The infra engineer mindset
“I can give infra engineers a pen and a piece of paper and they would be happy” – that’s what a colleague working on dev infrastructure recently told me. His point was that infra engineers tend to be less needy than other engineers in regards to support for tools and dev experience.
This post isn’t meant to fuel a war between infra and product engineers or how one might be better than the other – rather it’s meant to talk about the mindset infra engineers tend to develop. Working on infrastructure means that:
- You are less likely to build on top of another team (you likely still have dependencies on other teams though) – this forces you to figure out things in case something doesn’t work out. There’s nobody to ask for help.
- You have to develop an eye for engineer productivity opportunities – same as feature engineers develop an eye for customer experience
My theory is that their situation helps them develop a mindset to figure things out by themselves and to get their hands dirty to improve their own productivity. This is a valuable mindset as your productivity tools/setup/scripts tend to travel with you – I personally still carry the same vim configuration as when I was in college (with tons of tweaks added over time).
Not everyone can/should be an infra engineer, but the interesting take away is to take your destiny in your hands in regards to your work setup, your tools and your productivity overall – the time spent here is a long time investment that will likely transcend your current job.