The Handover
So it has been several weeks since my new role has been announced, yet the transitioning from my former role to the new one hasn't fully been done; handing over technical operations (TechOps) role including the transfer of former TechOps engineers to the Engineering Department. The idea behind it was to return the ownership of production issues to the Engineering, instead of offloading the burden to another team in a different department. TechOps has been acting as the middle-man communicating between operation and engineering during production issues. A little bit similar to the SRE role, but still lacking the core principal practices and infra-related technical skills. Aside from handling production issues, some people considered TechOps role as "engineering support" by handling tasks such as performing stress tests, managing engineering related Jira board and handling API integration with partners which makes the TechOps role line even blurrier. Who even wants to be in this position xD. How did that came to happen ? That's another long story.
On the bright side, the TechOps members have a sense of urgency mentality wired in. They know if a certain parameter is not followed by the operation team, it could lead to business risk, hence we gathered together and create a list of recurring operational issues and communicate them with the product and operation team. We're the team to tap on people shoulders and say, "hey guys, we have some problems going on". I was leading the team for more than a year, acting as their "manager" despite the Staff Engineer title that I am labelled with. I mentioned to my team that I have mixed feelings about the TechOps disbandment, a combination of relief and excitement but also worrying for their new role, since I know they have a deep learning curve ahead of them.
And on the other side, I'm starting to understand on how the former DevOps (now SRE team) works in detail. The SRE team went a long way to where they are right now. I witnessed their transformation during the last 2 years, they are an autonomous and accountable team which consistently learns new things everyday. My fellow Staff Engineers to my perspective have high personal standards yet humble enough to admit and finding ways to overcome the current stack challenges. The new recruits also have high spirits amidst the day to day workload and tech winter wind gusting outside the windows, and the seniors and the Staff Engineers try their best to keep it that way.
Back to the handover, after meeting the respective leaders, we agreed on having shared knowledge base among the engineers and elevating their skills. We're also still in the talks of the upcoming on-call schedule and issue escalations. This is going to be addressed shortly as I plan to do several Tech Department-wide sharing sessions and proposing frameworks on how to do what we've been doiong for the last 2 years.
Also thanks to Bri the superman, he helped me created a handover handbook which was supposed to be my job ! That handbook acts as a guide of the all the current documents and activities that happened for the last 2 years. I kind of felt bad losing such a relentless guy that you could count on like him. And I am happy to see he is learning really hard about the new tech stack that he's going to use.
I still have some pending meetings in my backlog that I will do by this or next week and some followup to HR regarding their update in the organization structure in order to complete the handover and consider my transition done. I wish good fortune for all the of impacted teams by this change including myself since I got the "SRE Lead" title that I have to make up to.