Google says something like that for every job. From what I know about SREs, the "programming" you do is basically shell scripts to automate sysadmin stuff. Programming, sure, but the most boring type possible.
Yeah, SREs don't do all that much hard-core programming, but they need a skill that's almost harder: the ability to quickly evaluate whether a change is likely to bring the system down or otherwise cause reliability problems. SREs get consulted very often by engineers for questions like "Do we have enough capacity to burn 15% more CPU for the next week?" or "Is this change likely to cause an unacceptable risk of serving bad pages to users?" They also do code & design reviews.
In that respect, the job description is pretty accurate. You do need a strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics, and problem-solving to perform well as an SRE. You need to be able to think on your feet and evaluate the suggestions that engineers are throwing at you before somebody does something stupid, as well as the ability to figure out how to avoid having problems recur.
"SREs don't do all that much hard-core programming"
On the contrary, some of the code I've seen written by SREs has been among the most delicate, finely tuned, and "hard core" (by my definition) I've seen.
That's because the odds that a sysadmin is an absolute nut for delicate, finely tuned, hard core code are orders of magnitude larger that the odds for a standard programmer.
It's not required, but that pedantic nature seems to help make a good sysadmin.
Personally, I cannot stand the type of programming which is encapsulating a bunch of "BUSINESS LOGIC" in code. I.e. "apply this much tax unless we are in florida or new york, then apply this much. except on the day after christmas..." or even worse, "restrict these parts of the site to the accounting department, except for gary because he's in fiance, too" etc.
You know how Clark Kent's boss, in the first Superman movie, says "A good reporter doesn't get great stories — a good reporter makes them great."?
Same thing with programming. If you are given enough freedom to do the job right, and you can find a way to motivate yourself, there are no bad programming jobs.
Zed Shaw himself has bragged about a system he wrote which does the kind of business logic you mention -- except by his description it's a meta-programming system that can add rules almost as fast as they can think them up. That sounds like some sort of constraint solver, which is among the fanciest kind of programming around.
I actually find that pretty interesting because it allows me to learn about different types of businesses I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. I guess the key is to work in a field you're interested in.
