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Johanna Walter's avatar

I work as infrastructure/DevOps (systems engineering, network engineering, programming, data center operations, on-call, etc), though I've always had titles like "Senior Operations Engineer", "Operations Engineer, Platform Infrastructure", and "Operations Engineer, <PRODUCT> Operations". To me, the number of infrastructure engineers is nearly always too low. We're the first stop for complaints when there's any kind of issue and that's a huge time-suck. We're the ones up at 4:30am, barely awake, phones blaring, laptops blasting us in the face with light, working voodoo magic to get the product back online. You want to see burn-out? Have one person...

* ...keep a SaaS online while 10+ engineers try their best to break it by using all the new "cool" things they found on StackExchange and HN.

* ...have to tell engineers "no" constantly.

* ...have people go over their head constantly so they can get what they want.

* ...be forced to be seen as the "difficult" person to work with.

* ...be on-call 24/7/365.

* ...not have a moment free of their laptop and phone.

* ...not be able to be unreachable.

* ...who can't take time off.

Please, invest in infrastructure engineers. At 50 people you should, realistically, have three infrastructure engineers.

* On-call? One week primary, one week secondary, and one week off. Nearly two-thirds of what I listed above can be scratched out.

* Give your lone infrastructure engineer people to bounce ideas off of.

* Give your infrastructure engineers the ability to have time to create tooling that makes lives easier.

* Revel in the knowledge-sharing amongst your infrastructure engineers and between them and other engineers.

When engineers have downtime, good things happen. Please, don't run one person ragged because of a ratio.

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Arlo Gilbert's avatar

Great post David, thanks... ARR per employee seems crazy low though, 50 person startup w/ $1M in ARR seems super bloated.

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