[opportune]

Even Google is doing this now.

I think it’s simply swapping one set of trade offs for another. With dedicated SREs you have true specialists in production operations and their accompanying systems (tooling, alerting, etc) with a clear mandate and ownership of outcomes; but they don’t necessarily have full ownership of what they’re keeping running, and that can cause organizational problems (we want to launch X, SRE says no, or vice versa) and make it so non-SREs take no ownership over their hard-to-support code.

Conversely you can have Eng teams without SREs and most of those organizational/social problems, at the cost of production reliability being only one of many priorities.

I think what’s really happening is that a lot of companies are deciding they don’t care about reliability very much as a business outcome, especially when it comes at the expense (at least in opportunity cost) of less features.