Wondering if anyone else has been in a similar situation…
For some background, I installed my first Linux server as a teenager around 2000-2001. I started working in ops around 2007, transitioned into SRE around 2011, have been working in that space ever since, and I’m now comfortably sitting in Sr SRE rolls.
For that entire time, I never did any formal training of any kind. I’m entirely self taught. Because of this more unconventional approach to this industry, I am positive that I have knowledge gaps. The thing is, I don’t really feel affected by those knowledge gaps very often. I think I have written code in at least a half dozen languages… I can pick a new language up pretty quickly too. What I’m writing isn’t generally very large projects but I’m not typically writing large projects at work… Since containers took over I feel like +90% is simple automation or glue code… I’ve never really had a problem I couldn’t solve in code though.
The situations where I feel these gaps the most is in the interview process. Algorithm design might be important for some people but I really don’t come across situations very often where I need to be concerned about perfect O(1) performance.
System design questions during interviews aren’t great either… “How would you make this system better?” I can explain some things but the closer I get to the front end, the weaker I get… I personally just have zero interest in front end development so I’ve never cared enough to learn it.
Lately I feel like I’ve missed out on working in more interesting roles entirely because of these types of interviews. Sometimes not even because of failing a challenge… Late last year I was interviewing with Etsy and the feedback I got was, “You didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone on the team said yes but there was another candidate that everyone said yes to as well. They just had a little more experience than you did in a few areas. We only budgeted for one new engineer though so we took the other guy.”
Maybe I don’t know what I don’t know though…
I guess I’m wondering what a solution for this might be? Part time comp sci degree? Bootcamp? Library card and some willpower?
If you’ve been working as a SRE since 2011, I’d say now is a good time to refresh your knowledge on Ops. A lot has changed since then in terms of best practices.
I would recommend reading the DevOps Handbook. The audiobook version is quite easy to digest. There are many case studies about DevOps transformations in this book as well, including Etsy’s—the development techniques they used are quite interesting.
DevOps has introduced a swath of methodologies for increasing the stability and maneuverability of large technology companies. Ignoring or remaining ignorant of these standards puts companies at a steep disadvantage. CI/CD and IaC techniques allow technology companies to develop stable code efficiently without accruing technical debt.
I’ve worked in places where these principles were not followed and had to take on somewhat of a SRE role myself because of how many failures we were having. DevOps practices would have saved us, had we only had the knowledge and foresight to use them throughout the organization. I highly recommend increasing your awareness of these standards, regardless of what direction you want to take with your career.