rqmedes

One of the original promises of the cloud was reduced operational overhead—you wouldn’t need armies of sysadmins or people racking hardware. But at scale, the opposite seems to happen. We have hundreds of cloud engineers. That headcount is growing faster than any other part of R&D. The tooling, services, and interdependencies are increasingly complex, and managing reliability feels harder, not easier.

Then there’s cost. Cloud spend is rising far faster than the growth of the business, and the pricing—especially for storage—is getting harder to justify. We’ve hit the point where some parts of our cloud bill look downright absurd.

We’re not inexperienced at this—we’ve been in the cloud longer than many companies have existed.

Cloud is starting to feel like a trap, am I just an out of touch old man?

I have held the most senior engineering roles in some of the largest software companies in Australia and New Zealand. There has been a notable skill and experience gap between me and other engineers in these companies, which can be challenging at times. Before I get too old (maybe I already am!), I’d love to see if I could make it in the much larger and more competitive US scene. The problem is that I don’t really have a network in the US, given that we’re on the other side of the world.

Do you have any suggestions for how I could grow one? I’ve been reaching out on LinkedIn, but it just feels like cringe-worthy self-promotion and very superficial.