Krishna Vinnakota

I would say the first thing is mindset—having the mindset of continuous learning, being curious, and—it sounds obvious—but actually applying. I’ve noticed a lot of people don't actually apply because they’ve disqualified themselves before even putting the application in, thinking they won’t get it. So put in that application and if you can, reach out to the hiring managers. A lot of times the hiring managers are really happy to jump on a call with you and have an informational session. Keep being curious and learning, and share what you've learned with others. Read books on the field, there are a ton of free resources as well. Stay up to date with the latest technologies and developments in reliability engineering and don't be afraid to apply for any job you want. If you don’t apply, you definitely won’t get it, so take the shot. 

One thing I always want to know is how the companies support learning for their employees. If I want to learn something, are there resources available in the company? Are there opportunities to grow or move to different roles eventually within the organization? I value having flexibility to move around work on different products and  technologies. I also always look at how other employees at the company feel. It’s usually pretty easy to find out if people like working somewhere or not. 

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One of the most important things for me is also knowing I’ll be working on products that are interesting and impactful. It should be meaningful to me, I want to know that what I work on matters to people. At the start of my career I was more concerned about the fun perks and free food, but I quickly realized that those things don’t matter nearly as much as doing engaging work.

Oh yeah. The term SRE is loosely used these days and everyone seems to have their own perception of what SRE work is depending on their company and team. For me, SRE is focused on SLAs (service level agreements) and the SLOs (service level objectives) within them, and all of the work that ultimately goes into maintaining a high 99.99%+ uptime SLA for your customers. There is so much to do to guard those agreements, like automation, building services, creating processes, hiring great people. Plus there’s a huge range of technology. I think people often underestimate the breadth of what SREs need to know, from running servers to writing applications, understanding networks, operating systems and infrastructure. There’s a huge breadth to the day to day work, but people tend to think of it as "just operations” work. 

I would start with just making sure you can sustain a reasonable on-call rotation. Obviously it depends on the size and maturity of your team, but it’s something teams should work towards and prioritize as they mature. A sweet spot to me is every 8 weeks. It’s frequent enough that you don’t lose those response skills between shifts, but infrequent enough that you really do feel like you get a real break between on-call periods. Another thing is, if at all possible, having a distributed team is hugely beneficial so on-call shifts can be planned during people’s waking hours without leaving gaps. Great documentation is also hugely helpful. When you’re woken up in the middle of the night, being able to follow documentation that actually makes sense is so helpful. Even better if you can automate it. The team culture also makes a huge difference. You want to know you can lean on your team, call someone if you need them, and that everyone ultimately cares about making things right for the customer. 

My home is my favorite place. I live in a place called Sammamish, and there are beautiful hikes all over. My kids love to play in our neighborhood and ride their bikes and scooters around, and I just sit down enjoying the outdoors and watching them have fun.