Ask HN: What do SRE do at your company?
A Hacker News discussion explores the varying definitions and responsibilities of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) roles across different companies, highlighting that the position can mean significantly different things depending on the organization.
Background
- **SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)** is a discipline originally coined at Google, blending software engineering and operations to keep large-scale systems reliable, scalable, and incident-ready. It's distinct from traditional "sysadmin" or "IT ops" roles.
- The term has become a buzzword. In practice, what an SRE does varies hugely: some companies treat it as pure operations (on-call, incident response), others as a platform/infrastructure engineering role (building internal tools, automation, monitoring), and others as a hybrid that also involves coding features.
- Key concepts: Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, toil reduction, blameless postmortems, and the "Google SRE book" (the canonical reference).
- The Hacker News thread reflects real confusion in the industry — hiring teams post "SRE" roles but expect different things, and candidates aren't sure what they're signing up for.