My experience in a platform team
This post is going to summarize the main points of my experience while working in a Platform/Productivity team for two years. I also worked as platform engineer many years ago and I have always been eager to create tools that help other engineers.
Giving support is a hard task
Developers do not care about the platform their sofware runs, they intend to developed features that product teams require, I mean that is what they should do as developers need to provide value to the company (no question on that).
Everything needs to be documented
Having a custom platform where applications run means having a custom documentation. Besides this and related to the point above, there needs to be a solid documentation developers can be pointed to. In fact, I would say two different types of documentation needs to be written:
- Troubleshooting guides: step by step guides that can be blindly followed by a developer when the software suffers an incident.
- Development guides: documentation that guides developers to understand the deeper aspects of the engine their applications run on. Developers could also use this documentation to extend the software platform and even act as our ambassadors in their own teams.
## Developers are difficult users Developers are pressured by Product Managers and their managers, they are pigeonholed in only worrying their next deadline and not about the global health of the platform.
This myopic behaviour they exhibit implies that they do not care about new features unless those impact positively in their work. Some times, they do not care about the health, performance or quality of their software.
This makes developers users very adverse to give feedback, and even more opposed to collaborate with the platform team.
However, there are some times when a developer wants to collaborate with the platform team and that usually makes for a fruitful relationship. One where we can work together and acomplish great features.
But the developers are our users
Their aim is in a different place than ours, so it is normal to find that they are not looking for working in the platform. It is not in their objectives and the developers are not going to be rewarded for that.
That means that the feedback needs to be requested frequently. Maybe they only need to confirm that a new feature is useful or is impacting their work in a good way (if it impacts in a bad way they will complain to you for sure!)
Conclusion
The concept of Platform Engineer is a young one, (or at least that name, as I was working empowering developers since 2010), but the role is taking importance as