cjaro

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.

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.

> 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".

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.

Yo ho yo ho, back to my old life I go.

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 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.

The veterinary field is the same way. I saw a TON of abused pets & animals when I was doing vet tech work. I ultimately decided not to pursue vet school.

Performance Improvement Plan. It's basically the company's way of saying "We want to fire you, but don't have a reason on the books, so here you go. In six months, pack your bags and go."

eBird, iBird Pro (UK), BirdNet, Merlin, PlantNet, and iNaturalist are my go-to apps for general outdoors adventures and casual walks. I like snapping pictures and posting on iNaturalist because the community and citizen scientists will help you ID birds, reptiles, plants, flowers, insects, etc. iBird is great for bird ID from pictures and a library of sounds.

The pandemic also brought more awareness of my local flora and fauna for me as well.

Barred Owls can make a terrifying squawk/yell/howl noise! Juveniles will make the noises as well to call to their parents. I heard a family of 5 BAOW this past summer (also upper Midwest here) and got to observe them all communicating and the parents hunting around dusk. It was magical and I got to hear these owl calls in the wild.

Yeah I'm with you on this one. I consider small talk sometimes but honestly, the emotional/social effort it takes + the risks of engaging with stranger men (as a gal myself) aren't worth it. I'll do my grocery shopping in silence, because with how stressed I am right now, I don't have extra bandwidth for entertaining chatty strangers.