zk/writing/ally/burnout/04.md

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