Not entirely true. There are two sides to the SRE positions. The sysadmin side is indeed what you say they are, they work on the systems keep them running and d

Not entirely true. There are two sides to the SRE positions. The sysadmin side is indeed what you say they are, they work on the systems keep them running and do hardware related tasks as well as UNIX level tasks. The software engineering SRE's work on products to make sure they are ready to scale or if something fails to fix the point of failure. They work alongside the product development teams to make sure the product is stable in production. The two positions require two different skill-sets (I was interviewed for both sides of SRE). One requires very much computer science, data structures, programming languages, and all of those, the other sysadmin requires more knowledge about Linux, its internals, and the command line interface.