SREs are (with a few exceptions) only responsible for production (or more precisely, things serving prod traffic, which may be multiple environments). Dev teams are usually responsible for keeping qa and ci green.
You have a good point overall. However, can you truly reduce the definition of reliable code to something that simple? I think there are a lot more factors that determine if code is reliable or not.
I actually think that this is good definition of reliable code -- product of an individual developer's process.
It does not say whether it was specified well, but I think an application can reliably execute wrong process. There is no contradiction.
I don't want to say that making sure that your code does exactly what you intend it to do is at all simple.
As your application grows, as you start incorporating dependencies, external systems, code that came from others, things that you do not know very well -- writing code that does exactly what you intend it to becomes very difficult or even impossible.
But on the lowest level, when we are talking couple of variables, conditionals, loops, maybe small data structure -- I would expect a developer to be able to write it to do what is exactly intended.
Because if you have that ability and use it for every piece of code that you write, the overall result (even if it does not guarantee reliability) will be better than a person that cannot do it.
In my experience (and it depends a lot on our HR and candidates that are being sent my way) only one in about 10 candidates (for senior Java dev position) can do that.
In middle school I used Javascript to change Google's button text from "I'm feeling lucky!" to "Andrew is the best!" (javascript:getElementById('').text='blah')
I showed some other students who were so freaked out that I had "hacked Google" that I got the attention of the librarian, who promptly banned me from the library computers for the rest of the year, even after I refreshed the page to show them it wasn't "real". Oof.
Haha when I was searching for printers across the district network the librarian was looking at my screen. She called me out across the room asking why I was looking at printers at a different school. Oof.
I wrote an infinite loop in postscript and sent it to all the printers. This was when postscript printers cost a fortune so there were not many of them. Fun days were those.
Reminds me of the black words service at apple that checks for explicit or non printer friendly stuff for iPhone engraving. It was hilarious looking at the advanced linguistic engine they developed to filter out asshole and 30+ variations of it with snarky comments added by devs in the past.
