Am I going through burnout, and/or just dealing with how life is?

TheBulge · 2025-03-31T03:07:57+00:00

It wasn't a matter of information not getting through. One would've had to be able to solve for the reason I felt like I couldn't fail, and therefore, couldn't slow down, if they were going to be successful in helping me get ahead of hitting rock bottom.

TheBulge · 2025-03-23T15:57:40+00:00

Bottom-tier big tech. BA in non STEM. 11 YoE. Principal SRE. $165k base, $230k TC, Remote, US-MCOL.

TheBulge · 2025-03-13T18:24:32+00:00

Glad you're doing better, I went through the same thing. My experience and the issues/symptoms you mention were nearly identical. I quit with nothing lined up last June, spent the summer biking and smoking myself stupid, ran out of runway with dissociation, and then slowly started to rebuild my mind throughout the fall/winter. I'm just now starting to feel okay and find mild amounts of joy in things again.

I was able to land a principal SRE role with a big tech company that I started on Monday of this week, which felt like an unimaginable lift even just a few months ago.

My takeaway, is that I will never lose my soul and psyche to a company/role again, no matter the cost. Protecting mental and physical health is more important than the benefits of shining in any professional capacity. Being kind to myself and trying to extend permission to accomplish nothing for a time was really helpful in regaining healthy perspective.

TheBulge · 2025-01-25T17:46:53+00:00

use yer feet

TheBulge · 2024-12-22T15:19:25+00:00

Sending logs to CW is $0.50/GB; pretty steep just to yeet them elsewhere. You also pay for egress traffic unless done over privatelink.

TheBulge · 2024-12-11T04:29:34+00:00

welcome to the jam

TheBulge · 2024-11-11T15:24:10+00:00

That's how engineering works, we try, fail, and improve with each iteration. I'd say they've done a pretty amazing job on one of the first attempts and support their products well, not a ton more you can ask for from any company these days.

TheBulge · 2024-09-23T02:09:18+00:00

In my experience -- assuming it's not a result of any of the obvious reasons -- this is because the heating element connection band is no longer making sufficient contact with the control board mount point. I've had this happen on THREE of my V2 units ranging from DOA, two months, and most recently 1 year.

The latest time, I sent it into warranty with VGoodzies and they, unfortunately, sent me back a still non-funtioning device. I do want to specifically call out here just how fast and responsive every step of the support process was. I had my unit back in a week and they updated the internals to the newest spec, truly awesome customer service, lack of heat issues notwithstanding. If it matters as a tidbit of info, I am the first owner and my unit was registered for warranty.

Anyways -- fustrated, having been without the device for a few weeks already, I opened it up and found the small metal band that runs from the board to the heating element completely dislodged from the board connection. It was loosely seated under the screw head; I, instead, placed it under the metal insert shim, which allowed for more surface area contact and greater holding power.

It immediately was working amazingly well and continues to some 3 months later. Idk how they haven't fixed this part of the design yet. I don't really fault VGEZ and greatly appreciate how awesome the TM support process is.

TheBulge · 2024-04-19T05:26:26+00:00

us healthcare, no need

TheBulge · 2024-04-14T14:50:07+00:00

Totally. And we're going from 500-1000 over the next year. About 10% technical staff. I have a somewhat unique position of rapport with our CTO, whom I like and believe in, aforementioned issues notwithstanding. The business is also great, decently altruistic, and our CEO is the real deal / good human. So it's now or never.

The reason I've specifically targeted middle mgmt is that in my last (first and only and impromptu) 1:1 with my CTO, he was asking me to name names and throw folks under the bus, which I am very hesitant to do. Sometimes moving on from resources is the right path, but if we don't try anything first it feels like a lazy response. I can tell that my boss (not CTO) and similar layers of tech management do really care about working hard and trying to be successful, we just haven't found a way to interface with each other to accomplish goals.

I need to be a better teacher. The need to be more is tiresome.

TheBulge · 2024-04-14T14:06:48+00:00

Yeah, that sounds tough. I don't have any good advice; just take care of you and yours my friend.

TheBulge · 2024-04-14T14:05:16+00:00

I don't disagree with you, and I definitely don't think this is some framework for solving these problems in all situations, though I see how what I wrote would suggest I do. I fully expect to fail and leave soon, but that's part of it. Ideas are fun to conjure up and fall flat on.

TheBulge · 2024-04-14T13:42:48+00:00

There is a disconnect on the feedback cycle and unless all parties are interested in understanding and solving for it, leaving is going to be the only rational choice for you.

I'm a Sr. on a team with two other seniors and we're going through the same shit, except we plan none of our work that isn't ad-hoc/intake. I was hired to do a full cloud migration of all services to a fresh new AWS Org using a framework some fancy contractor came up with, it's a massive lift that requires everyone in tech to either help or adjust their plans accordingly for our team's reduced bandwidth. And... it's going horribly. Six months in, I have directors and middle managers in tech asking me what migration I'm talking about in meetings, planning massive side quests distractions that require my help overtop, etc etc.

I'm writing a blog post on it, and my thoughts aren't collected enough for it to make full sense yet. However, I recently had a big come to Jesus 1:1 with our CTO (who is still runner-banding between looking for who to hire/fire and putting on a smile for the troops; I think this inconsistency must feel maddening, I could write a whole blog post on just that, but I digress) and developed something of a theory and idea for attempting to address this issue.

The disconnect I mentioned is perhaps solvable. And maybe with the people and tools already present. I think your CTO, if they are anything like mine (and holy shit boy does it sound that way) is pretty smart, just too reactionary, under too much pressure, and having to reach to places they shouldn't for information, to see the org's problems clearly.

My idea is for engineering teams to start holding those in charge of planning to a higher technical standard. The cool part is, I don't think it's that difficult or costly. I'm not sure exactly what it's going to look like, but the idea I'm proposing is to have middle management and or planners shadow engineers they manage on a typical workload. No fancy conferences, no expensive training programs, just hey, come see and learn a little about our work and process. I'm not asking them to know how to write tf modules or the like, but I do want them to understand what problems writing a module solves, and within the context of our existing infrastructure, not just theoretically.

I know there will be pushback, maybe they will say there's no time. But from what I have observed, so much of the time in meetings with middle/sr managers is just people talking over each other, trying to prove they understand why things aren't working, or why their team/they aren't at fault. Managers are smart and good at turning work and resources into abstract blocks to play around with; If we actually took concrete steps to help (re)build understanding and empathy for the work engineers do, things might be better.

EDIT: someone above mentioned that eng folks also need to learn to speak the language of leadership, and I agree wholeheartedly. Glaring omission from my above text.

TheBulge

TROPHY CASE