Former Senior SRE here. Was doing everything: working with engineering teams to build a microservice authoring framework. Putting out fires and responding to ou

Former Senior SRE here. Was doing everything: working with engineering teams to build a microservice authoring framework. Putting out fires and responding to outages. Adding monitoring/metrics/logging to all the things. Building productivity tools for engineers. Spinning up new software in sandboxed environments for evaluation. Onboarding and offboarding new engineers. Coordinating downtime for software upgrades. Refactoring our infra and making it more IaC. Security audits. Our team was basically a dumping ground for anything that required experience in many different types systems and/or privileged access. On top of that, we had projects were shoe-horned into roadmaps. So while 90% of our duties were reactive to what the org needed, we also had the pressure of trying to meet deadlines for normal software engineering work. It was unhealthy and I wanted very much to not be defined as an "SRE"