That’s good to know, thanks for bringing that to my attention. Is it true that SREs are more likely to have oncall rotations at Google than SWEs? That is the impression I got from reading the Google SRE book - it talks about bringing SWEs into the oncall rotation when the SREs are swamped (i.e. more than 50% of their time is devoted to operational work) as a kind of pressure release mechanism to prevent the SREs from burning out or getting mired in endless toil. It makes it sound like outside of situations like that, SREs are doing most of the oncall work.

If this is the case, perhaps the pay discrepancy is explained by the greater oncall duties and morale issues for SREs?

It’s also worth mentioning that based on my reading of the Google SRE book, very few organizations approach operations like Google does. I personally think that Google has an enlightened approach to operations, but not all companies do.

Basically, I think SRE is a good title to have, but sysadmin is not, and I encourage anyone early in their career to rebrand themselves ASAP.