Senior Site Reliability Engineer Promotion
Recently I announced my promotion to Senior SRE at Worktango. The promotion was one that I had been *working* on for over a year. When I first joined Worktango in October 2022 I said to my manager that I had the goal of being promoted to Senior SRE by May 1 2023 – my 5 years in tech. One of the primary blockers to this was that the team was intending to grow including adding a junior engineer I would be able to mentor once up to speed. This did not happen as on December 1 2022 Worktango did a layoff. During this layoff the SRE team was not impacted in numbers however our promised junior engineer was cut.
Come the fall of 2023 things changed a bit to enable me to get towards the promotion I wanted and in late November I started to push the idea of it since I had decided if I could not reach it due to company limitations by May 1 2024, I was going to switch companies to enable me to advance in my career. Not something I wanted to do however it was something I felt I had no choice but to do for my own good.
Thankfully we managed to find something that works for everyone and I got my promotion to senior site reliability engineer. It was nice to get my first promotion ever at a company that I am very thankful to be at. I look forward to a good future at Worktango.
Now the push onward towards management and moving away from being hands on with code that is constantly broken – life of an SRE is build new stuff because the current stuff doesn’t work or fix everything that is broken.
Learnings
During my time working towards my promotion I learned a good number of things. The biggest being that I could not keep up the same level of output of engineering work as I did before due to the increased levels of communication required to do my job (meetings and Slack messages mainly).
As a coworker said, increased senority appears to involve more meetings. While this is correct it is not about more meetings but instead moving away from engineering work directly to communication and guidence.
The other primary learning from becoming a senior SRE was that it does not matter what you are told will happen or is likely to happen during a promotion or needed to get one. The goal posts will shift and the goal counter may not move either.
Technically I did not have to do much learning for my promotion (none I can think of but maybe something I don’t recall). However I did have to get better about sharing out my technical planning and ability to plan projects for more people than myself. Going forward I am hoping to shape some of the processes to better fit my style as well as be a little more defined and repeatable rather than the current state of many things in SRE at Worktango which is to say, random and haphazard.
On the side of unblocking a promotion, I found out that if you can prove to a company that you are a good employee worth keeping around and making happy that you can bend some of the requirements of the next positon if they are blocking you and are due to the company and not yourself. Communicate and work with the company and others (more generally in life) to get what you want rather than just jumping ship like so many nowadays do in tech – more below on my thoughts on it.
Conclusion
It is nice to finally be a senior SRE and I learned a good bit in the process. Would I do it again or would I stick with a mid level SRE role? I’d probably stick with the mid level SRE role and only look for a promotion via a company switch. I think getting a promotion internally while good is often not worth the effort and more than likely something I will not do a ton of going forward while stilll in the IC track. Possible once I go the people manager track it may make sense. My next steps are riding out the senior SRE position for a while and then looking to make my next change into people management for a new challenege.