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:
- Coding is fun
- Solving problems is challenging, and I love a good challenge
- 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.