Somewhat of a cynical take, but a lot of programs called DevOps and SRE are actually the same old ops people armed with some scripts and better BI tooling.
It's rare to find definitional SWEs in these spaces and when you do you should cling to them. Even then, it's hard to resist the urge to revert back to ops because toil is somewhat addicting to companies.
From what I can tell, there's very little value in putting a SWE into an ops role, regardless if it's SRE. The open source (CNCF in particular) tooling is really good these days. Hiring an SWE for ops results in them building a bunch of custom tooling that needs to be thrown out when they leave.
I couldn't disagree more. The tooling that is Kubernetes was written by SWEs in ops roles and there's many more examples like that. Much of the CNCF donated tooling wouldn't exist without SWEs in ops roles.
