I've been one the other side of this (i.e. companies that have no SREs or QA, or in one case a company that had QA and got rid of it) and it has always been an unmitigated disaster.

The root cause of this disaster is that, when writing software, interruptions are the death of productivity. Having a software engineer wear too many different hats at one time, especially when some of those hats are largely real-time interrupt driven, can absolutely kill productivity.

To emphasize, I'm not at all in favor of "throwing things over the wall". Software engineers are responsible, for example, for making software that is easy to test and has good observability in place for when production problems show up. But just because you listed a bunch of things that are "critical for software development" doesn't mean that one person or role should be responsible for all of these things.

At the very least, e.g. for smaller teams I recommend that there is a rotating role so devs working on feature development aren't constantly interrupted by production issues, and instead each dev just gets a week-long stint where all they're expected to do is work on support issues and production tooling improvements.

I agree very much with you that interruptions are death of productivity. Your suggestions for weekly rotations are great.

However, I argue that if the engineers are interrupted by QA issues, they will be motivated to find ways to not have those QA issues. In absence of that, we end up with the familiar “feature complete, let QA find bugs” situation.

> However, I argue that if the engineers are interrupted by QA issues, they will be motivated to find ways to not have those QA issues.

There are institutional limitations that engineers cannot overcome, no matter how zealous or motivated. Moreover, companies also ought to remember that engineers can "find ways to not have those QA issues" by seeking employment elsewhere!

This is such a crazy take for me. Any profession that matures eventually specializes. I wouldn’t expect the same person to pour my foundation, install the plumbing, and wire the building. Yet in an ever expanding field we expect someone to be able to do it all. Also saying people who don’t code have no stake so egocentric.

Pouring foundation, installing plumbing and wiring the building is specialized by the physical necessity of these activities, which cannot be repeated without mistake at a great cost. That justifies specialization. Unlike building a bridge, compiling software is essentially free. QA, release engineering and database design can and should be repeated and iterated on by software engineers, because it is a necessary part of the development and removing it from the expected work distorts incentives.

Regardless of these fields being separate departments/job titles: people are not getting promoted for doing QA, release engineering, continuing engineering, or DBA work. It's a huge cultural problem in tech.

I agree that doing this work is looked down upon and not recognized as the critical work that it is.

Only having full stack engs taking care of everything works but only until a certain org size (like in a small startup). Once the org gets larger/systems get more complex, you usually need specialisation. It’s natural, and Google didn’t really invent anything here