If you want to find your place in IT, you must first explore the field
When Flavian started his studies in informatics, the only job he could imagine was Developer. Now he works with site reliability engineering (SRE), and he is glad he approached the job market with curiosity because SRE has turned out to be an awesome fit for him.
Flavian started his career with an internship as an iOS developer in his third year of studies. Although he expected to be an iOS developer for the rest of his career, he came to reshape his career path, inspired by one of his friends who became a DevOps engineer. After hearing his friend talk about his tasks as a DevOps engineer, Flav took an interest in this kind of role and researched it. The more he learned about it, the more he wanted to experiment with a position like that.
“I definitely knew I wanted to be in IT when I finished high school, but I didn't know what my exact spot would be. First, I thought everything revolved around programming and creating software, and that would be it. I knew nothing about being a site reliability engineer, tester, or other specific role,” Flav says.
Thread until you get it right
After completing his internship as a software developer, Flav got a job as a DevOps engineer, switching from writing code and creating applications to bridging the gap between development and IT operations. Looking back, he remembers that his main goal was fast feature delivery and implementing changes while ensuring zero downtime.
As time passed and he gained more experience, he realised that it is not the velocity that matters when deploying new changes but how stable the application is after the deployment and the impact on both the client and user. This is very well represented by the SRE methodology.
“To me, that stability-centred mindset gives more sense to our work, as it lays the groundwork for all the daily activities. In other words, DevOps was the golden standard in the past for the application development lifecycle, but now the industry is shifting more and more to the SRE. And it's totally worth it.”
Putting the puzzle pieces together
In March this year, Flav joined Systematic as one of the youngest members of the site reliability engineering team, a role he describes as “the person behind the scenes who does the magic work or has the puzzle pieces and tries to assemble everything. Unlike 'regular' developers, who create and implement the application, our role as SRE primarily revolves around overseeing and supporting the entire development cycle. Our activity emphasises operation aspects to ensure system stability and performance.”
Constantly asking questions like “How do you build that?”, “Why is it built that way?” it is no surprise that Flav became passionate about informatics in his childhood, soon after discovering computer games and basic computer operating. As an analytical and curious person, he is fascinated by thinking about everything in the world as simple informatics.
Avoid the tunnel vision
However, there are many ways to work with informatics, and Flav is an advocate of trying new roles to discover what you like. He wouldn't suggest adopting a tunnel vision mentality where you set your mind on a specific target and ignore everything around you to achieve it. He offers an example by saying that experimenting is a good way to discover what works and what doesn't: “You might find out that one programming language is suitable for one specific project, but it might not be the same for other projects. So, you have to explore other languages, tools and positions.”
In the same way, he says that many other roles exist within the development process, such as testers, DevOps engineers, SREs, and more, so experimenting is essential in finding your place in the industry.
