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I'm curious on people's thoughts on the demand for them as well.

From my perspective in doing infra / devops stuff, they exist to make developers lives easier and faster (CI testing and continuous deployment), or in the case of monitoring / platform engineering, looking to "enhance" their capabilities. Meanwhile the people who do both feature development and the bugfixes are product developers ... So in my eyes it seems like the "auxiliary pieces" like devops people wouldn't be seen as core or necessary to the business in the eyes of managers looking to lay people off

Older companies with poor engineering practices don't have devops people at all, often times they don't even unit test actually, maybe it would be a riskier position to be in charge of those pipelines

Perhaps the data point of Meta still hiring SREs is just one data point as well (they could just be in more need of SRE people), although it is so hard to find more market wide data