5 ms·

The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was more of a hobby than a comme

by ryandv 3y ago

The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was more of a hobby than a commercial pursuit. It was nice to be able to parley my passion into a career, but contact with the world of business tends to corrupt what I always viewed as a form of play and artistic expression. I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters or deployment pipelines. String together everything with a smattering of bash because nothing is really at stake. It's easy to get started since the tech is as simple as it gets, and there's nothing actually on the line. You can practice using obscure languages never seen in industry. Do things because they make you laugh, not to build a portfolio or a product. At the least, I can still crank out a modest amount of code and actually enjoy the process, without tearing my hair out over whatever asinine enterprise-scale clusterfuck needs to be untangled now. Still waiting for whatever is next.

oldandboring 3y ago
This is the closest comment I could find to how I experience my burnout. Nothing makes me more anxious than realizing that I fall further behind every day I'm not spending (unbillable) time becoming an expert in all the dev/ops tooling that somehow became indispensable the past 5-10 years. It's funny because I used to LOVE computers as a teenager because I loved setting up and configuring Unix systems. Now, as a developer, the idea of writing configurations instead of code just makes my hair stand on end.
- mbm 3y ago
  The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user experience has not.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    If anything, it's regressed. All of this complex tooling gives devops the ability to say "sorry, no capacity, see you in two quarters".
smugglerFlynn 3y ago
Just some random thoughts, but I've started during the era of J2EE monoliths still being on the rise, when Web 1.0 -> 2.0 was only starting its transition, Python still being niche etc. Amount of insanely boring and inefficient stuff like digging through all the XML APIs and CORBA was self-evident. It was fun to build totally new (and much simpler) tools, shortcutting quite literal man-years of work with each solution. Like rewriting half of some insanely expensive and over bloated million-dollar Oracle enterprise product into web app that we crunched out in a weekend over pizzas, and then demoed and validated with our clients before next week ended. Over the years all this exciting new way of doing things has somehow evolved into what feels very much like the older dig-through-XML-schemas-for-hours world. What I miss the most is the shared mindset of focusing on the problem, using simple tools that were build for purpose. That mindset was commonplace back then, at least in my circle. Maybe that's just a phase (cycle?) the industry goes through.
- mbm 3y ago
  This.

by ryandv 3y ago

oldandboring 3y ago

This is the closest comment I could find to how I experience my burnout. Nothing makes me more anxious than realizing that I fall further behind every day I'm not spending (unbillable) time becoming an expert in all the dev/ops tooling that somehow became indispensable the past 5-10 years. It's funny because I used to LOVE computers as a teenager because I loved setting up and configuring Unix systems. Now, as a developer, the idea of writing configurations instead of code just makes my hair stand on end.

mbm 3y ago
The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user experience has not.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  If anything, it's regressed. All of this complex tooling gives devops the ability to say "sorry, no capacity, see you in two quarters".

smugglerFlynn 3y ago

Just some random thoughts, but I've started during the era of J2EE monoliths still being on the rise, when Web 1.0 -> 2.0 was only starting its transition, Python still being niche etc. Amount of insanely boring and inefficient stuff like digging through all the XML APIs and CORBA was self-evident. It was fun to build totally new (and much simpler) tools, shortcutting quite literal man-years of work with each solution. Like rewriting half of some insanely expensive and over bloated million-dollar Oracle enterprise product into web app that we crunched out in a weekend over pizzas, and then demoed and validated with our clients before next week ended. Over the years all this exciting new way of doing things has somehow evolved into what feels very much like the older dig-through-XML-schemas-for-hours world. What I miss the most is the shared mindset of focusing on the problem, using simple tools that were build for purpose. That mindset was commonplace back then, at least in my circle. Maybe that's just a phase (cycle?) the industry goes through.

mbm 3y ago
This.