>>> An SRE with no authority to do anything is just an overpaid totally frustrated paperweight.

That matches my experience at most companies, the SRE/DevOps is just the sucker who is on call.

I think authority is a critical differentiator between the SRE described in the Google book and SRE as it’s practiced elsewhere. Google SREs can impose moratoriums on feature development or deployments if they judge that a product is becoming critically unreliable (which has a well-defined meaning based on SLO breaches). SRE teams will also sometimes “offboard” a product that is insufficiently respectful of the finite attention that an SRE team needs to spread across multiple products, returning full production control to the development team along with the pager and all responsibilities thereof.

I think one more differentiator is the dedicated position. Rotation is not SRE. It can be helpful to help people understand both sides. But just rotating your team into the role every few weeks with no real 'group in charge' just seems to make them mad.

> An SRE with no authority to do anything is just an overpaid totally frustrated paperweight

That's exactly how it is implemented in my company. We are called SREs but everything is driven my management (and by that I mean a single VP who is omnipresent).