#683

Back to Borg: Nat joins Google CRE

On Monday, November 12th, 2018, I returned to Google as a full-time employee.

View on Insta.

This is probably a bit of a surprise to a few of you, as I have said in the past that I would never return to Google, except maybe if I was having a child (Google's family raising benefits are some of the best in the industry). I am not having a kid, at least in the immediate future. Instead the reason I decided to return is to join a very unique team: Google CRE.

CRE stands for Customer Reliability Engineering. The idea is to work with customers to improve their reliability, so that we improve the reliability of all systems. You can read Google Cloud's blog post on the team, Introducing CRE.

This is a free product, which is very much in its infancy (it was founded in early 2017), but has seen great success. Gartner listed CRE as one of the core differentiators of Google Cloud and CRE is growing rapidly. I joined a team in New York, and there are also teams in the Bay Area and London.

I'm hoping this role will let me continue what I started with Real World SRE. My book differs somewhat from the Google vision of SRE, but I hope I can continue to help companies, especially smaller ones, build and operate more reliable services.

Helping companies of all sizes and problem spaces operate without the constant fear of failure is an exciting task. Hopefully, we can help provide a better understanding of the risks a company is taking and how those affect the business. I also hope CRE can improve communication between companies, and hopefully dispel some of the fears companies have around sharing information on their infrastructure.

Leaving First Look Media

Leaving FLM was a tough choice. I really loved the team there. It was agile and relaxed. The team understood what were real problems and worth stressing over versus things that were just important and not urgent. Felix and Jeff run a good ship, and I learned a lot, especially about React and GraphQL.

The job helped me recover from the deep depression I was in after the campaign and I was able to see tech and editorial work together in a healthy way. I also wasn't paged in 2017 or 2018, so that was great.

FLM is hiring, and if you're looking for a job on a small and diverse tech team working with a wide variety of media projects, based in NY, I would highly recommend. Some of their websites include https://topic.com, https://theintercept.com, https://thenib.com, https://missingrochardsimmons.com, https://therealpeetape.com, https://code.firstlook.media, https://fieldofvision.org and many others.

Apply at https://firstlook.media/careers

That is all I have, for now. Have a good one.

/Nat