I’m not shy about how I like to work in the “infrastructure” section of a tech company – it’s my favorite area, and I tell people as much all the time!

However, in online software circles and around the office, I don’t often hear people as excited about infrastructure as I am. Part of this might just be why I like it so much – when I talk about it, I realize my narrative is pretty different from what I hear from other software people.

And so, I thought it might be fun to make a case for it here!

1. It’s Fun to Help Others

I love that I get to help people every day. Each time I untangle a weird metrics query, create a new Cloudfront distribution, make a client library safer, or stop a memory leak from paging the on-call – that’s a real person who is now unblocked from finishing their project, or gets to sleep better at night – someone I say “good morning” to and eat lunch with! They’re happy the issue is solved, I am happy to have helped, and it’s just a nice bit of relationship-building. You might argue that all software development is helping others (i.e. the customers), but it just hits different when it’s someone you interact with all the time. Infra work is full of little moments like these.

2. It’s Not Just Programming 24/7

I mean, I like programming… but I’m not the kind of person who can sit down and do any one thing for 30+ hours of the 40-hour work week. I’d burn out in a month! In infra-land though, there’s so much variety – sometimes it’s coding (Terraform, a shell script, some “everyone uses it but no one owns it” TypeScript library), but just as often, it’s writing a post-mortem for an incident, or building a dashboard to help people debug their slow database queries, or doing detective work to suss out a random daily crash, or whiteboarding with others the most efficient way to split up a big table. This mix of equal parts thinking, writing, and talking is really healthy for me, and seems great for people who work better doing context-switching as opposed to tunnel-vision.

3. It’s Where the Buck Stops

I got into this business because I like knowing how things work, right? I imagine that’s true for a lot of software people. And in my opinion, infra is the pinnacle here, the best place to be with regard to that mindset. The frontend person might say “the page is loading slow because the API call is slow, not really my area”, the backend person might say “the API call is slow because the cache is slow, not really my area”, but the infra person? There’s no one to pass the potato to! The answer for us is always “roll up your sleeves and figure it out”, and I love that – worst case I have to go learn some new things (which is hardly “worst”), and I’m rarely blocked on someone else. A win-win!

Infra for Me, Infra for You?

Sometimes, when I describe infra work this way, people are surprised; maybe they thought it was always super technical, or focused mostly on operations (and thus kind of boring).

In reality – or my reality at least – it’s really collaborative, full of rewarding problems to solve, and thus the opposite of boring! So in case you’re considering spending some time in the area, I can only recommend it :)