> Common to all SREs is the belief in and aptitude for developing software systems to solve complex problems. Within SRE, we track the career progress of both groups closely, and have to date found no practical difference in performance between engineers from the two tracks. In fact, the somewhat diverse background of the SRE team frequently results in clever, high-quality systems that are clearly the product of the synthesis of several skill sets.
The result of our approach to hiring for SRE is that we end up with a team of people who (a) will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand, and (b) have the skill set necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work, even when the solution is complicated. SREs also end up sharing academic and intellectual background with the rest of the development organization. Therefore, SRE is fundamentally doing work that has historically been done by an operations team, but using engineers with software expertise, and banking on the fact that these engineers are inherently both predisposed to, and have the ability to, design and implement automation with software to replace human labor.
https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introduction/