[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you manage your IT/DevOps role?
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Ask HN: How do you manage your IT/DevOps role?
Context: I'm senior mostly-solo IC for a mid-sized SaaS that does
DevOps and IT-related tasks. This role is similar to others I've
had in the past. It's great because there's lots of flexibility and
not much micromanagement. It's challenging because: - I often
need to learn and evaluate new products (e.g some SaaS we might
want to use). On a related note it's often difficult to get good
(sometimes any) support for products we're paying for, so I waste
time debugging obscure issues or reading through confusing
documentation - I don't really have anyone to delegate to. I could
coordinate with managers to negotiate for engineers' time, but this
would take almost as long as just doing some of the tasks myself,
so I don't do this - Verification is difficult. Infrastructure
doesn't have as good testing facilities as "regular" software does,
and even when it does that still takes some setup, which must be
balanced against everything else I'm supposed to be doing and the
new things that come up. - I often am asking for review for people
not on my (mostly solo) team, which can take time and extra
reminders - I mostly get requests from everywhere, manage my own
backlog, and people are busy enough that they really only see what
they need to remind me to do (because there's a lot to do), rather
than all the little things I get done This is better than previous
similar roles I've had, as the teams are nicer and I don't own
everything I touch, but I feel I'm falling behind and will not get
recognition unless I "sell" my accomplishments (which of course I
don't have time to do anyway). I don't really feel I can turn work
down, and don't really care to, but I'm finding it difficult to get
it all done and still work a regular amount of hours. It's also
difficult to ask for help, as in the past when I've asked for
training I've been told things like "ohh that's not too hard",
which is generally true for most products once you've got the hang
of them, but never getting training on anything is a recipe for
lots of half-baked solutions, or lots of time off the clock reading
and experimenting. I worry trying to define my role will lead to
micromanagement. I worry not doing so will lead to burnout or me
missing things. I worry discussing these issues with management or
fellow engineers will make me look incompetent or unwilling to do
my job. I also worry it's going to get increasingly difficult to
advance in this role, as the more I do the more I'll be asked to
look into, and with things being difficult to test/verify, the
small tasks will continue to pile up as I try to work on the large
tasks. How have you handled this situation in the past, other
DevOps/IT folks? I added in IT because I'm also given
administrative tasks as needed (migrating some accounts/debugging
issues that aren't strictly software related).
Author : throw_devops_q
Score : 7 points
Date : 2022-09-21 22:06 UTC (54 minutes ago)
| atmosx wrote:
| > This role is similar to others I've had in the past. It's great
| because there's lots of flexibility and not much micromanagement.
|
| ...is there _lots of flexibility_ ? Looks like you're stuck
| between the hammer and the anvil to me. You either kill yourself
| or the backlog grows forever, to top it all you don't seem to be
| getting much appreciation...
|
| Company's should be pushing you to get trainings, not the other
| way around.
|
| The market is hot for SRE/DevOps, especially if you have
| experience with kubernetes/swarm/nomad and cloud providers (AWS,
| GCP, Azure, etc.), I think you should move on. Look for a company
| that has an infrastructure _team_ to join. Will be a lot more
| fun.
| JoeMascuve wrote:
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > I don't really have anyone to delegate to. I could coordinate
| with managers to negotiate for engineers' time, but this would
| take almost as long as just doing some of the tasks myself, so I
| don't do this
|
| I think this could be worth exploring. It may take more time the
| first N tasks, but maybe along the way you'll find an engineer
| that is really good, or at least is interested in transitioning
| to a devops-based role. It could be an easy way to grow your
| team.
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