At the beginning of the month, a colleague reminded me that I had been with the company for 8 years now! A little anniversary! I reflected about the past years when at the same time a recruiter message reached me, what my motivation would be to “leave my comfort zone“.
Before being here, I changed jobs about every 2 years. The team was always great – super lovely people that I still miss, but I felt like I couldn’t improve anymore, I felt stuck and I felt like I wasn’t adding value to the company any more – and I then did the necessary steps.
It was the first time I joined a larger corporation. And obviously something was different here – otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed so long, right? So I started reflecting what I did all those years long. Was it worth staying? Am I, perhaps, settling into a comfort zone?
Well let’s try to wrap it up. Obviously, I cannot write about internal information here. Everything I write could also be on LinkedIn (or is even there) – just to manage expectations 😉
2 Years Corporate Startup – Rise and Fall
I joined the company as a connection to a corporate startup that was founded shortly before. Coming from Startups and small companies before, I felt quite home but also saw the differences to a corporate startup. I also changed from doing-a-lot-on-my-own to consulting, mentoring and even hiring and leading others. Until the company decided to pull the plug and close the corporate startup.
2 Years building DevOps
Afterwards I joined an operations group in the same department. The task was to deal with operations, automation and infrastructure – all in the field of analytics. Luckily, the department was to be transformed into a DevOPS workstyle! Participating and pushing a full department from a Dev & Ops style into DevOPS was really a cool journey.
Well there were also couple of really tough “side” projects that started by the end of this “chapter”. I remember when one of team said “Franz, what exactly did you do? Why are all the shit projects coming to you? Did you burn down the house of the CFO?“. No, I didn’t 😉 Regardless of how those projects landed on my desk, we tackled them over quite a perioud of time that overlapped into the next chapter …
1 Year – The Super Intense Cloud Migration
Then came the big cloud migration. And this migration came with a hard deadline: everything had to be moved by year-end. It was fast, chaotic, full of tech debt. This was the toughest year in my entire career. Of course, nothing I did alone. But we as a team migrated a whole department including all people.
Garnished with the little treat called Log4Shell at the end of the year. Because it wasn’t stressful enough …
2 Years – Tech Debt & Cloud Adoption
After the madness of migration, we started tackling our backlog in parallel to our regular business. We refactored, optimized and began leveraging more and more cloud capabilities. It was a lot of cleanup and optimization – painful in parts but necessary.
But the result is something we can really be proud of! Something the company can gain value from.
1 Year – GenAI!
GenAI didn’t pass unnoticed – of course. Besides our regular services, monitoring and optimizations, GenAI also has a couple of implications on architecture, infrastructure, processes and operations.
Getting into the topic (and holding the pace of innovation), managing expectations(!), consulting others, thinking about all possible implications and trying to steer into the right directions to maximize long term value creation is part of the job. – As well as distinguishing snake oil from helpful tools.
What’s Next?
Eight years in, and I know one thing: change is the only constant. The next wave – more AI, more automation, and who knows what else – is already here. Does it feel like a comfort zone to me? Not really. But maybe that’s the secret – when the work keeps evolving, you never really settle. And that’s what keeps it exciting.