So. I quit my job, and did the things I said I’d do. But then I also … just kept interviewing, instead of taking a longer break. Which in retrospect seems like somewhat of a mistake. And in the middle of recovering from surgery, I … got another job. I’m really torn on it. I enjoy the money, but a lot of the process is really … arduous. I’ve already gotten tired of what the job asks from me, which is almost entirely ‘repair our tech debt, which is insurmountable’. There seems to be a lot of … required failure, as nothing is explained, and I’m incredibly unused to being as much of a minority as I am within the team (which … one thing I’ve noticed is that the further I scale the “career ladder”, the less women there are … so that sucks … but I was not expecting being white to also confer minority status, so that’s new?).

It also feels like I don’t know how to take a useful vacation, as well - if I take a break and come back, something I don’t know immediately crops up, and something that requires work expands, and … everything is just as heavy as it was before. It may be that Devops, the job itself … generally burns people out and makes taking a break seem impossible. I’m not sure if this is isolated to this specific Devops job, or it is just isolated to ‘bad’ Devops jobs, or if it’s a general feature of Devops. I know that I didn’t feel that way in my prior job. But I’m … unsure, really.

This job has also been a lot of new things. Generally this is fantastic - and I do have enough expertise now in production to say that I can do several fun cloud buzzwords now, which is great for my career at least! - but they’re all fairly unstructured. Though I came in with very little knowledge of many of those things, it has felt like I’ve been assumed to have full knowledge of everything so everything I’ve learned has to a point been … self-learning, but without having a real dev space to learn within, kind of on the fly. I’ve also noticed that having to learn a ton of different things that are undescribed … generally doesn’t combine well with imposter syndrome (which everybody in the space has, 100%, and I am /definitely/ not an exception).

… So. Money is good, at least! I’ll continue to do it until I literally can’t, maybe. Or until I can figure out how to manage my burnout better. Or until I can find a job where there are less constant imposter syndrome triggers, and a more diverse team environment. We’ll see.

Next post is going to be about some JQ stuff I’ve done within this job - probably the thing I enjoyed doing the most, though it took a long time and probably isn’t terribly useful in the long term - but hopefully that’s useful to some people? I’m also hoping to create some things this weekend or next, but … this is always, always, always … a process.