Why I'm a Consultant

(cross-posted to LinkedIn)

Today I wanted to talk about WHY I'm in the tech industry as a consultant.

Around a decade ago, I was a manager of a cloud operations team for a rapidly-growing PaaS/SaaS company. Our mostly-manual processes were becoming really cumbersome due to scale. We were one of the top 10 AWS EC2 users at the time, and containers and K8S weren't really a thing yet.

Our alerts volume got so out of control that we could only hold onto the pager for a few hours at a time as it drained our cognitive batteries quickly.

Some incidents we dealt with were multi-day in duration, especially in the early days of AWS. All-hands-on-deck situations interrupted holidays, even vacations!

The growing number of customers, manual processes, and incidents led to a ballooning ticket queue, frustrating both customers and internal teams.

The result: a grueling work environment, leading to burnout and attrition.

(Yes, I then developed an SRE and DevOps program to address the problem, but that's not the point of the post!)

Even with advancements in the industry today, companies still face similar situations. The reason I work in tech: to help navigate or avoid such challenges. It's really fulfilling to learn about the people and teams that are directly impacted by my work.

I believe we can achieve revenue targets without sacrificing individuals and teams, enable engineers to build amazing products while maintaining work-life balance, and guide teams through tough times with psychological safety.

Do you relate? Experiencing similar situations? I'd love to hear from you!