Category: Career Upgrade Update

I know it’s been too long since I posted something new on my blog. It’s been about 6 weeks since the last post. Yet, I’m back now and I do have some great news I want to cover in a series of post. The first of the great news is that I got a promotion! As of November 1, 2025 I will be a L3 Data Center Technician (DT) at Google. I worked with my manager for the past year on this move. I had to not only improve on my networking a new skill-set, but become highly proficient in it. And this was in addition of taking on additional leaderships roles not only on my team, but within my site.

Since I got a promotion what does that change regarding my daily duties? Not much. Since I’ve worked as a L3 Data Center Technician for the past several months leading up to applying for the promotion what I have to do now is building upon my leadership and influence duties. I also have to sign up to join the on-call rotation, but I’ve done that before when I worked at the Twitter data center. However, I haven’t been on-call in a few years so that will be an readjustment. Oh, I did forget that I have to take on more of a mentorship role for the L1 and L2 DTs at my site. Some of them want advice on how they can progress in their career.

Speaking of career, moving to a L3 role at Google now allows me to progress into a different technical role at the company. Including Software Engineering which is what I am interested in. As my manager told me when he gave me the great news last week now the hard work begins. Why? Because I need to figure out how to progress my career at Google. Does that mean I take on a 20 percent role and help out another team to earn experience? Or do I work on my own to develop that experience? I know this: I need to find a mentor again at the company in roles I’m interested in. That will really help with my career progression, in addition to my manager’s help.

There’s a reason why I haven’t posted anything to my blog in over a month: I stopped studying.

There’s a good reason why: I had to focus on various checkups for my health. These checkups I ignored for a good number of years, even though I got email after email about setting up an appointment. Why did I do that? Because I felt fine. Like many people if I wasn’t sick there wasn’t a need to go to the doctor. Yes, I go to the eye doctor and dentist regularly because I do need glasses, and I have a chronic dental condition requiring care. Yet, visiting my PCP or woman doctor wasn’t a priority for me. That changed in June.

I decided to go to the doctors during my birthday week in July because I promised my mom I would come home to celebrate my birthday. Thus, I called all the doctors and made appointments as all of my doctors are still in my hometown. (I’ve seen them for years and don’t want to change them.)

Then I scheduled off time from work to handle all of this.

I took my Grokking Algorithms books to read while on vacation, but I only read it a little.

While I brought my laptop to do some coding, I wrote a few lines.

At the end of July I stopped studying completely.

August came and I had follow-up doctor appointments to attend. In addition, work became busy. Google Deepmind continues to drop new features to Gemini each week or two, which causes us Data Center Technicians to work more to deliver the TPUs needed to meet demand. As my workload continues to ramp up, my energy to study declines.

Now it’s the middle September as I write this post and I still haven’t restarted studying. I want to, but I’m not sure what to study. I am unsure because I have some interesting stuff happening with me at work. Nothing I want to delve into now because I’m not sure how everything will pan out. If things go well, and I do a great job, I may have a new career goal. It’s not that I want to give up becoming a Software Engineer, but I can’t discount a new role that could work out better for me.

So my plan for the rest of 2025 is to keep up my productivity at work, and do well in the new tasks happening also in my work life.

In this post I’ll explain my Python study schedule as a full-time employee hoping to apply to entry-level Software Engineer roles at my employer later this year. My objective for writing this post is to help other full-time IT employees determine how to create their own study schedule so they can upgrade in their careers. So let’s get right into it.

My Python Study Schedule

My Python study schedule is every day of the week. The only time I don’t study is when I’m vacation, or when I’m sick. I want to enjoy my vacation, which is why I take a break from studying. Thus, I leave my programming books and laptop at home. When I’m sick – and I don’t get sick often – I’m not fit for learning anything. If I try to, I’m won’t remember much. And if I try to code I’ll write so-so code at best. Thus, it’s better to wait for my body to recover.

Since I’m a full-time employee I don’t have much time to learn on the weekdays. I get about one to two hours to be studious each evening after I get dinner. Usually I break up each session into some combination of reading one of my programming books or technical documentation, and writing code. I may work on an exercise from the book, or work on one of my projects.

However, on the weekends I can dedicate six to eight hours to study. I can spend more time than that, but I do go outside to get fresh air, go to gym, run errands, stuff like that. Weekends provide me the best opportunity to make extensive progress with my projects due to amount of time I have to code.

Difficulties With My Schedule

With my Python study schedule I do run into problems.

My first problem is I don’t have any time in the morning on the weekdays to devote to learning. This is how my morning starts:

• My alarm wakes me up at 5 AM.
• I arrive at my apartment’s gym by 5:30 AM.
• Perform my forty minute workout.
• Leave the gym around 6:20 AM to commute to work.
• Arrive at work around 7:15 AM.

Yes, I have a long commute. Due to various reasons I live one hour away from the data center. That’s the main reason I can’t devote any time learning in the morning.

Can I change my living situation to live closer to work? I could, but it’s going to make other parts of my life more difficult. Thus, I won’t make those changes.

Could I study at work? I can, and have, but not anymore. I used my lunch break to read, but I only take a thirty minute break so I can leave work earlier. Hence, I don’t get much learning done. Also, sometimes I end up using my lunch break to eat and do something else unrelated to learning.

Ease With My Python Study Schedule

While I do have some difficulties, there’s three reasons why I have so much time to devote to learning:

1. I’m single with no pets or any dependents.
2. All my free time belongs to me.
3. I no longer play any video games.

I say this to be fully transparent. I know there are other people who don’t have the amount of free time like myself to learn. My schedule works for me, and I think it could work for others in a similar position like myself.

I wrote about my plan to become a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Google, but recently I found myself gravitating to the new Software Engineering role I discovered at work. That role is called a Customer & Partner Solutions Engineer. Why does this new role interests me so? And why am I moving away from becoming a SRE? I’ll answer the latter question first.

My Reasons Moving To The New Software Engineering Role

I recently had a meeting a SRE manager at Google, and I asked him what I needed to study and/or learn to successfully land that role. He gave me quite the list:

• Continue to improve my skill-set in a particular programming language. I’m currently doing just that.
• Learn about System Design. I added that to my list of things to learn.
• Then learn about System Design involving large infrastructure systems. Okay, that sounds challenging, but I like a good challenge.
• Develop a good knowledge of Data Structures and Algorithms. That was already on my to-learn list.
• Learn about handling very large numbers involving data in a large infrastructure system. This one I had to ask for more clarification on, and even then I’m still a little unsure.

After that the SRE manager told me it took him two months of studying on and off just to prepare for the interview even though he had a plethora of experience. That’s when I got a little iffy about the role. I’m not saying I can’t become a SRE, but I don’t know if I want to invest one to two years of my life preparing for that role. So I thanked the manager for his time, and started thinking about learning the skill-set needed for the new Software Engineering role I recently discovered.

What Is The New Software Engineering Role I Found?

The new Software Engineering role I found is called a Customer & Partner Solutions Engineer. This type of engineer develops technical solutions for customers regarding life-cycle events. The team the job role I found handles Google’s first party and third party authentication.

These engineers also identify technical gaps and other opportunities to reuse solutions or create new code to resolve those issue. In addition, they create technical documentation for the customer’s developers and/or partners.

Finally, and this isn’t an exhaustive list of duties, Customer & Partner Solutions Engineers create tools and dashboards to track and improve efficiency.

Why I Think This Role Fits Better For Me

First, I get to work on problems and find solutions. Thus, I get to perform research and write code to resolve those problems. Next, I also get to work with customers, which I do enjoy doing. I know some people don’t like to work with customers because they can be demanding. Especially if they aren’t sure what they exactly want, but that just means a person like me has to explain what’s doable, and what isn’t. Finally, I have the ability to write technical documentation which I do enjoy too.

The Qualifications Needed For This Role

These are the minimum qualifications:

• Computer Science degree or equivalent practical experience
• Experience with client-side web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and HTTP
• Experience with one or more programming languages like Java, C/C++, or Python
• Technical troubleshooting experience, and managing internal and external customers

So I have all those skills (except the Computer Science degree). However, I do need to work on the following preferred qualifications:

• Experience in web technologies like XML, databases, SQL queries
• Knowledge of programming languages like Java, Python, and PHP
• The ability to implement web and/or mobile operating system authentication and authorization protocols
• Demonstrate project management and analytical problem solving skills.

These I can learn in about six months with the learning schedule I follow now. That’s why I rather work toward this role.