that people hate on sysadmins because of corporate culture, echos of centralised IT organisations that said no to everything.

But we're doing exactly the same thing with these new titles now. It's a joke.

[bogomipz]

Your comments really come off as bitter. I think this maybe just says more about the companies you've worked for than anything else. SRE is a methodology and a pretty-well understood methodology at this point.[1] The actual title is less important than the practice. It also goes by different names at different companies, example at FB it's called Production Engineer.

By the way Brendan Gregg is a Performance Engineer not an SRE. I believe that's been his title for close to 20 years, according to the the bio in his books. I don't believe he has ever had the title SRE.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/how-to-sta...

[vosper]

> Your comments really come off as bitter.

That wasn't my intent. I have done my share of DevOps, it's not for me. Maybe SRE would be.

> I think this maybe just says more about the companies you've worked for than anything else.

Yes, it does :)

> The actual title is less important than the practice. It also goes by different names at different companies, example at FB it's called Production Engineer.

Absolutely. I'm just saying that I've worked with people titling themselves SRE who aren't doing the stuff of that methodology. When last years DevOps team starts styling themselves as SREs but nothing else changes, then they have definitely missed the point about the methodology being the thing that matters!

It's not just those teams, of course! There are plenty of "fullstack engineers" who wrote a Node function one time.

> By the way Brendan Gregg is a Performance Engineer not an SRE. I believe that's been his title for close to 20 years, according to the the bio in his books. I don't believe he has ever had the title SRE.

This seems to be true, but he's spoken at SRE events on "my SRE work at Netflix".