Ask HN: Love fixing bugs but don't enjoy coding anymore. Burnout?
So I've been a software engineer for around 20 years now, doing mostly backend (from C++ and Go to PHP; and DevOps stuff like networking or k8s). I had offers of transitioning to mgmt but tried it once and I believe I was a mediocre manager at most. I'm an introvert and like a doing technical things rather than having management meetings or 1:1s.
Anyway, I remember back in the days I could easily spend months working on a the same project 8 hours a day with the feeling of excitement. Nowadays if the ticket does not look exceptionally difficult (in a sense - you have to spend waaaaay more time thinking than coding), it can take me hours before I can even force myself to take it and start coding - and I honestly hope something breaks in a meantime so I can work on an outage instead. My productivity is still above average so nobody notices, but I struggle a lot. On the other hand whenever there is a nasty bug nobody wants to touch, I take it on the spot and feel a lot of joy tracking it down 3 days in a row, going through logs, metrics and several apps I'm not even that familiar with. And I'm really good at it.
It makes me wonder - did anyone feel the same? Is there a niche/role where you can mostly take care of bug fixing/diagnosis? I would like to believe so, on the other hand it's harder to fix bugs in a piece of software you do not work with on daily basis. Or maybe this whole thing is a clear sign of burnout and I will get bored with bugfixing in a few months/year as well so I should still think about transitioning to a non-engineering role before it gets worse?
Anyway, I remember back in the days I could easily spend months working on a the same project 8 hours a day with the feeling of excitement. Nowadays if the ticket does not look exceptionally difficult (in a sense - you have to spend waaaaay more time thinking than coding), it can take me hours before I can even force myself to take it and start coding - and I honestly hope something breaks in a meantime so I can work on an outage instead. My productivity is still above average so nobody notices, but I struggle a lot. On the other hand whenever there is a nasty bug nobody wants to touch, I take it on the spot and feel a lot of joy tracking it down 3 days in a row, going through logs, metrics and several apps I'm not even that familiar with. And I'm really good at it.
It makes me wonder - did anyone feel the same? Is there a niche/role where you can mostly take care of bug fixing/diagnosis? I would like to believe so, on the other hand it's harder to fix bugs in a piece of software you do not work with on daily basis. Or maybe this whole thing is a clear sign of burnout and I will get bored with bugfixing in a few months/year as well so I should still think about transitioning to a non-engineering role before it gets worse?