Tangent: I hate this trend of following titles like that.
To my mind SRE != Sysadmin; SRE is a principle of tackling "Sysadmin" as if there were no sysadmins- engaging software solutions and engineering to track recurrent problems with a top-down approach, often with little understanding of high-availability in hardware or OS design.
Sysadmin is historically a role of automation and reliability, but working from the bottom up. I (and others) make sure operating systems are not exhausted and that the hardware can support various reliability metrics.
Personally, I think these roles are complementary because an auto-healing system that has a stable platform is going to be more reliable than something that is very over-engineered to deal with hardware faults as a common occurrence.
I don't think title inflation is necessary.
Don't get me started on "DevOps" engineers. It's either rebranded sysadmins doing the same thing but maybe with some CI/CD. Or Developers who have been thrown to the wolves. Hardly anyone is actually using the "there are no fullstack people, only full-stack teams" mantra.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but my (semi-serious) point was rather that most good SAs could do both, and that there might be a pay differential between SA and SRE as SRE is more popular currently.
> Don't get me started on "DevOps" engineers. It's either rebranded sysadmins doing the same thing but maybe with some CI/CD. Or Developers who have been thrown to the wolves.
