Agree up to certain levels but your examples are too specifc.

Understanding should come in different levels abstraction of what you are building,and managing.

There are different levels SREs, from beginner to say Fellow level.

Do you expect the Fellow level to understand nitty gritty details of each component his apps or services are interacting with and how each of them start? No. Especially when they have to deal with hundres or thousands of services each of them hosted by different teams, orgs, or different companies.

junior SREs, yeah probably got their hands dirty with those nitty gritty details you listed because they tend to deal with smaller or lower levels of components

So my point is, I agree withyour "Understanding" but not specific details as they differ per one's level of experience

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okdood64 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There's nothing unique about junior SREs. They're replaceable with almost any "vanilla Dev". You don't really build a unique experience or expertise until Senior+.

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slyall 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The difference between a junior SRE and a dev is that during an outage the dev will take responsibility for their own code only[1]

While the SRE will follow the problem to the next layer or component and try understand what is going wrong there even though they never heard of the system 10 minutes ago.

[1] "I know I'm on call for this team but the guy who sits next to me wrote that code" is something I've heard way too many times.

	▲	okdood64 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fair.

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yipinwong 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's where my analogy breaks as all of them do.

My point is that @pluc comments suggests too specific and I wanted that his examples break down in different levels of expertise.

Nothing I mentioned deals with disposability of engineers.