From a "job security" lens, the sysops crew needed to keep the site up will be the last to go during downsizing.

There are plenty of managers with the "why are we paying them when everything just works?" mentality.

Yeah, firefighting is a more visible show of "value" to those not directly involved than reliability is, because nobody at too many places likes to ask why we're always fighting fires in the first place.

Not always. I was one of the only devops/linux admin at a past job and was in one of the first rounds of layoffs. It's a bit dangerous to think that just because you're critical, you're immune - on paper, you're probably also one of the most costly.

> SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue.

Which is why SRE evolved from ad driven sites like google -- all uptime is worth money.

Yup, it's always a good idea to figure out a way to position yourself as the profit generator, instead of overhead whose costs needs to be minimized.

Funny thing, tech is pretty unique among industry sectors in that engineers are part of the profit centre. Just about everyone else treats engineers as operational costs.