🦙 Why I Retired from Site Reliability Engineering at 29 🦙
Tags: sre, career
Published: 2022-11-21 18:11:23

you read that right

_retired_

as in

_withdrawn from one's position or occupation_ (Merriam Webster)

as in

_i have made a conscious choice not to be an oncall software operations reliability engineer professionally *_

hence, r-e-t-i-r-e-d


## Let's start from the beginning...

It is Fall of 2016 and I have just graduated from Hackbright (HB) and am ready to code #AllTheThings. Look how proud I am of my app that is literally running on localhost!! Simpler times.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2myw99x1k3faxfwid20j.jpg)

After graduating I spent 2 additional years at New Relic as a software engineer and soaked up the excellent culture of empathy and learning 🫶. I climbed from software engineer 1 -> 3, onboarded to oncall, and worked on everything from admin'ing JIRA to building the sales demo with disposable infra to working on the greenfield distributed tracing product. It was a whirlwind and

It didn't take long after leaving the cocoon of NR to realize that outside of hyperscalers and monitoring vendors.....most organizations don't spend their days intensely studying the art and science of monitoring distributed systems at scale. Which you know, fair! But it meant that instantly wherever I went I was "the monitoring expert" 😱

...

Aaand now we're going to fast-forward a bit here and gloss over my transition from software engineering (SWE) to site reliability engineering (SRE).

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/w8kcili1tqma31q722ov.png)

It is now 2021 and I have worked at a few startups, helmed some SEV-1s, succeeded and failed at effecting organizational change and migrated more things to the cloud and containers and k8s than I want to count. Oh the places I've been and the things I have seen!

Working in infrastructure / operations / """devops""" / sre during this period was s-t-r-e-s-s-f-u-l. Massive migrations to containers, the cloud, and later container orchestrators are not easy projects, they're the kind of project that is long-running, totes critical to the business functioning, cross-team, and I must confess such a slog.

From my limited vantage point I saw massive investments in the migration for infra and CI/CD (to an extent) but not the same energy poured into evolving:

- **monitoring** (aka notifying the right people at the right time of negative system impact based on known signals)
- **developer education **(it feels like I keep seeing in the field SRE as "application configuration experts for K8s" which imo is way underutilizing their skillset and hampers devs' ability to de-mystify production)
- **oncall onboarding** ("you write it, you run it" is uh...still a work in progress imo but it is no excuse for not having solid onboarding for oncall duties, touring the observability data, running through a mock incident, etc.)
- **service documentation** (tbh I don't quite have strong feelings about where this lives like a service catalog or READMEs but I do expect in a microservices remote distributed company to be able to pull down a repo and at least run it and the tests and have clear PR submission rules to follow without talking to anyone)

^ that work is sometimes invisible and so crucial because it supports the humans in the system today and for the future. I have never regretted spending a few days writing up local development docs, taking an afternoon to show someone around production, pairing on a dev's first PR to the K8s config. Never!

🔥🔥🔥  Burnout City: Population Me 🧯
Few among us would describe 2019-2021 as "the best years of their life" and I am certainly no exception.

During a particularly fraught project with a rapidly advancing deadline I was feeling stressed to the Nth degree and decided as a joke to take a "well-being exam" sent from some mental health app. And uh....I failed.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/pioz3nlro4mf6lhgdzu8.png)

oh how I cackled at those results.

had I seriously taken to heart what it meant to fail a wellness exam perhaps I could see a long future enjoying a career in SRE but I forged ahead...taking a 6w mini break in the springtime to reset work-life boundaries and rest and build the sweet Land Rover Cruiser Lego set.

rinse and repeat and almost a year later I burned out ✨spectacularly✨. Unraveling during my last days pushing through a months-long migration serving as faux-manager, project lead, mentor and more believe me it was not pretty. This time instead of taking a break, the break took me.

It became clear that SRE, startups, and my boundaries with work were not sustainable. You'll notice I'm not digging into specifics here - imo I experienced average garden-variety IT burnout, this syndrome and the contributing factors aren't new to this field...

Five years later and Alice Goldfuss' Rockstars, Builders, & Janitors talk is as relevant as ever (sans Chef references) which to be honest is disappointing af.  

[Rockstars, Builders & Janitors @ DockerCon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZp3W4qYhJc)

## Life After SRE

so where does a 29 year old retired SRE go? within the tech industry I considered the following off-ramps:

- technical writer
- sre/eng manager
- """devops""" engineer
- software engineer
- sales engineer

### off course options

I also considered completely off course options like:

- 🌈 queer elopement planner / makeup artist
- 🎨 art therapist (it is an incredibly long ass road to becoming one and i am never going back to uni! you can't make me!!)
- 💁‍♀️ 4 day a week gig working the front desk at a nearby car dealership
- 🏬 Managing 1 location of a local craft art shop
- 📮 USPS deliverer  (my mailman Dan has been selling me on the benefits (literally thx to the NACL union carriers get 2x a year COLA adjustments! plus I'd get hella muscular calves and befriend all the neighborhood kitties win-win-win.)

and that's simply a _smol_ slice of what I pondered.

## Tradeoffs
As the US interest rates kept getting hiked, gas prices went nutty and my "f*** you fund" was moving down and to the right so it was time to get serious about job hunting.

Taking a look at my skillset, areas of interest and expertise, and what industry I guessed would be able to ride out the choppy waters ahead I decided to forge ahead in the observability space but totally switch up roles and departments getting closer to customers and prospects.

Thus, my time at Chronosphere as a Senior Developer Advocate has begun. Why Chronosphere? You can [read my Official Thoughts TM](https://chronosphere.io/learn/why-i-joined-chronosphere-as-a-senior-developer-advocate?utm_source=paige-cruz-blog&utm_medium=referral) on the blog!

and you can read the full version of this post with GIFs and cat tax over on my site [here](https://www.paigerduty.com/why-i-retired-from-sre/).