I think part of the problem, as it has already been touched on here is true Ops people are of a different breed to standard developers. They usually have similar coding ability (but different areas of expertise, automation and systems coding over business logic) but drastically different personalities.
This is an issue during hiring when companies have minimal Ops background. They (usually) attempt to interview the candidate as they would a normal dev position. This has 2 serious problems. 1) Real Ops candidates are going to seem lacklustre compared to web devs when giving web dev coding tasks and inteview questions. 2) You probably aren't going to ask them anything actually relevant to their ability to do Ops well because you just don't know.
This can usually be solved by hiring an experienced SRE manager. However those people are expensive and hard to find.
The next best thing is to have a gun SRE in your personal network that you can convince to join your team and help you build it out.
If you can't achieve that for whatever reason then you really just have to hire based on experience and suck up the cost of hiring an ex-Google/Facebook/Netflix/Twitter SRE that you can be reasonably confident will be good.
That is still hard though because those sorts of people know there is a ton of shit shoveling to be done if you are the first real SRE on board.. you have to clean up the mess left in the wake of "devs doing ops" which is not Devops btw. Devops is what is done by SREs. "devs doing ops" is how this sort of thing happens.
/rant