IME, it's much of the slog you mentioned, until things go sideways. Then suddenly, the few people in the org who actually understand the nitty-gritty are called

IME, it's much of the slog you mentioned, until things go sideways. Then suddenly, the few people in the org who actually understand the nitty-gritty are called upon to fix things. Rinse and repeat. That said, at my last place the SRE team did actually create some interesting and useful tooling. > SWEs don't know how to use a DB If by "use" you mean access it through an ORM, they do. If you mean "have an inkling about normalization, index design, and the query planner" then no, they absolutely do not.