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.
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.