December 14, 2019
The third time was not the charm.
No, it was not. Canonical stopped doing something I believed in, so I switched to a company — Internet Archive — that was doing something that I believed in, but the process was crap. Now, here I am at a company that’s got a great process and is doing something that I really believe in it, and…
And you hate it.
I hate my career. I don’t hate my company. I love them. They’re great people doing great things and doing them well. I just can’t stand programming anymore.
I don’t believe you.
You don’t?
I don’t. You, who have at least two open programming projects you poke at with some regularity.
I suppose I do, yeah.
So what do you hate, if you don’t hate programming?
It’s not work. I don’t hate working.
It’s not programming, you’re right there. I still love the idea of making something that does what I tell it.
It’s not computers, even if I’m a bit ambivalent on them.
It’s…well, I definitely hate devops.
Why?
It feels…messy. It feels like I’m doing all I can to drag these ephemeral things into line, and none of them want to do it. It feels like all these people have grandiose ideas about what goes into running a system, and none of them agree with each other, and all we can do is to pick the least-bad one.
It destroys this idea that computers are a thing that you can ask to do something, and they can do it. There are more non-deterministic bugs in devops than in any other area of dealing with computers than I’ve experienced.
It makes me want to take up Haskell.
All very sensible.
If such a thing can be said of it.
Is that why you’re burnt out, then?
No.
Then why?
I don’t know.
Perhaps I’m only good for seven years at a time, like I said.
Did you burn out on music?
I would say that I was burnt, but I placed that on the performers at my recital.
Had your recital gone perfectly, would you still have felt burned out, though?
Perhaps.
Would you still have gone into computers?
Definitely.
Would you still be composing?
I don’t know.