Three Years at Snowflake!

At the risk of posting two navel-gazing posts too close together, this month represents my three-year anniversary of working at Snowflake. I joined three years ago on a referral from a friend after getting laid off.

PIVOT

I’ve done a lot of pivoting in the last few years of my career. I’m in a great place now, and happy with how everything has turned out so far.

I spent a full 16 years of my career fighting to do IBM Db2 (LUW), and ONLY Db2. I built a deep level of expertise, a community of peers, and this blog. I spoke at conferences and was an IBM Champion and IBM Gold consultant. I figured I’d always work on Db2. But times change, and I went on a journey to pivot to a different database platform. In that process, I worked with MS SQL Server, DocumentDB, MariaDB, MySQL, and finally Snowflake.

Snowflake

I started at Snowflake in July of 2023 as the third member of a team that focused on performance within the SQL engine. We were “Field CTOs”, or technical overlays in the sales organization, and called principal architects. The job focuses on helping customers of all sizes with performance problems. My guess is that 85% of Snowflake customers my team has never worked with because much of the time, performance is just fine.

Since starting at Snowflake, I have had twelve (12!) different managers. That started sounding ridiculous around about manager #8, so I made a list to make sure I wasn’t exaggerating. The team was reorged between different areas, split apart, gained a fourth member, brought back together, changed from FCTO to AFE(Applied Field Engineer) and finally this year moved from the sales organization to the engineering organization. Now my title is the much more boring-sounding “Senior Performance Engineer”. Through all the change, I’ve had some good managers and a few who were not as good. You can imagine the stack ranking I’ve done of all of them in my head! Even with change at literally every level above me, including the CEO of the company, this organization feels more stable and adult than my last employer.

Both the sales version of my role and the engineering version focus on SQL performance. While my former role focused a bit more on helping customers use Snowflake in a more efficient way, the current role focuses on taking feedback from customers, and pushing problems customers are seeing through to making actual changes in the product. The one thing I really miss from the old role is the expectation to create content. I’m good at that, and the new role doesn’t really have much of that. Last month, I worked with some help from my team to find the technical reason a particular sql query was unusually slow. It was an edge case that had to do with memory management in a specific area only when specific functions were used on one specific data type. I talked with a software engineer to get a fix for the specific issue. That change is already in production. Less than a month to get a fix that is now the default in production is a thing that could only happen in the cloud. That feels pretty good, too.

I know how tough tech has gotten. I was at one point a minor victim of an AI leader board. I use AI every day as a part of my job now and am better for it. I know how to build skills and push AI to get good answers, and how to identify bad answers, at least in my area of expertise. I am also a woman over 40 in tech. There are minefields in my career. Even so, I love my job. I love SQL. I enjoy attempting to understand optimizers. I love digging into a performance problem and getting to the root of why it is occurring. I enjoy working with customers to help them understand specific issues and either waving a magic wand to fix them, or showing customers how to mitigate and avoid them.

What’s Next?

I am keeping my current role, but as I mentioned recently, I’m moving to Berlin, Germany. I’ll be working from the Snowflake office there, but in the same role and for the same manager. I am focusing my deep need for change on my personal life for a bit. I don’t have a different grand goal, and don’t feel a need for one. That’s new for me – time and again in my career, I have achieved some role or some goal and immediately started panicking that I don’t know what’s next. I think Snowflake as a company is making more good decisions than bad ones. I have probably around 15 years until retirement, and right now, I see myself spending that time with Snowflake, assuming I am lucky enough to be able to do so.