To accompany the neighboring reply from the grandparent poster, the practice of site/service reliability as an engineering discipline is not just popular amongst the FAANGs, all of whom have SREs, but embedded into the company culture and structure. Google, for example, has a head honcho of SRE (a VP of SRE?) who gives all SREs extra authority to act somewhat independently.
A large part of the perceived competency of the FAANGs is their ability to casually and repeatedly achieve 5+ nines of availability. When HN is unavailable, that's no big deal; when google.com is unavailable, users act as if an apocalypse has begun. That difference in reliability changes a service from something that people consider as an option into something that people rely upon.
A large part of the perceived competency of the FAANGs is their ability to casually and repeatedly achieve 5+ nines of availability. When HN is unavailable, that's no big deal; when google.com is unavailable, users act as if an apocalypse has begun. That difference in reliability changes a service from something that people consider as an option into something that people rely upon.