Are there any Release Management Engineers out there?

August 8, 2007 11:37 AM

Are there any Release Management Engineers out there? I would like to find out about your daily routine. Besides the responsibilities mentioned in typical job descriptions, what is it like being a release management engineer? Is it stressful? Is there room for creativity? What sort of career path is there? Lastly, how does the pay compare with other software engineering roles?
posted by zzztimbo to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I think the routine comes down to, in large part, the particular release process for your product. I worked as a release engineer for a few months on a product that had been around for 20+ years. This meant that there were release engineers who had been around for 20+ years, and cruft in the process had built up for 20+ years. It was impossible to gain any traction to change the cumbersome, redundant, and error-prone process since everyone, including the developers, had been doing it for so long, and it had become so complex that nobody knew where to start. It was nobody's fault, but it made the job boring and, for a newcomer, frustrating.

Every morning, I'd check the release schedule to see if any new patches had come through and, if they had, pull them, package them, and release them. During a release, there were a few extra tasks, but it came down to installation testing on a few platforms, packaging, and making sure patches got into the next point release. Almost no room for anything interesting, if you're not into process for its own sake.

I left because I had been thrown into the role during restructuring. While my previous job title had also been "Release Engineer," it was on a younger product where I had a lot more freedom as far as process (and worked on a smaller team). I did a lot of systems administration and DBA work (which I enjoy), and less emailing developers to tell them they'd completely bungled their SQL and clearly hadn't tested it. This job was a lot more fun, and had more room for creativity (the development process was so off-kilter that we occasionally wrote product patches), but the workload was wildly inconsistent. If there wasn't a release or a large patch in progress, there was literally nothing to do.

All-in-all, it's not a bad career, as long as the particular process doesn't make you miserable (those engineers who had been there 20+ years at the same job stayed for a reason). It just wasn't for me.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:16 PM on August 8, 2007