I appreciate your shared experience as I have a rather similar one. I've been on a platform SRE team for about eight months myself, with seven years of SWE experience before that, and feel as though I'm just able keep my head above water. It's one thing to learn about k8s, the cloud, terraform, etc, then quite another to pile it all together, particularly since it all becomes heavily customized. It's a different job than code-writing software engineering, that's for sure. To me, it feels less like there's a 'stack' so much as there's a word cloud of DevOps buzzwords to start throwing at problems. Even when directed by architects & principals, it overwhelms.
I resonate with feeling incredibly dumb whenever I pick up a new ticket from our backlog. It feels like gaining deep knowledge of these systems will be a nearly insurmountable challenge. It's been eight months, and while I know far, far more than I did on day one, I feel that every day is a day one of sorts.
I agree. I was hired over a year ago to a similar place that's since been acquired by a Big IT Consulting Company. One benefit of that situation is that a) I can kinda just blend in and do my job quietly without attracting much notice, and b) the hiring bar was insanely low, the easiest interview-to-offer pipeline I have ever fallen through. I'm not planning to stay forever, but they're paying my bills and giving me work so for now, I'm content to stick it out, maybe through the end of next year even.
For both your and the GP's comment, it would be great if you could share some details on how job searching with "local low prestige consulting companies" works, either here or in a recent post I made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841.
One thousand percent agree. I can't even bring myself to finish Streets of Laredo because I cannot say goodbye to the world McMurtry created. I haven't teared up at a book since I was a kid, but Lonesome Dove made it happen. I feel like all I've wanted to do since finishing Lonesome Dove in July... is talk about Lonesome Dove. It catapulted itself into my top 3 books list. I have to re-read Anna Karenina to decide which is better at this point. I wish Lonesome Dove was 1500+ pages.
Yeah, I think his dismissal of the book in the article is pretty typical of people's approach before they read it:
> I’m simply not sure I have the will to face 839 pages of cowboys by an author I don’t know.
I don't blame him, I was the same way, but that book subverts expectations in the best possible way. The reason it won a Pulitzer despite having the baggage of being a "cowboy book" in the world of literary novels was because it's an undeniable artistic achievement, full stop. Part of that achievement is sustaining its effect throughout an epic length. In other words, the page count is a feature rather than a bug.
> it's a mistake to expect to derive significant joy / self-actualization / gratification / whatever from your "job"
I couldn't agree more. Over the course of the last few years, I have put in the work to separate my work and my life. I now notice a difference in how I interact with my work. I am a solid "bare minimum" worker, and I've been able to get away with it. Does it have an effect on my earnings and reputation? Probably. I know I'm not going above and beyond and qualifying for some of the perks & programs that my coworkers do. I happen to not give a shit about that corporate reward atmosphere. I make $101k/yr and I'm comfortable and my work days are short and manageable.
Do I enjoy my work at this current moment? Not really, but it's easy and it pays my bills and I have capacity for other shit that I enjoy - hiking, photography, games, etc. Plus, I have had enough time to evaluate what I truly value in my work and want to do year over year (I am interviewing later this week for a better-fit job I know I have in the bag if I can ace this technical).
As I've been interviewing, I've gotten the question over and over: how much coding/programming do you do outside of work. My interview answer includes a spiel about a few side projects I've got on my roster. My honest answer is "almost none".
Don't forget this bit "I mean, sure, if you happen to enjoy your job, then that's a nice bonus."
It's great and important to be able to separate your day job and home life, now more than ever. At the same time, there's no requirement that you half-ass your job. To me, a job well done is always a more interesting way to pass time than with lack of care. It's 8 hours either way and can seem like less.
La Sainte-Chapelle was far better than the Notre Dame for me. I went to mass at the cathedral but the art and design of the Saint-Chapelle was more beautiful to me. I grew up catholic so maybe huge grand cathedrals don't really inspire much beyond reluctance and memories of suffocating in stuffy cathedrals my whole childhhood.
It is a beautiful piece of history, but that's the extent of it for me. Cheers to those to find the cathedral moving or breathtaking.
The majority of the media I bought on iTunes from about 2006 onwards is gone. Some of the music is still there, but every music video, show, and movie is gone. If I hadn't had the common sense in high school to back it all up to my hard drive, it would be gone forever. that was a tough wake up call that I don't own any media I "buy" from Apple/Amazon/etc. I'm renting it until they're done hosting it.
I have an M1 mac for work and I am seriously impressed with the battery life. I prefer my asus laptop that I loaded ubuntu on for my daily driver (gaming, coding, fun), but man, I can leave my work machine unplugged all day while running the work VPN, firefox & chrome, remote desktop, vscode, slack and mattermost, and finish out the day with above 70% battery. I wasn't planning to like this laptop but I do.
I'm in the same boat. Unfortunately, I have run into odd compatibility issues when trying to compile and run a handful of Rust projects that are generally meant for x86 platforms. That issue and macOS prevents me from adopting the m1 as my daily driver.
I agree with you. I was rejected from a company in January after spending upwards of 40 hours on the process. 9-10 on the actual interview, talking to people, Zoom calls that blew through the scheduled times, and the rest on their code challenge/assessment. I could feel my motivation and even desire for the job tanking dramatically by the end of my 3rd 3-hour-long zoom call with their team. I didn't even want to do the code challenge at that point.
On the flip side, the jobs I've held where the interview process is more centered around my past work, discussions about approach to teamwork & software development, and extracurriculars/interests have never failed to lead to something more enjoyable and long-term. The fastest way, in my experience, to destroy a candidate's interest in your company is to demoralize and dehumanize them by dragging out the process for weeks (I am "still waiting" to hear back on a job I applied for in December... if they end up getting back to me at this point, I just can't see myself wanting to continue the conversation.)
That's the opposite direction I'm trying to head. I'm at a huge company (relatively, I guess - 300+ ppl, got acquired by a several-thousand ppl company) and I'm eyeing a startup. I hate how corporate and over-policied everything has become.
The Body Keeps the Score is honestly a must-read, but it can be deeply challenging. Reading that book helped me uncover even more childhood trauma that I wasn't really actively processing or recognizing as abuse until then. So it was an extra challenge on top of the trauma I was already dealing with.
And for what it's worth, I also am a SWE, and I also struggle working around men. 90% of the time, the men I work with are awesome, supportive, nice, etc. But the trauma informs that 10% where I feel invalid, not seen, objectified... all that fun stuff. It's challenging and I don't think trauma has ever been brought up as a challenge in the workplace when there's no trauma directly in the workplace, if that makes sense. I certainly haven't directly connected it before this.
I resonate with feeling incredibly dumb whenever I pick up a new ticket from our backlog. It feels like gaining deep knowledge of these systems will be a nearly insurmountable challenge. It's been eight months, and while I know far, far more than I did on day one, I feel that every day is a day one of sorts.