I was doing "SRE" level system engineering at Amazon back in 2001 long before facebook ever existed.
Also when I grew up as a junior system engineer in the mid-90s I looked up to "system administrators" like Wietse Venema who coded in C and wrote tcp_wrappers and postfix, and Larry Wall who wrote his own programming language.
The System Administration / Software Developer is not a new invention of Facebook/Google. What is "new" is the "System Administrator" that started getting hired in the late 90s who couldn't do anything other than install programs and configure them and maybe knew how to 'ps' and 'kill' and that's about it. Even the old school Enterprise-class system admins knew more about debugging crash dumps and using their tools even if they did call up IBM when they needed a patch.
Very true, I should have been more specific when I say "created". Popularised is probably a better term.
I worked with some old and crusty Perl and C hackers that called themselves sysadmins that definitely would have qualified as "SRE"s during the 90s, it's just they were taken for granted.
All the term SRE has done is create a role that is more appreciated and better compensated with a better understood set of responsibilities and required skills.
Also when I grew up as a junior system engineer in the mid-90s I looked up to "system administrators" like Wietse Venema who coded in C and wrote tcp_wrappers and postfix, and Larry Wall who wrote his own programming language.
The System Administration / Software Developer is not a new invention of Facebook/Google. What is "new" is the "System Administrator" that started getting hired in the late 90s who couldn't do anything other than install programs and configure them and maybe knew how to 'ps' and 'kill' and that's about it. Even the old school Enterprise-class system admins knew more about debugging crash dumps and using their tools even if they did call up IBM when they needed a patch.