What I found most fascinating is that Google essentially rediscovered what is important in a …

I don't think that's how the SRE role is described in the book. It shifts the boundaries between sysadmins and developers to give developers much more freedoms in deciding the operational parameters of how their softwane is run/released but also gives SREs the ability to push back if they get handed over some piece of software that's not sufficiently following recommended patterns that make actually operating it mostly automated.

Sysadmin originally meant Unix greybeards who were competent at C and could write and implement, say, Kerberos. Then in the 90s-2000s the term came to primarily refer to Windows admins clicking around Active Directory and Group Policy for large enterprises. The "sysadmins can't code" thing came grom that time and the early 2010s when all the cool startups were building on Linux and the available pool of sysadmins were largely Windows specialists. Then DevOps came along trying to get Windows sysadmins that were dabbling in Linux into modern development practices, and SRE came along trying to revitalise the old Unix greybeard style with modern software development practices.

That may what sysadmin meant back in the 80s and 90s but it's not what it means now. I would never describe myself, a SRE-SE, as a sysadmin because I would be describing someone whose primary job is to operate software and iterate on configuration. SRE-SEs on the other hand are SWEs, they just have a focus in systems adjacent software whereas a SRE-SWE is someone who can dig into compiler level issues and optimization. Both write application code, do analysis, and write policy. A sysadmin of today would be out of place on a team like that.

* SRE are sysadmins with Go * DevOps are sysadmins with Python * Sysadmins are sysadmins with Perl (stolen from twitter, can't find the source)

I think you’re right, but I want to relate a story where the agile team leader decided that devops meant “developer operations”, or in other words the development team. Sometimes all you can do is shake your head.