Continuous migration to something new in the Infra space

2 points by golondon 5 years ago | 2 comments

Hey folks,

I have been working as SWE / SRE for last 5 years in FAANG and a big startup, prior to that I was working as normal SWE writing code for the customers.

One thing I noticed especially in the infra space is that work itself consistently consists of migrating from one system to another, or to new shiny service you wrote. Migrating all the existing internal teams, sometimes called customers, after some time this becomes quite boring, repetitive and exhaustive as well due to many hats you need to wear (you should keep your team up to date, keep users of the system up to date, keep management up to date, write code, document it, make sure rest of the who didn't work on it understands it etc).

I wonder how is everyones experience with this? Do you do anything to exit from this endless loop? To me it feels like my only exit is returning back to normal SWE role where you can ship to prod many times a day and don't care much about how many % of the users started using the feature. Someone does for sure, but it's not your job to follow that, communicate on that.

thorin1 5 years ago |

There are some companies where the only way to get promoted is to release a new better improved system. So there is an endless loop of rewrites and migrations all over the company.

If you don't like it, you will probably have to join a place with a different culture.

Edit:

If this is the case only for SRE roles then you need to find out why are you rewriting and moving to new, shinier systems. Is there a big improvement? Or is it just for a sake of changing something?

golondon 5 years ago | |

It's for the SRE roles. The continuous change of frameworks, languages etc happens in SWE world as well but I guess the difference is when you're making those changes you have necessary support around you. Your team / group has product manager so you know what feature needs to be there, your team lead negotiates those so you don't need much convincing all the time, your product marketing manager keeps rest of the company in the loop. In the SRE world, you pretty much need to all of those, while doing fire fighting. So the problem is not the change itself, but how it's done and amount of effort it requires I guess.

I experienced this in 2 FAANG SRE orgs, might be the case we had not properly thought SRE org.