[yashness]

Google is anyway planning to shut down SRE role & transitioning them to SWE role predominantly. A few months back there has been announcement already & one of the reflections is to start with reducing the numbers - https://archive.ph/YWp4O

[rwiggins]

It has indeed been a strange time for Google SRE recently. However, they're definitely not planning on shutting down SRE - at least, if you can trust what Google leadership's actual explanation of what that meant.

Supposedly, the ratio of SRE to product eng had been growing slowly over the years. The KR to "readjust" that ratio was to bring it back in line with historical norms, i.e., to ensure that SRE continued to scale sub-linearly with SWE/systems. This had (primarily) two facets.

First, it gave SRE teams an effectively-blank check to reevaluate their existing dev engagements and jettison the ones that weren't working well.

Second, it pushed to eliminate old tools/systems/platforms and converge onto the more modern stuff, like Annealing [1]. Fewer crufty platforms means fewer teams needed to run them, and improvements in those platforms have broad impact.

Anecdotally, my own sub-org (within SRE) is growing at the moment. Not by a huge amount, but growing nonetheless.

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/prodspec-and...

[danpalmer]

This doesn't say SRE is shutting down, it says that they're changing the ratio of SRE to SWE. One thing to realise about Google is that the technology is increasingly unified across the company. 10 years ago everything worked in different ways, but now there are very standard technologies and paths, and naturally this requires fewer SREs to the SWEs developing the products. I don't think this is a bad thing, and in the layoffs SREs have not to my knowledge been hit any harder than SWEs.

[dpbriggs]

I can't read tea leaves but I'm fairly confident they're not shutting down SRE. They want to get back to sublinear scaling and move away from the "devs create crap, bribe SRE (headcount) to babysit it in production". It was a major anti-pattern for the role.

[Unfrozen0688]

Ofc everyone downsizing... smh