Re SREs: we've taken a different approach. Devs own their systems. If the issue is network or hardware, there are more ops oriented folk that make that work. But when it comes to services, teams own their stuff. Bug a 2am causes a service to go down? The team is expected to start debugging it and pull people in as needed.
The result? Shifting to this model from an SRE firefighting model has lowered total alerts, incidents, and outages. When we first shifted, people dreaded going on their on call rotation for their team; you expected to be paged multiple times a night. Fast forward and now I can count on one hand the amount of pages I've had on my last multiple on call rotations. Work is prioritized for system reliability because we feel the pain.
The result? Shifting to this model from an SRE firefighting model has lowered total alerts, incidents, and outages. When we first shifted, people dreaded going on their on call rotation for their team; you expected to be paged multiple times a night. Fast forward and now I can count on one hand the amount of pages I've had on my last multiple on call rotations. Work is prioritized for system reliability because we feel the pain.