Having a similar situation myself actually. In a team of SREs and "SRE" only in name. Just a bunch of ops guys, and being on the bottom of food chain[1]. When I

Having a similar situation myself actually. In a team of SREs and "SRE" only in name. Just a bunch of ops guys, and being on the bottom of food chain[1]. When I came over there, and I shit you not, there were pager duty alerts every 15 seconds at peak times, multiple ones at that as well. And for years they thought it completely fine. Took me 6 months of employing best of soft skills to be even allowed to tweak some(!) of those alerts. Believe or not, we have tens of millions of users each day and at least 50 "micro" services. It is a complete mess with a lot of reliability problems in the last couple of months (failed projects getting "second chances" - sunken costs fallacies etc). Every few weeks some dev teams organizes meeting with us and basically say: "hey guys, so you've earned [newspeak for we're giving you our shit we don't want to support and move on to next big thing] this service, you're now the proud owners of it, glhf". I'm also like you, preparing for my next job and this is the first time in my career that I actually know what questions to ask on the next job interview. The experience here is that bad. The only problem I have right now is that I'm so ridiculously micromanaged at work and interrupted every few minutes (or more) that I just cannot focus on learning anything of substance. So I'm trying to do it my free time. I'll get there, but I agree, some changes you're trying to do on a job take years to get there (even if those happen). Life is too short to change a lot of short sighted, entrenched people. [1]: word of caution for anyone: you cannot be a decision maker (and SREs are supposed to at least be at the place of decision making) if you're on the bottom of the hierarchy. So be wary of jobs with great sounding titles where you cannot change anything for the better.