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I hear you. It's definitely important to be careful; less prestigious jobs can also just mean getting treated with less prestige AKA like shit.

I think this is more of an organisational thing, as well as likely your team within the organisation

There's a lot of programming gigs in the public sector or in larger boring organisations. They pay less but are also have lower expectations and more structure which are both great

No PTSD but dealing with burn out I needed to find something else, and that's what I tried. So far it's paying off.

I will but only if it's motivated by some moral/ethical calculus. If it's just a product I kind of like then I'm out of there

Could it be people are choosing over-engineered solutions because AWS has bad documentation and that's what the solutions architects tell them to do?

Could it be because microservices and so-called "server-less" have been sold as cost-saving measures that increase the business' flexibility and decrease capital investment?

When... in reality a single deployed Docker container is way more manageable than a distributed system constructed with "lambdas" and requires fewer engineers in the long run?

What I'm trying to say is that FAANG cargo-culting is only part of why developers choose to build solutions that scale larger than they need. Another large part is the cloud development ecosystem writ-large and the consulting culture that has built up around it.

I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.

A large portion of this is due to the corporate enclosure of deep learning and machine learning that has occurred over the past 10 years. This, combined with the scale required for a lot of deep learning research, means that neither the code nor the resources required for reproduction are accessible outside of corporate labs.

You're being exploited. You've been worked to your limit. You probably share some blame in this but you're certainly not the one profiting from it so the key thing is you need to stop for a minute.

You need a break to re-evaluate. At least two weeks without work before you even bother trying to sort through important questions like who you are and what you want. Once you've relaxed, you can start to ask the heady, existential questions that it sounds like you've been putting off for a while.

Try asking for some extra vacation from your employers. If they won't give it to you, and you can afford it, ask for unpaid time off.

Rationality is a tool not a state of being.

Have you switched jobs on a while? It sounds a little like you’re also describing being deeply embedded in your organization and having social capital there.

I’d suggest switching jobs. You’ll lose the social capital and have new tech to learn. The stress and work of reaccumulating those should distract you for a hot minute

1. I am cranky on Wednesdays. I'm sorry. I'll try to do better – but Thursday or Tuesday are probably better.