To me, a SRE is *both* a sysadmin AND a programmer, developer, whatever you want to call it. It's a logical-and, not an XOR. By sysadmin, I mean "runs a mea

To me, a SRE is *both* a sysadmin AND a programmer, developer, whatever you want to call it. It's a logical-and, not an XOR. By sysadmin, I mean "runs a mean Unix box, including fixing things and diving deeply when they break", and by the programmer/whatever part of it, I mean "makes stuff come into existence that wasn't there before". The main issue i see with that is the companies usually aren't willing to advertise and pay SRE salaries for actual SRE skills. The skillset described in the above quotes are essentially the skills of an SWE and of a Sysadmin. So essentially you're doing two jobs for one salary. There are people capable of doing two jobs, but you won't find them until you start advertising and paying actual-SRE salaries.