I think it's tough hiring for an SRE role. Much tougher than a programming role. Although in Google's SRE book, they say the interview bar is lower than for the

I think it's tough hiring for an SRE role. Much tougher than a programming role. Although in Google's SRE book, they say the interview bar is lower than for their software engineers. Odd! You're looking for the sort of person that could setup a startup from the data center up. On top of that, they need to be good coders so they can automate everything, and also understand the applications running on the things they build. It's generally a much more in-the-trenches job - relying on limited information, and much harder to test things in isolation since there are so many moving parts, and things you can't change or automate easily (network vendor appliances, and so on).