24. September 2020

People @ Personio – Let’s #TECH A BREAK with Pierre Piriou

This week we joined Pierre Piriou, one of our Senior Site Reliability Engineers to take a coffee break. Pierre agrees that Tech is also about creativity; therefore, he recommends a Sci-fi book to stay creative and dreamy while learning not to panic (which is a very useful skill when you are in engineering).

When did you realize you wanted to go into engineering?

When I was 15/16 and started to manage video game servers and create websites. I haven't stopped since. I dropped out of university and started working when I was 19 years old, and I knew it was the right thing to do. Since then, I have had a lot of backend positions and moved to SRE 4 years ago. I am now moving to an Engineering Manager position, to share my knowledge and most of all to help others to succeed.

What’s your role at Personio?

When I moved from France to Germany, I started as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer here at Personio, a little over two years ago. I basically manage the whole infrastructure in the cloud and make sure developers and customers are able to work efficiently!

What can you tell us about your growth at Personio?

I was given a lot of freedom from the beginning, people trusted me from day one. Thanks to that, I was able to do a lot of things without being challenged on every single detail, which drove me to learn and evolve a lot since I joined Personio.

What’s the coolest / latest project you’ve worked on at Personio?

Doing monitoring from scratch. Was not the most fun thing, but it was the project with the biggest impact for us and the engineering department. We drastically improved the quality of life of everyone. During that project, we worked closely with the Developer Experience team (DX) lead by Rémi Lanvin. And my colleague Filip Petkovski published a blog post about that, go and check it out!

My team also recently redesigned the whole logging collection stack to be more efficient and future-proof. This is used mostly by engineers to debug and by Customer Success to audit production systems. And the latest and coolest is definitely using AWS EC2 Spot Instances in production for most of our workload. It was challenging to do and the team really kicked ass there!

Which book do you think every engineer should read and why?

Book

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It makes you dream, wonder about the universe, and think about the meaning of life. Spoiler: 42.

And most importantly, you learn rule number one: Don’t panic! Which is very useful when you are in engineering.

Otherwise, any Sci-fi books are really cool to read in order to keep being creative and dreamy. Tech is also about creativity after all.

What can you tell us about your growth at Personio?

I was given a lot of freedom from the beginning, people trusted me from day one. Thanks to that, I was able to do a lot of things without being challenged on every single detail, which drove me to learn and evolve a lot since I joined Personio.

Name one positive aspect of this #NewNormal that you would like to keep on the future

Home office, for all those who need it, whether to focus more on their family or to focus more on something else that matters in their lives outside their jobs.

Even though sometimes I also like to isolate myself, I still prefer going to the office as much as possible to meet with friends and work with them. That’s a part of my job that I really enjoy.

Let's #TECHABREAK with Pierre - Engineering Manager @Personio

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