Has it really been a year since my last post? So much for getting into the blogging habit. Lot’s to catch up on.

A lot has changed in my life since my last post, both personally and professionally.

The biggest change was that I started a new job in January of this year. I honestly wasn’t actively looking for a new job, but sometime last October I happened across a job posting on LinkedIn that caught my eye. It was described as a devops role but focused on a managed security service based on F5 Big-IPs and associated services. I took a chance and put my hat in the ring for it.

Things progressed pretty quickly - I was contacted by the corporate recruiter within just a few days. Initial interviews went good (I thought, at least) and within a couple of weeks I was scheduled to interview with some of the technical team. A couple of weeks after that I was reviewing an offer letter. It was exciting and scary I hadn’t interviewed for a job for quite a while so I wasn’t sure how I came across. Apparently I did OK. I started with them on January 10, 2022.

I’m not going to name the company, but it is one I have had a lot of interest in, and respect for for many years. Having joined them, the company is even cooler than I thought. The onboarding process was not perfect, but they went out of their way to make it as smooth as possible and make you feel welcome. Most of the hiccups came from the systems that were specific to the department I joined. They’re using separate systems that are a bit older and managed by different teams. The majority of the people on my team have been with the company for many years and it had been a while since they had to setup someone new in those systems. Nevertheless, I’m still finding systems or pieces of information that I don’t have access to here and there. At least by now I have a somewhat better idea who to go to to get it sorted out.

It feels weird being the new guy on the team again. I went through so many turnovers and changes on my team at my last company that I ended up being the “senior” guy for the last couple of years. Now I’m back to being the newb - in more ways than one. While my Linux and networking experience is important to this new role, it requires a much deeper knowledge of Big-IP systems than I’d ever needed as just a customer. The first 3 months on this job were basically spent in training classes for all the Big-IP systems we use. I took as many notes as I could during classes, but trying to cram that much information in over the course of a week or two weeks per class - It’s hard to absorb it all. Luckily the other team members have been patient with me (so far) and seem genuinely willing to teach while they help.

I’m pretty excited about working here, but it has been a big adjustment. In all fairness, my previous employer was VERY flexible with hours and vacations. This company is a lot more rigid. It makes sense that they are - we’re supporting a customer-facing service for which outages have a big impact both for the customer and for the company. It’s nice having a bigger team to share the load with, though. Most of us are based in PNW, but the entire team works remotely. We have one engineer in Europe, and we’re hoping to hire more there. We’re also looking to hire in Asia. The goal is to have round-the-globe coverage so that oncall duty is more just for weekends.

If this is the last career change I make I think it will be worth it. Even though this job requires a more specialized skill set, there’s still a lot I can learn. The role is not really a DevOps role, though. It seems a lot of the job functions that are part of traditional DevOps have been moved to another team. We’re mostly doing 2nd-line support. That’s kind of disappointing, but I still get to learn a lot of new things. Overall, I’m still pretty happy about the change.