Hey everyone! I'm a recent graduate and have been working in my first full-time job for the last 8 months. I mostly manage our company's Google Cloud Platform tools like Service Accounts, Pub/Sub, GKE, and Cloud Functions. I've set up monitoring dashboards on Grafana for our clusters and manage logging and metrics for them. I also work with bare-metal servers that have multiple Kubernetes clusters on a third-party PaaS.
But I feel like I walked into an already stable situation when I joined. I've tackled a few obvious issues to enhance stability, like adding load balancing and setting up proper metrics, but now I'm at a bit of a standstill. Although I have some Kubernetes and site reliability engineering internship experience, I currently don't have a manager, and I'm unsure how to progress further since everything feels stable. I know there's some cleanup to do with resources and permissions, but I'm looking for ways to actively improve our infrastructure and development experience. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, even though I know each company operates a bit differently!
4 Answers
Honestly, if you feel like you’re not growing, it might be time to think about moving on to the next opportunity. Sometimes you can only get so much experience from a single platform. Don’t hesitate to explore new pastures if you get that itch!
To show you're proactive about improving infrastructure and development experience, consider conducting a survey if you have internal customers. Ask some closed questions to gauge their satisfaction with current services and leave space for open-ended suggestions. This will give you useful insights into what developers think and what improvements could be made.
I totally get where you're coming from. I felt pretty stuck about six months into my first DevOps role too. Honestly, sometimes it pays to just hang in there. Give it at least another year to really grow and absorb as much knowledge as you can. I ended up staying at my first position for about two and a half years, and it was worth it in the end. Good luck!
If you want to stick around and see some upward mobility, consider focusing on documentation. There are usually gaps in various areas, and taking the initiative to improve documentation can show your engagement. Plus, it’s a great way to learn more about different aspects of your team’s work. It might not be thrilling work, but it pays off in the long run.
Same here, man! I started as an SRE too, and I agree that you get better with time. Just stick with it!