I've been running as SRE for the last decade, running critical stuff like authentication (which mostly all services depend on). I'm a software engineer.
I cannot disagree more: our team is healthy, oncall is quite a fine activity to do (and compensated, of course), we have plenty of engineering work to do.
I've had five promotions (and tripled salary) and done so working on plenty rewarding activities over time. I've done from deployment automation, to capacity planning, distributed system design, large data migrations, designing ietf standards for auth protocols, wrote client sdks, now we even do AI for different things (including model development).
I'd recommend to not generalize from "I didn't like it / the experience wasn't a match for me" to "the role is shitty".
I cannot disagree more: our team is healthy, oncall is quite a fine activity to do (and compensated, of course), we have plenty of engineering work to do.
I've had five promotions (and tripled salary) and done so working on plenty rewarding activities over time. I've done from deployment automation, to capacity planning, distributed system design, large data migrations, designing ietf standards for auth protocols, wrote client sdks, now we even do AI for different things (including model development).
I'd recommend to not generalize from "I didn't like it / the experience wasn't a match for me" to "the role is shitty".