Produce hot air, check boxes, and 'see, I told you so'

I'm a SWE SRE at Google. That means we had to do a SWE interview with an emphasis on system design.

So I'm expected to be able to do both operations for oncall, but also do RCA and implement fixes and changes to make the systems our team is responsible for more reliable.

We're able to throttle the release cadence of binaries, so we work together with dev teams (SWEs who develop features) to come up with appropriate monitoring, metrics, mitigation, and scaling capabilities.

Some SREs are not SWE SREs, they usually have a specialty related to the team they're on, such as networking, low level linux internals, etc. They're still expected to be able to write production level python/Go code.

They are more likely to send a bug to the devs rather than fix it themselves, where as I will often (but not always) just go right in and send a CL to the devs fixing or optimizing something.