Our performance engineering job is one of the best out there. We deal with the latest technologies, try to break things, tune services for speed and make our customers love their applications. It is true; performance engineering never gets boring because we are involved in the entire value stream, from designing applications for reliability through validation on QA stages to continuous monitoring and optimization on production.
Everybody should think and act like a performance engineer. We always have real production situations in mind because we know that this is the final performance validation, and there is never a second chance. Proactive, open-minded, self-driven, and comprehensive technical knowledge are our most essential skills. It takes years of learning and training on the job to become a successful performance engineer.
They have always done it that way!
Tuning complex systems for speed and stability is not a cakewalk. You have to simulate a meaningful load, identify the breaking points and apply the right improvements to reach your goals without wasting too many resources. It's an outstanding experience to see the positive impact of the implemented tunings. I believe this is why we keep all these improvements in our minds and develop an excellent instinct about bottlenecks and their resolution.
Experienced performance engineers are a scarce species. It would be best to thread them with respect because they can save your project from becoming a total performance disaster. Listen to them if they share their thoughts on tuning services for speed because they can make your life so much easier.
They can't see the forest for the trees!
A performance engineer sees your application from a different perspective. He has not written all the code and was not involved in design decisions. His main intention is to simulate a realistic load, identify bottlenecks, support the tuning activities to ensure that the application fulfills the performance requirements. This external viewpoint is why performance engineers pinpoint performance hotspots much more straightforward than any core team member.
Listen and take the advice!
Technical debt can overload the entire team. There are workarounds for so many things that require a lot of support. Your engineers are so tight up with maintaining these workarounds, so they are too busy for optimizations. Performance engineers spot technical challenges during their analysis activities and share their thoughts on getting rid of them. Instead of ignoring their hint's you should open your mind, listen, learn and implement the suggested improvements.
Cutting a long story short, being open-minded, and listening to pieces of advice instead of following the good old way could make your life so much easier.
Happy performance engineering!
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