Career Story: Site Reliability Engineer
Ruth, 24, is a software engineer at Pinterest based in San Francisco. Learn how her side projects helped jumpstart her career in programming.
In my senior year of college,
RUTH GRACE WONG, 24
SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, PINTEREST
I went to my first hackathon.
I'd been doing programming
contests for fun before that,
but I hadn't really realized
that I could actually
do something with this, right?
So at the hackathon,
I didn't get anything to work,
HACKATHONS ARE
COLLABORATIVE EVENTS
WHERE PROGRAMMERS
COME TOGETHER TO WORK
ON PROJECTS. MANY
HACKATHONS ARE
COMPETITIONS.
but I was trying to make an app,
and I was seeing
all these people around me,
making apps, making websites,
making robots.
So, I kept going to hackathons,
and I decided, in my head,
that if I didn't get into med school,
maybe this would be
a good backup plan.
If you want a job
in software engineering,
you have to have projects
on your resume outside of school,
and a hackathon
is the best way to do that.
In one weekend, you have
a project on your resume,
it might not be working all the way,
but people aren't necessarily
looking for that.
They just want to see
that you have enough passion,
that you're going to work
on things outside of your school,
and also that you are curious
and passionate enough
about the field.
I went to my first hackathon
in senior year,
and I thought it was so cool,
so I kept going to more
and more hackathons.
And after that,
I did Google Summer of Code,
the summer after I graduated,
and the summer
before my master's degree,
and so that's...
Google Summer of Code is this program
where they give you, I think,
$5,500 to work
on an open source project
that's not associated with Google.
So, it's just a stipend,
and it's to encourage
open-source development.
I worked for a lab in Toronto.
It was the Bader Lab,
and they were working
on this software
called MedSavant for doctors
at SickKids Hospital to use.
So, a lot of the children
that come into the hospital
are sick with genetic diseases
and they get it young.
And, so, the doctors
will get sequencing...
Genetic sequencing
information from them
and then use the software
to try to figure out
what could be causing the sickness.
After Google Summer of Code,
one of my mentors actually
worked part-time at Google
and then did his master's degree
part-time at the lab I was working on
and so, he referred me
for a Google internship.
So, the summer after that,
I did a Google internship
in New York.
And I was on the Site Reliability
Engineering Team for Persistent Disk.
The summer
that I was interning at Google,
I went to a hackathon that was here
and it was the Major League
Hacking Season Finale.
And Andreessen Horowitz,
the company, was there recruiting
for their talent pool.
So, somebody referred me
to Andreessen Horowitz talent pool
and I got in and they...
So, they started connecting me
to all these startups
and Pinterest was one of them
and that's how I got my job here.
Coming out of college,
I felt really insecure
about my technical ability
because I had
this biochemistry degree
and a bioinformatics
master's degree, which was mostly kind
of a do-it-yourself
programming thing.
And so, it was really important
for me to find a job
that had really good mentorship.
So, actually, when Andreessen
Horowitz called me up
and they said, "Reese,
do you want to work for a startup?"
I said, "No, I want to find
a place with mentorship
and I feel like startups
don't have that. "
But they found me a place
that fit me anyways,
and that worked out well.
Site reliability engineering
is kind of a new type of role.
I think it was developed by Google
and they wrote a textbook about it.
So, I get a lot of different advice
about where to go with my career.
Some people are saying
that I should specialize.
I should pick either
databases or traffic,
or something else
and I should specialize
and be really good at that.
Other people say
that it's okay to just kind
of be a generalist and be really good
at debugging any kind of problem.
And I guess there's also
sort of the managerial path,
but I'm not sure I want
to go down that way.
My name is Ruth Grace Wong,
RUTH GRACE WONG, 24
SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, PINTEREST
and I am a Site Reliability Engineer
at Pinterest.
My salary is approximately $120,000.
I live in the Mission
and I specifically picked a place
that's close to Noisebridge
which is the Makerspace
that I frequent.
So, I live in a community house.
There's five different floors,
five complexes I guess,
each complex has its own kitchen,
it has its own laundry
and there's about 10 people
on each one. And so
there's 50 people in total.
We share buy all our groceries,
and I share my room
with one person
and it costs me $1,350 per month
including groceries.
When I knew that I was
going to be moving here,
I joined a couple
Facebook groups for people,
new grads moving to the Bay Area,
Bay Area, housing,
and so somebody posted
about this community home there
and that's how I found it.
It's pretty expensive
to be living here.
When I was in college
with my boyfriend,
we had a room
and we split 550 Canadian dollars
for our room.
And so it's many, many times
more expensive here.
So I currently share my room
with one person
and I'm trying to get sort of
a cheaper living situation.
My boyfriend is still
in Toronto and so
when he makes his way over here,
then we can move out
in a place together,
but for now I'm kind of trying
to save money.
Annually I make about $120,000.
So my monthly gross income
RUTH’S BUDGET:
is about $10,000, and so for taxes
MONTHLY SALARY $10,000
and medical benefits and all that,
I pay about $3,500.
TAXES AND OTHER DEDUCTIONS ̴ $3,500
So, I take home about $6,500.
NET TAKE HOME INCOME $6,500
My rent is $1,350
and this includes groceries.
RENT, UTILITIES, AND SHARED FOOD $1,358
It also includes gas and electricity,
internet, and for my phone
I have a Canadian plan
with a U.S. roaming add-on,
and so that's
45 Canadian dollars
which is about $30 American dollars.
CELL PHONE $35
It's unlimited data
which is really nice.
I often take the bus to work
but if I'm running late
or something I'll take Lyft
and so for Lyft
plus public transportation
it's about $200 a month.
TRANSPORTATION $200
I don't have any student loans
and for other monthly
expenses, I pay an $80
membership fee for Noisebridge
MAKERSPACE MEMBERSHIP $80
each month.
I pay about $60 in sewing lessons,
SEWING LESSONS $60
about $185 for Mandarin lessons,
MANDARIN LESSONS $185
and then $15 for Patreon donation.
So, Patreon is a platform
where you can support people
who are creating content,
so $10 a month
I support With Wendy
which is a YouTube channel
for sewing tutorials.
And for five dollars a month
I support Nick's Craft
which is a Linux help website
that I use a lot.
And then I also donate
10% of my salary
56
to the Gates Malaria Foundation.
COMBINED DONATIONS ̴ $665
And I do that because it was rated
as the most effective
charity on Give Well.
And for other expenses,
I spend about $120
on groceries or candy
or butter for baking,
GROCERIES $120
I really like baking,
and I also spend about $100 a month
MAKER SUPPLIES $100
on maker supplies.
So, that includes fabric,
or wood, or tools.
One example for something
I've been working on lately
is this grow bucket project,
where I'm repurposing
plastic buckets
that people throw away
and adding in lights and a fan
and so I've been buying
supplies for that.
So in the end I'm saving
about $3,000 and I do this
SAVINGS $3,000
with an automatic investment
into Vanguard.
I don't have my own budget
so this was a really
good experience
because it forced me to really
look into what I was spending.
I try to automate as much as possible
so all my credit card payments
and my donations,
my savings, that's all automated.
So, I usually know approximately
what my bank account balance is
and so I know if I have
to be saving more
or spending less.
Because all my savings are automatic,
it gets taken out.
I think that I'm kind of
generally a cheap person.
I love seeing great deals
and I try to buy
only things that are great deals.
I do wanna have a family later
so I'm saving
for that, but I haven't really
done the math on that
to see what I need to be doing.
To be honest,
I didn't expect to be making
this much money, so it's been
kind of a learning experience
where I used to be really cheap
and I would wanna
walk places to save money.
But sometimes I feel like
now the bottleneck is time,
and sometimes it is worth it
to pay some money
to save time.
My name is Ruth Grace Wong.
I'm 24-years-old.
RUTH GRACE WONG, 24
SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, PINTEREST
I'm a Site Reliability Engineer
at Pinterest
on the Core Site Reliability
Engineering Team,
and my salary
is approximately $120,000.
Pinterest makes a website
and mobile apps,
and they allow people
to collect things
that they find on the internet,
ideas that they wanna put
into their own lives,
and save them all
in one place as inspiration.
Core Site Reliability
is responsible for the overall
reliability of Pinterest.
We're always trying
to be proactive to help improve
the experience for engineers.
We've got about 400 engineers
at Pinterest
and our goal is to help them
make their services more reliable.
And we also have
150 million users of Pinterest,
and so we want Pinterest
to work well for them.
For Site Reliability Engineering,
we have two categories
of responsibilities.
There's proactive
and there's reactive.
So, reactive work would be
looking at operations requests
if somebody needs help with something,
and then proactive
would be improving the system
so that they're more reliable
and easier for people to use.
I think there are two main skills
that are good to have.
The first one is learning to be okay
with not feeling
like you aren't the expert
and you might not ever be the expert,
but kind of diving in
and doing your best anyways.
And also, knowing
how to code is also really good
because then you can automate
what you're doing
and improve the system.
Problems are so complex
that it's important
to also persevere.
Sometimes I'll get stuck on something
and I'll try to work
on something else
and then come back to it.
It's also really important
to ask the people around you
for help, because often
there's that one senior engineer
who knows all these details
and they're not written down.
I guess the most frustrating thing,
or difficult thing about this job
is that sometimes
the problem that you're trying
to fix is just so deep,
so complicated, you try all
these things, they don't work,
and it turns out it something
that doesn't even make sense.
Sean, who works on Kafka
here at Pinterest,
he once had this problem
where certain machines
would run fine and then
other machines would not.
And he figured out
that it was because the way
they were named,
certain numbers on the end
of the machine name were not working
because it was being
converted to Octal.
And that's just an example
of a problem that's so crazy
that you would never
be able to figure out
unless you met somebody
that had figured it out before.
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