Cover image by Brianna Santellan on Unsplash
Since I joined my current company 9 months ago, I have always looked at the SRE team with interest. They look to be experts in everything: technology stack, application domain knowledge, software architecture, the ability to handle hot and risky tasks, DevOps techniques, cloud services and infrastructure. They literally looked so brilliant.
Since then, I simply wanted to become one of them. So I thought that I had to work hard to fill the knowledge gap between me and them and then ask to join the team one day. I never explicity asked for a team change but few - and apparently right - people knew I would like it.
If you don't known what an SRE is, it stands for Site Reliability Engineer. It is a software engineering approach invented by Google in the 00s but became public knowledge only in the last years. Lot of companies like Amazon and Netflix adopted this technique. It is like a DevOps subset approach, but teams members have a software development background and they can fill the gap between devs and operation teams. SREs have to make sure the system runs smoothly. Resources provisioning, infrastructure, bugs, check and fix of production data, automation of ripetitive tasks in order to remove the toil is what they do everyday.
In an afternoon about a month ago, my boss called me on Teams and I thought the reason was a task I was working on. Instead, he asked me if it was true that I was interested in joining the SRE team, because they probably needed more people. The question was unofficial because everything needed to be sorted out yet but obviously I gave the green light on my candidature. At that moment I didn't realize immediatly what was going on and I felt completely normal. After the call I started to understand what happened and I was so excited about the news! A couple of week later I received another call from my boss and he confirmed the move. Deal was done!
For the first time in my work career, I can finally say that I am not a software developer anymore, but an SRE! 🎉
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