This can be good when companies and incentive structures are set up to reward it. The entire concept at the core of SRE is "if you have skilled engineers do you

This can be good when companies and incentive structures are set up to reward it. The entire concept at the core of SRE is "if you have skilled engineers do your ops work, they'll automate as much as possible, freeing up their time to work on bigger and more interesting problems". At Google, automating a huge swath of your own job is one of the fastest ways for an SRE to get promoted.