My new CrowdStrike job
A recap of the last 2 weeks in my new position with CrowdStrike
On the 4th of may, I began a new chapter in my life, finally begining the journey to my career, whatever it may be. As a CrowdStrike Datacenter Associate, I am now responsible for installing hardware, configuring it, putting it through it’s paces, racking, and shipping out over a dozen 42U server racks every week. Each of these racks contains millions of dollars of specialized equipment. We’re talking petabytes per rack, kW of power, and days of racking, testing, and more.
The first week was a lot to absorb. There’s a rhythm to the floor that takes time to learn. Which tools live where, how to read the rack layout, and the hardware itself is unreal up close. You stop thinking about servers as black boxes pretty fast when you’re the one sliding drives into 2 dozen 24-bay JBODs at 7am.
Physically, it’s harder than I expected. A fully loaded storage node can push 80 pounds, and a full shift means dozens of them. My hands were wrecked by the end of day two. You learn to learn how to rack a server or sled a few hundred drives without cutting your hands raw. There’s something satisfying about work that actually makes you tired, but I wouldn’t last if this were the only thing my job description entailed. Luckily, there’s plenty more to do to the servers besides throw hundreds of drives at them.
The team is solid. Everyone’s done this long enough that they’re efficient without being cold about it. Questions get answered, mistakes get corrected without drama. The pace is real though. A rack doesn’t care that it’s your first week, and neither do the places that need them.
Two weeks in, I still feel like I’m learning the edges of the job. But I can rack a server cleanly, and actually hold a conversation about what I’m doing and why. That’s more than I could say on day one. I don’t know exactly where this goes, but it’s a start, and it’s mine.
As a foot-in-the-door job, this I feel is an absolutely incredible start. From hobbiest & part time laptop repairman straight to Datacenter Tech, completely skipping over other jobs like helpdesk, it’s a real confidence boost. Not to mention I am the youngest team member by over a decade. The pay is good, nothing to gawk about, but that’s not why I took this job. More than anything, it is an incredible thing to put on my resume in my search for other jobs, which is another perk of this position - I just gave my contact info to a team member who has also been with FaceBook for a very long time. Very much looking forward to seeing where that goes. There will be another update if/when that happens >:)