Comment by jetru

This is normal, companies want to organize their staff into the best roles they fit in to the projects which are most important. This is important for a healthy company. The manager would have obviously worked with higher management and there was some tradeoff to be made here, so it would have been let through, keeping in mind the persons interests(hopefully).

Google SRE is overinterpreted. they are a big company with lots of resources and exceptional engineers. It's not reasonable to model smaller companies like that.