# Repost: Why change role to AI Engineering

# Introduction

The post, Why change role to AI Engineering (opens new window) by Lawrence Jones, came up in my IndieBlog (opens new window) feed in NetNewsWire (opens new window) this morning.

It resonated with me not so much because of the AI engineering part, but because of the first part which describes the author's experience in switching from product engineering to SRE. I somewhat unintentionally made a similar switch from product engineering at Yoyo to the Tooling & Security team at FINN in 2022.

Overall, the post is a smart and honest take on how to think about the different sub-roles in software engineering and how to approach a move between roles.

He writes about receiving the following "anti-sell" points about SRE:

1. “Your development as a software engineer will slow, as you’ll write much less code.”
2. “The work is further from the product, which changes your relationship to the business and understanding of the company.”
3. “Infrastructure work can be long, tedious, extremely frustrating: if you’re not up for feedback loops that would break a normal dev, it may not be for you.”

He later goes on to add the following about AI engineering:

The dopamine hit is way less reliable than smashing out product features—don’t do this if you live for consistent todo list checkboxes!

The lack of dopamine hit and being further away from both the product and the rest of the company is something I struggled with during my first months in the Tooling & Security team. Coming from being the lead of the Payments team at a FinTech, I felt nervous that I was not providing enough "value." However, once I started working on access management and monitoring of the third-party services that FINN was using - especially setting up AWS access for our engineers - I could start to feel that I was providing "value" again.

Something else that helped with my shift was the fact that my manager at time, Marek, encouraged me to pursue the AWS certifications (during company hours, I should mention). I later saw how all that time spent on getting in depth knowledge on AWS paid off in being able to quickly help engineers during incidences. It also allowed me to easily spot potential security holes or cost burdens in their architectures. Over time, I came to value the longer-term outlook that we could adopt in our team.

I'm thinking of moving back to product engineering next to ensure that I keep growing in those skills, but in the long run, I hope to alternate between product engineering and roles with more infrastructure and/or security focus. Either that, or eventually trying my hand at entrepreneurship.

For yourself, I'd encourage you to consider a move to a slightly different role (opens new window), especially if you're getting bored in your current role.