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.
