[wavemode]

By "SRE", are people actually talking about "QA"?

SREs usually don't know the first thing about whether particular logic within the product is working according to a particular set of business requirements. That's just not their role.

[stvvvv]

Good SREs at a senior level do. They are familiar with the product, and the customers and the business requirements.

Without that it's impossible to correctly prioritise your work.

[wavemode]

Any SRE who does that is really filling a QA role. It's not part of the SRE job title, which is more about deployments/monitoring/availability/performance, than about specific functional requirements.

In a well-run org, the software engineers (along with QA if you have them) are responsible for validation of requirements.

[stvvvv]

well-run ops requires knowing the business. It's not enough to know "This rpc is failing 100%", but also what the impact on the customer is, and how important to the business it is.

Mature SRE teams get involved with the development of systems before they've even launched, to ensure that they have reliability and supportability baked in from the start, rather than shoddily retrofitted.

[zeroCalories]

Most companies don't have QA anymore, just their CI/CD's automated tests.