Brittbot

Category: Career Upgrade Update

Posts about how my career upgrade from a Data Center Technician to a Software Engineer at Google is going.

  • My 2025 Career Goals

    My 2025 Career Goals

    Happy New Year! With the coming of the new year it’s time for me create my 2025 career goals and post them online so I can force myself to actually attain them! (I wrote that line to have a sarcastic tinge to it, but I’m not sure if readers will read it that way. Ah, one of the major pains of being a writer. Enough, Brittany. I way off on a tangent and the readers want to know about my goals.)

    My 2025 Career Goals: Continue My Journey To Become A Software Engineer

    One of my 2025 career goals it continue my journey to upgrade from a Data Center Technician to a Software Engineer at Google. Will that happen this year? I’m leaning toward no, but there is a slight chance I could make a successful transition. For that to happen I need to accomplish the following:

    • Submit working code changes into the codebase: This shows not only can I write good code, but other coworkers who review it think so too.
    • Continue to write and update technical documentation: There’s quite of bit of outdated documents that are waiting for anyone knowledgeable to update them. And there’s need for someone to create new documentation for upcoming services and/or procedures.
    • Widen my professional relationships to include additional individuals from other teams: Not only does this help me get to know new people, but also create the opportunity to share information and improve productivity for both parties.
    • Improve my programming language skills: I will continue to improve my Python skills. I’m also interested in continuing my C/C++ education. I plan to do this through books. Yes, actual books. I love to read!

    My 2025 Career Goals: Move?

    Yeah, I’m thinking about moving this year. And by moving I mean transferring to a different work location. If I’m able to do that with a Software Engineering role, that would be fantastic! However, if I can’t then I would transfer to another Google data center.

    Why is moving one of my 2025 career goals? Frankly, I’m not that fond of Tennessee. As a lifelong Georgia resident I find living in its upstairs neighbor a boring. Also, the road infrastructure is worse in Tennessee than Georgia. I did move to Nashville to see if that would make life exciting, and it did for a bit, but I’m back to wanting more.

    Where am I thinking of moving to? Here’s a list of all the states containing a data center I’m interested in:

    • Georgia
    • Virginia
    • Texas
    • Arizona

    Now, if I’m able to get a Software Engineer job I would probably transfer to the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, or Raleigh. That’s where many openings are. (Granted, there are others in the Seattle area, but I’m not sure I would want to move there.)

    I plan to travel to Texas (and possibly Arizona) this year to get a feel of the different cities. I already traveled to Virginia a few times in 2023 and 2024 to perform some work in the data centers up there.

    When I would move would be around after August 1st, as I have to work in my current role for 12 months before transferring to a new role. So I wouldn’t start looking for a new position until late June or early July.

  • My Plans For My Future Role

    My Plans For My Future Role

    In this post I want to discuss my plans for my future role I want to try for (and hopefully get) at my current employer. I’ll also touch on a little about my learning plan, but I will discuss that in more detail in a future post.

    Information About My Current Role

    I work at Google as a Data Center Technician (DT) for the past 18 months. May 2025 will be my two year anniversary (or Googleversary). Knowing that, I made the decision back around August or so to start developing my plans for my future role because I’m ready for a change.

    This is not to say I don’t like being a DT. I’ve worked in other data centers in my storied IT career, but now that I’m getting older my joints and back don’t like it as much. The servers are getting heavier, and sometimes I don’t want to climb a ladder or sit on the floor to access the server at the bottom of the rack. However, due to all the walking my job requires I can easily hit ten thousand steps per day, which is beneficial to my health.

    My Plans For My Future Role

    So what is my next move regarding my future role? Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

    Why? Because of the following reasons:

    1. Coding is fun
    2. Solving problems is challenging, and I love a good challenge
    3. Administering systems/services is fun too

    I’m currently working to apply to a program at my workplace that would allow me to work with a SRE Team for three months. The program allows individuals to determine if the role is a good fit for them, and to get experience working as a SRE. Thus, if I do like the position then I will gain the knowledge I can put on my resume to hopefully get an interview (and the job).

    One way I’m working to apply to the program is to improve my programming language experience. I chose Python since I already have experience writing and debugging it. The way I chose to improve my skills with it is to use YouTube University! Most of the videos I’ve watched in the playlist I created have been from the FreeCodeCamp channel.

    The other way I’m working to get into the program is to assist the group maintaining the code and documentation for the applications and/or scripts the DTs use. The group has several volunteers, but the amount fo bug and feature requests is too much for them. So I can help them (and all the DTs) and gain the work-related coding experience needed. I already started helping the group with updating the documentation for different applications and/or scripts.

    I hope to apply in Q2 2025, but that timeline can move to later in the year depending on my current workload and if I have enough work-related programming experience.