The impression I got from talking to the recruiter is that you're spending more of your time ensuring systems work as intended and managing running systems than

The impression I got from talking to the recruiter is that you're spending more of your time ensuring systems work as intended and managing running systems than you are building systems from scratch, and particularly you're not working on the sexy parts of systems - the bits people actually notice,bu instead are focused on making sure those sexy bits actually turn up in a timely manner. It's not a bad thing, it's just a very long way away from what I do, and what I want to do, and the fact that the Google recruiters are always pushing me that way gives me the imipression they struggle to find people for the SRE roles.