Technical Operations: Changing needs of the IT industry
I’ve been in technical operations for a long time; with the changing needs of the IT industry, the roles have changed and so the titles for the same work..
Here is my story so far..
I started as Systems Engineer at a big company where I worked for about 5 years. During this time, my title changed multiple times from Service Engineer to Technical Lead and so on. When one of my colleagues asked the then CEO about these frequent changes in roles and organisational hierarchy, her answer kind of surprised me :) Yes, its your own career and only you are responsible for it!
I left the “company” to join a medium sized one where I helped build the e-mail solution for B2B along with my team. Around this time, “DevOps” movement started gaining traction but I knew it was another bubble in IT industry (having witnessed similar one couple of years ago in another industry) and I started building some missing skills in Tech Ops such as networking to manage L2/3 switches. At this point we were equipped to build SDN based cloud solutions but due to many reasons, the project was called off.
I’ve started another journey with a new company where I truly witnessed what “startup” means :) I was one among the three Ops personnel responsible for managing entire fleet of servers around the world (read: CDN company). Here I learned how internet protocols such as BGP works. Also, I got a chance to work with world class team where we managed to build a secure PCI network in a span of three months (pre-planning took another three months though). During this time, I personally felt we need to embrace DevOps as a culture because though we were moving fast as a team, the business started to slow down. This is when I understood what “DevOps” actually means.
With this learning, I decided to join another company where they already are doing DevOps. However, this wasn’t followed across all departments of the company due to various reasons. I had a short stint here but I managed to learn what people management means :)
Now, this is when I started to look at life, technology and products differently. I took a right call and landed in Stockholm to work for a company called “Truecaller”. It is a mobile app company which started as a value add on service to identify unknown calls but over a period of time, it emerged as a product with features ranging from automatic spam detection to Instant Messaging. Now, we can call it fully featured product but whats lies ahead for us is our journey into payments space where we have a huge opportunity to grow in emerging markets such as India, Middle east and Africa regions.
Summary
With all these learnings, I’ve come to realise that technical operations is about :
- People
- Product
- Technology
If you enjoyed this article, please read out my other articles which were learnings from my team at work and yeah please like/share/comment on this one. tack :)