That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon.
Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.
It's worth noting that the beginning, the end and the middle of Scrum and what most companies laughably call "Agile" is to prevent exactly this: the entire structure is there to force every developer to interview for their job every morning and prove they're making "contributions" (it doesn't matter if they're good contributions, they just have to be completed by the deadlines).
The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers.
When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.
The people handling the emergencies should get paid considerably more than developers - when they system is down, the real, actual, company-sustaining money stops coming in.
But on the other hand they don't add new features or push product forward in any way.
Maybe this is okay for a late stage company that is in the value extraction mode. In that case the private equity playbook is to lay off the app developers, and they can throw more money at ops to increase efficiency of the shrinking pie.
On the other hand if you're in a highly competitive growth industry then you need to innovate, and if you optimize for SRE talent, you won't have sufficiently senior engineering talent to find the right balance between innovation and stability.
Firefighting used to be very lucrative as people was willing to pay a lot to "solve the problem" when their house was on fire. Also one house on fire could possibly mean the whole city could burn down.
Reading this caused the following factoid bubbled up in my mind: the leading cause of death for firefighters is now heart disease. The 98% of their time that’s not responding to calls is evidently spent napping and eating lasagna. I’m not naysaying this arrangement, it’s how it has to be. I don’t see why it should be too different at Google, for some employees anyways.
Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.