3 ms·
My first true burnout came working at a "lifer" job, enterprise engineering for an organization everyone has heard of. It was good for a long time. Then a new m
by beat 11y ago
My first true burnout came working at a "lifer" job, enterprise engineering for an organization everyone has heard of. It was good for a long time. Then a new manager and a change in organizational direction came at about the same time. What should have been a very fun new project instead became miserable. But I was a "lifer", and wasn't going to leave. Eventually, I got fired, and it felt like someone had cut my chains off.
The worst thing is that I wasted nine years of my career there, three in misery. And it took me a couple more years to realize that I shouldn't work for others at all, but instead should start my own company. And I'm still not to the point where I can make a living on my own product without dayjobbing. But someday, someday I'll be able to sync up my love of enterprise configuration management problems with my wish for freedom and independence.
- nextos 11y agoCan you expand on what you're doing now?
- beat 11y agoI'm working on a search engine for complex system configuration. It tracks changes in any sort of system configuration (configuration files, database schemas, deployed apps, firewall rules, whatever) and lets you see what changed when across entire groups of systems. It's really targeted at larger applications built operated by multiple subteams and specialists. Large systems suffer from interaction-driven failures - Component A changes, and Component B breaks. For example, a db schema change can break applications that rely on the schema. But if the databases are maintained by a separate team of DBAs, coordinating and communicating change and dependencies is difficult, and debugging them is even worse. Being able to see changes that can affect your own domain from other domains outside your scope can make solving system failures a lot simpler and faster. I took several months off last year to work on this, and built an alpha version. It worked, but mostly taught me what needs to be done to build a beta and head for production. Alas, I had to go back to dayjobbing for a while, so it's slow going again. :( But it'll get there.
- cleaver 11y agoI was in a very similar situation with a full-time permanent government job. They were restructuring the organization and had an offer to leave with a nice severance package. I left and have been some form of self-employed ever since. I had been planning a career change at the time to something not computer related. This gave me a good chance to try out consulting and I realized that I didn't hate computers, I just hated my job.