I’ve built and run a performance monitoring platform/team at a large tech company. I’ve also worked in security for the past few years.

Both have similar problems: if the business goals don’t align with reducing latency or improved security posture then your detailed analysis will get parked in a ticket queue and promptly forgotten. Your OKRs will be missed. You will also be fighting the tide against new features developed sloppily- as latency will increase and then investment in your team seems like it’s not working to the executives. Fortunately we had a supportive directive but being siloed into an infra org didn’t give us the juice to influence product roadmaps.

We built a lab for testing against devices, did a bunch of work to isolate noise, integrated automated regression testing into CI to combat this. It still didn’t move the needle frankly, as the teams building products were not held accountable for the regressions (and don’t forget that it’s likely the right move for the greater business health!).

Netflix is unique in that latency is very core to their product.

Peformance (beyond analysis) is one of the most interesting things to do beyond building things. It's needed and relevant in many settings and you can (have to) do it without the JD (and IMO you should at least initially). You'll find plenty of this at any relevant size infrastructure place (there are a lot of them).

The principle to do whatever you love is to "ask for forgivness not permission". Feel free to understand why you're solving what you're solving in order to challenge it and do it right.

I work on performance and I enjoy it even more than writing features, honestly. There’s much more freedom in it in a professional setting because you generally get to define the subtasks under the goal of “make it faster/more efficient” whereas with a feature you’re usually told what specific thing you’re supposed to make, and your flexibility is usually just picking how to implement that. And the problems are almost always challenging and require technical (and occasionally, political) insight to fix. With features you might ship something that’s loved or a dud, but improving the performance of something is basically always a good thing.

I'm currently at a very big company (not faang) and I had the chance to do a little bit of performance analysis.

But unfortunate it was a totally unoptimized thing so only quick low hanging fruits.

Like io bound but they didn't though that component is the issue as it was not CPU bound, bad SQL queries and unoptimized caches.

Nothing big or difficult to analyse :-(

I learned about one person who is only doing java Performance analysis and he said it took a while to be known in the industry good enough that he can do it fulltime.

And he has to travel to allot of customers.

Hey it’s fine to build a name for yourself while knocking out low hanging fruit. It’s still bringing useful and meaningful results in a professional setting.

Well, he moved to Australia last year.

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-05-29/moving-to-austr...