I'm surprised none of the other respondents have caught this error in Stack Overflow's terminology. Stack Overflow's salary calculator is lumping two very diff

I'm surprised none of the other respondents have caught this error in Stack Overflow's terminology. Stack Overflow's salary calculator is lumping two very different roles together and is therefore not useful for true SRE pay calculation. I'll explain my reasoning. Notice that there is no entry for "System Administrator" or "DevOps Specialist". Neither of these roles call for software engineering ability. Since Google coined the term Site Reliability Engineer and wrote the book on it [1], I'll use their definition as the canonical description: "SREs are engineers. [They] apply the principles of computer science and engineering to the design and development of computing systems: generally, large distributed ones." "Google caps operational work for SREs at 50% of their time. The remaining time should be spent using their coding skills on project work." SREs use engineering practices to develop durable architecture, automate emergency response (since human response is too slow to preserve the error budget), develop monitoring, profile, and finally, pass operations control back to the developers when this is done. Real SREs spend at least 50% of their time architecting and coding reliability solutions and automation for their infrastructure. They are software engineers in the most real sense. At Google and other companies that hire real SREs, they are paid more than typical software engineers at the same level of experience, etc. Most companies don't have SREs. SRE is a new occupation, but if you have to give it a Bureau of Labor title, "Software Developer, Systems" is the best fit. Stack Overflow would have been better off not using the SRE title and sticking with "Sysadmin". Sysadmin is by far the most common title for ops workers. The SRE community is still too small to be a meaningful choice in this menu. This would be the same as lumping in "HTML programmer" with "software developer". Two very different roles, and to consider them to be the same is serious title inflation. To approximate SRE salaries, I would choose "Software Engineer" and bump the skill level up by one. This is my experience and matches other SREs I know. [1] Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. J. Petoff, N. Murphy. O'Reilly. 2016.