u/OmegaDisrupt

I've been working as an SRE for coming up to 4 years now. I started my tech career in support, then DevOps, and now SRE. My official job title is SRE but in practice the lines at my company are a bit blurred between SRE, cloud engineering, DevSecOps, cloud security and so on, as my company doesn't have a mature SRE practice and the SRE team have to wear multiple hats due to being spread thin (I appreciate this is somewhat common within the industry).

I've been offered an SRE role at a much larger company with a more established SRE culture. They have an embedded model and I'd be working directly with one of the product teams, up to and including helping write application code to help optimise availability and reliability (although this wouldn't be on customer-facing services for the time being).

I'm really excited by the offer but part of me is apprehensive. I'm comfortable working with all the traditional SRE/DevOps-y things (cloud, IaC, alerting and monitoring, incident response, automation and so on), but my current role is somewhat silo-ed, as although we do interact with the product team it's not in a capacity that could really be described as embedded. I'm comfortable with Go and Python for scripting and custom tooling but I understand application engineering is a different kettle of fish, and I haven't had to wear that "hat" in my career before.

I am also a bit apprehensive about how well my SLI and SLO knowledge and experience will translate, as at my current company availability is by far and away the one we track and optimise for the most, to the neglect of the others (n.b. I recognise I'm at fault here for not pushing my company's SRE practice to think harder about these things); I was honest about this, although did my best to put a positive spin on it during the interviewing process (I was also very candid with them about never having been embedded in a team before).

I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I'm fairly content, although stagnant, at my current company, as I feel like I have "maxed out" there for the time being in terms of learning and experience; and as we all know, this industry tends to punish you if you stay in your comfort zone for too long. I've been eyeing a way out into something better for some time now ,and am genuinely excited by this offer, but I wonder if I'm really a good fit for the role and am trying really hard not to let the impostor syndrome creep in.

For those who've moved from a siloed SRE role into an embedded one, how steep was the adjustment (particularly if you found yourself writing application code coming from an ops background)? How did you navigate it and are you happy you took the leap in hindsight? If it felt awkward at first, how long did it take for that feeling to go away? Thanks.

(P.S. I have a fairly long notice period and it's pretty quiet in my company at the moment, so I'd have a bit of time to upskill/brush up on patches in my knowledge if I decided to take it.)

I (33m) have been with my partner (29f) for 4 years now. Roughly 7-8 months before we met I realised I didn't want biological children of my own; at the time I was in a relationship with someone who wanted them, and so decided to end things so that I didn't waste any more of their time. I also resolved from then on to be very up-front with future partners about my stance on children so as to avoid leading someone down the garden path.

My partner says she is 70% sure she doesn't want them, 30% unsure. I decided I could live with that 30% of uncertainty when we first got together.

About 3 years into the relationship, we had a pregnancy scare. Our sole method of contraception is her IUD, which had served us well for 3 years, but as with most methods it is of course not infallible. The pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm, but while it was ongoing she turned to me and said "what if I decide to keep it?"

I accepted that, if it came to it, such a decision was solely hers to make, since it's her body at the end of the day. And obviously, she has every right to change her mind about her stance on parenthood; you can't ask someone (especially a woman in her late 20's) to promise a partner to never want kids. Perhaps it was my fault for never asking her "if you get pregnant by mistake, what are you/we doing?" when we first started dating. But to be honest, hearing her say the words "what if I decide to keep it?" still came as a bit of a shock.

Since then things have been a bit uneasy between us. Our sex life has dropped off, in large part because I've been unconsciously avoiding it because I'm afraid of another pregnancy scare, and the lack of sexual intimacy has of course affected the relationship. We have discussed what happened: she is adamant that she wasn't thinking things through at the time because there was a lot going on, and reassured me if it happened again she would terminate the pregnancy. I did my best to take onboard what she said, but part of me couldn't escape the feeling that she was perhaps telling me what I wanted to hear; it didn't help when one day a while later she said to me in passing "if we have kids one day."

I've decided that if I feel this strongly about not wanting children then it's unfair for the contraceptive burden to rest squarely on the shoulders of my partner. I have suggested us using condoms as an extra layer of defence, but she finds them uncomfortable. I'm now seriously considering getting a vasectomy, as 1) I'm adamant about wanting to be CF, and 2) I want to give myself the peace of mind I need for us to get our sex life and our relationship back on track.

I am, however, anxious about how broaching the topic with her will go down. I understand it's my decision, in the same way that her keeping an unplanned pregnancy would be hers, but at the same time I appreciate it might force a discussion about our future that could lead to us breaking up, since (absent a reversal) a vasectomy is effectively closing the door on biological parenthood in a pairing where one party is still 30% undecided.

I don't have much of a question to ask really. I guess I could do with some outsider perspectives, as well as some advice about how to proceed with the vasectomy discussion. I want to be gentle and thoughtful, and not just drop it on the table as a "take it or leave it"; but at the same time I do need to be honest with her and explain that this is what I want. I don't know, just thinking out loud really. Any other advice or thoughts from people are welcome.