Do We Even Need SRE Engineers? Or Should Everyone Just Do Their Job?

Let’s talk about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) for a second...

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It was supposed to be the bridge between developers and operations, designed to bring some sanity to the chaos of production. But here’s the awkward truth: is hiring a separate SRE team even necessary, or should we just make reliability everyone’s responsibility? Shocking, I know—asking people to be responsible for the stuff they build.

At its core, SRE is about making sure your systems don’t spontaneously combust at 3 a.m. You know, the usual—automation, monitoring, and generally preventing the whole “it works on my machine” debacle. But somewhere along the line, we decided to take this brilliant concept and turn it into yet another siloed team. Brilliant. Instead of making everyone accountable for system reliability, let’s just hire a few people to wear the "ops" hat but call them something fancier.

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The truth is, SRE practices—automating manual tasks, building resilient systems, monitoring, and alerting—should be ingrained in every engineer’s job description. Do we really need a specialized team to tell developers that maybe, just maybe, their code should not crash in production? Crazy idea, I know.

And here’s where it gets rich: in many companies, those shiny new SRE engineers you hired just end up being ops 2.0. They spend their days dealing with outages and putting out fires instead of actually, you know, improving reliability. At that point, aren’t we just reinventing the ops wheel, but giving it a fancy new acronym? Spoiler alert: we are.

So, let’s call it what it is: hiring SRE engineers who end up playing ops janitor is an anti-pattern. The real solution? Embed SRE practices into every engineering team. Reliability isn’t someone else’s problem—it’s everyone’s job.