Things I Love and Hate About Being a Release Engineer

When I tell people that I am a release engineer I usually get a blank look. Then I explain the aspect of my job most people understand and say that I make programs that you double click to install software. Then most people say something along the lines of “oh you’re a software engineer”. I suppose that’s true, but a release engineer’s job is somewhat more specialized and it involves duties that are quite different from most software engineers’ daily routine of fixing bugs. So I decided to write a list of things I love and hate about my job, and I would love to hear what other release engineers think.

Here are the things I love about my job:

1. I am given a lot of responsibility and trust – Release engineers handle a lot of the critical systems like builds and version control in an engineering organization. Any screw up in those systems could potentially destroy a lot of other people’s hard work. So I learn to tread carefully and be an expert in these systems.

2. I learn a lot of random stuff - When you have to package builds for a bunch of different operating systems and programming languages you have to learn a bit about everything. I admit that I’m not an expert in any one programming language, operating system, or database, but I’ve picked up enough in the past few years to at least answer interview questions about a broad range of subjects.

3. I have an idea of the “bigger picture” – In my last company I was the sole release engineer, and now at my current company I am sort of moving into that role. This means that I have to be aware of all the product releases and the plans for these releases. Generally I like knowing what’s going to happen in the grand scheme of the company I work for.

4. I know what my purpose is - Release engineers serve a specific function so the job isn’t that ambiguous. As I have written before, a lot of people are disastified with their jobs because they don’t see the fruit of their work and they feel that it is pointless to work. Generally, I know what my deliverables are so my efforts don’t seem so useless.

5. I work with a lot of different groups – Release impacts a lot of groups including support,documentation, QA, and development. This means that I have to talk to a lot of people to get a good release. This makes the job less boring in a way.

6. I am special - When you search for software enginering jobs online most of the job descriptions are “software engineer” and the responsibilities section basically say that you will be a code monkey. There is nothing to distinguish one software engineer from another besides that they code different things. There are usually less job listings for the title of Release Engineer, and that usually means less competition and better compensation. So in terms of my career, I like being more specialized.

Now here are the things that are annoying:

1. The system administration aspects of the job – I hate setting up machines and monitoring their disk space. I hate upgrading software. I hate making images of machines and then deploying them on new machines that usually do not work right away. I hate power failures that mess up my fleet of build and test machines in mysterious ways. Basically, when you have to be a daily user of a bunch of different machines you generally end up maintaining them at least a little bit, and that could be a pain in the butt.

2. Broken builds - At my last company I kept a hall of shame for those who broke the build, and then I got bored of taking down people’s names because they were doing it every few hours. Someone emailed me once and said, “you’re like a zookeeper”. It really felt like that sometimes when I had to manage 30+ code branches with around 80 developers checking in code. At my current company we don’t have that many builds or developers and people seem to be more careful so it’s not so bad.

3. Telling people to fix stuff – I actually don’t like to send emails that tell people what they broke. However, this is really part of the job, too because the goal is to get a clean build every single time and I have to be whiny sometimes for the sake of product quality.

4. It is a tedious job – I think a good release engineer has to be somewhat obsessive compulsive to make sure a build contains exactly what is supposed to be there. In the most extreme case it involves manual inspections of hundreds of nasty code merge conflicts from various branches of code. If you ever used CVS for a large project with a crapload of branches you might have run into this problem. I have done that before and it was painful. Then again, a lot of other jobs are also very tedious so I don’t think tedium is a unique problem.

At the end of the day, I am pretty happy to be a release engineer because it is an important job in any engineering organization and I have a lot of autonomy to do my work. This job also helped me develop my organization and management skills that I could use in the future.

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