5.30 AM
Time to wake up and get ready for work. I grab some breakfast and drive to the station.
6.05 AM
Hop on the train where I either listen to a podcast, read, or do some quiet study on the train.
6.50 AM
Arrive in the city where I enjoy a short 5-minute walk to the Data Centre, IC1.
7.00 AM
When I get into the office after getting through security, I set up my computer, and get some water whilst having a chat with the other engineers. I then turn my status on to available so I’m ready to do some problem-solving.
9.00 AM
After doing my normal morning activities such as consolidating disk drives and freeing up space on customer environments, answering client or vendor emails, and following up on my tickets, we have a morning shift standup meeting. This meeting Is super helpful as we gauge the work for the day, have a bit of a laugh, and do some trivia to kickstart the day.
Some of the work I might do during the day include:
- Going through the Team’s shared email inbox to engage with clients or vendors where we either answer their questions or help them out by jumping on calls, logging problem tickets, or doing investigations. Some of the sort of emails I get include:
- Customer: “Can you please reset my VPN token?”
- Customer: “The correct routes aren’t being advertised to my firewall, could you check why that’s happening?”
- Vendor: “To help solve your issue, would you be able to configure the registry of the windows VM to include X and Y and then collect some more logs?”
- Customer: “Can you please delete this VM’s snapshot?”
- Customer: “My backups are failing, please check why.”
- Actioning orders like:
- customer firewall policy changes.
- configuration checks/changes on appliances like switches, firewalls, load balancers, mobile phones, tablets.
- Setting up VPNs.
- Going through the ticket backlog and following up on the progress of the investigation for each ticket.
- This usually involves some degree of investigative skills: pulling together resources, finding information on heaps of different platforms, writing succinct summaries of the problem, talking to customers, engineers, and specialists, and doing historical research on previous occurrences of the problem to name a few.
- Your skill as an engineer in this job relies heavily on how autonomous you are as well as the following:
- Do you like problem-solving?
- Are you capable of chasing up leads and digging through information to find important clues?
- Do you love to learn? This job is challenging but it’s very rewarding. The experience you gain is next level.
- Learning from other engineers or specialists on how they solved problems I encounter.
- Most of what I know comes from the people around me. You’re surrounded by some incredible people who know a lot, it’s a great way to learn and you make some cool friends.
- Calling clients to gauge the progression of their problem and gather more information.
- Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan of calling at first, but I really enjoy talking to customers and vendors, I’ve built relationships with some; they’re just people after all who’re usually happy to just have a chat and a laugh. It can be scary when you don’t know much at the start but diving in headfirst is a great way to learn a LOT in a short period of time.
- Jumping on calls with customers and/or vendors.
- This one is always an interesting experience. This is where your technical knowledge grows a lot. My role is often to help explain the customer's issues while the vendor offers solutions that you try to implement. You learn first-hand tips and tricks on Windows/Linux administration usually which is cool. I recently have been hopping on calls with Microsoft to troubleshoot Azure backups and how they work and Azure VMs and their monitoring tools. I got to deep dive into Windows processes, log collection, the registry, active directory (AD) and domain controllers (DCs).
12.00 PM
Usually, around midday, I go for lunch where I walk for around an hour and grab some sushi, or I listen to music while eating some of the plentiful snacks our team leader often provides.
3.30 PM
Final standup meeting of the day to talk about how we went on our assigned work and if anything is needed from other engineers before handing them off to the next shift’s engineers before heading home at 4.00 pm.
After work
I usually have enough time to head to the gym after work before coming home to make some dinner and finally get a bit of study done or maybe watch a movie before hitting the hay. I try to be in bed at 10.30 pm every night so I get a good amount of sleep, this is pretty crucial when you’ve got to be up early otherwise you’re tired all the next day.