Of course, I’m not suggesting they don’t contain great examples. It’s just silly to apply the book wholesale to a company 1/100th the size of Google or even 1/10th the size of Google. It’ll almost never work verbatim. You must adapt it to the organization, resources, architecture you have and adjust the direction for where you need it to go.

Someone else made the point that the book itself is an idealistic view as a visionary document of what Google wants it to be but from someone sitting in the SRE role at Google, the role is probably not exactly as described.