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date: 2019-12-14
weight: 4
---

> 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.