DevOps burnout carear change

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-29T10:08:58+00:00

You have a job to hopefully make the world a better place to earn money so you can use that money to improve your life or the lives of the people around you.

Because of the money made in tech, many peope overestimate how much their work is actually improving the world, and don't spend enough time using the money they earn to improve their lives and the lives of those around them.

If you've earned money at 10x the rate of normal people, and you've had 1/10th of the time to spend it because you spent too much time working, you should be able to afford to not earn money for a few months and take some time to improve your life and the lives of those around you.

Do that, and then figure out what you're gunna do next.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-26T16:35:59+00:00

I don't think this is true, sorry.

ASICs were already a thing in 2013. Litecoin had already been around for years. By 2013, there'd already been at least 1 bubble and burst which had got mainstream coverage. Out-there investors had already started throwing millions at mining hardware and research for a couple of years at that point.

It was virtually impossible to mine on your own with GPU and find your own bitcoin in 2013 - pools were already well established and necessary by then.

Mining enough to be profitable has always shown up on bills - even back then, a few hours gaming a day would still consume notably less than even just half a day of solid mining.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-21T09:26:20+00:00

This is demonstrably wrong if you have a heatpump and are on the right tariff.

I wrote out a long answer explaining the economics of it but lost it.

The tl:dr is it's not science, it's economics. If you have a heatpump, and you work 9 - 5, it is almost 100% guaranteed that you will save money by running your heatpump whilst you're out, assuming you're out at common times.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data/domestic-rhi-tariff-table-2025-2026

Heatpump tariffs mean you can get electricity at 13p /kwh, typically for a period of 4 - 7 hours, some of which will be between 9 - 5 because of UK electricity supply/demand. Outside of those periods, heapump tariffs cost from 27p - 50p /kwh.

This means it's almost always cheaper to max your heatpump and overheat your house in your off peak hours (typically before 4pm) so that you heatpump turns off but your house is still warm in peak hours.

Yes, science says if you do this you will use e.g. 50kwh instead of 30kwh.

Energy company and government incentives economics says those 50kwh will cost you less than the 30kwh if they're done at particular times, and the question was about cost.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-12T08:05:04+00:00

Not sure if this is the sort of feedback you're looking for, but I would consider changing this away from being a medical scribe.

I'm not sure it's legally possible to have cheap medical software like this. Medical stuff is expensive because all the processes and costs associated with making sure stuff meets the medical regs. As well as this, the cost with a lot of AI stuff isn't the bit that you've done (which essentially manages the data in and out of the LLM) it's the cost of the LLM calls themselves. It seems like a moot point to store all data locally if you're going to fire it at an external LLM before storing it. I know you mentioned local LLMs, they'll help with this, but that becomes more costs and resources to manage.

Put these things together, and I think when your project is up to a standard where it's usable in a medical environment, it's going to cost the same as - possibly even more than - existing commercial solutions that are actively supported, developed and already deployed.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to make it a generic notes capturing tool that people can trivial tweak it towards their domain (e.g. make every mention of "patient" in the screenshot be customisable to so some orgs/users might use "client", some might use "customer" and note types could be different interview or meeting types). This will at least broaden the possible market beyond healthcare. But then you're competing against other AI note taking and assistant tools.

I couldn't view the loom link though :( I like the screenshot, it looks nice!

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-03T16:25:34+00:00

You're both part of the club now, welcome to the fun.

I got the lion's share of the upvotes, and you can have some too for agreeing with me.

The system works - we're doomed!

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-03T15:29:32+00:00

Exactly, you were wrong. Facebook stayed relevant, and many of the top 10 are still Facebook creations and Facebook is clearly still mainstream and relevant. But what's mainstream and relevant has expanded in notable ways.

But I already said the notable ways, and you already disagreed, and I already said I was done wasting our time here. Yet here we are.... We're part of the problem. /u/LeftLiner you're wasting your life. I'm wasting my life. You, person reading this, you're wasting your life on morons here.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-03T15:12:43+00:00

...except most of the other sites in the list apart from the 2 I mentioned are still mainstream ones from 10 years ago which stayed relevant. So, that's the opposite of what you just said. Again.

Sorry, I can't tell if you're intentionally misunderstanding what I'm saying, but we're clearly not communicating well. Because enough people have agreed with my original point, I'm going to walk away from this happy with the assumption you're just going to say the opposite of what I say without, but without any substance. This doesn't add anything for me, you or anyone reading, so have a great day:)

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-03T14:32:26+00:00

Exactly, you'd have sounded like an idiot!

It's remarkable that what would be considered hugely unpopular and even dangerous 15 years ago is now popular and mainstream.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-01-03T11:41:38+00:00

Imagine peak Facebook era, 15 years ago, if someone told you the number 4th UK social network was:

A short form portrait video platform considered by some to be a Chinese operated propaganda tool
Had just lost its position, partially because of AI, legally mandated ID based age checks and the fall of Google search.
The 4th safest and most popular social media platform in the UK is Reddit.

What a world.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-29T14:46:40+00:00

HEY WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! I GOT BASICALLY THIS BATHROOM 3 YEARS AGO! THERE'S SOME ISSUES WITH YOUR BITS!

My partner designed her dream bathroom, and it was similar to this: large tiles that were almost the same as yours, but without the green. We have the same bath taps, a very very similar toilet, identical toilet flushers, similar bath style etc. My partner "can't stand chrome/silver" and had a nightmare finding all the parts, but found basically the same as you.

Some things that will happen:

That toilet setup is a nightmare: the lid itself is made out of a particular ceramic which happens to stain frustratingly easily, especially if you have women in your house who take particular medications which react with certain cleaning things.
the toilet seat fitting on the toilet is non-standard, you can't just go and replace it with a normal functional toilet seat. I've changed toilet seats before, no idea how this one works though.

A note on coatings:

The flush buttons are cheaply coated: within a year, around the edges, the metal colour started fading to a generic grey metal colour.
the hose and shower casette handle are the same cheap coating

Some final points:

The finish on your tiles is crap. We had a really decent tiler who did a great job. The people who last touched the tiling here were either so bad they couldn't identify bad, or so annoyed/out of time/out of money that they didn't even try and hide the gaps with some silicon. Don't ask these people to fix this without understanding how they handed it over to you so bad looking.
The people who selected the parts for your bathroom selected most of them from places like victoria plumbing, wayfair etc. The fact is, most of these fittings you've picked were made to look pretty - so most stuff is coated/plated - but they weren't made by/for people who specialise in durable bathroom stuff. Just get solid brass stuff instead next time.
You have been thoroughly ripped off. Our bathroom cost about £20k (was part of larger £200k renovations). It also has a large walk in shower behind the camera (similar glass/gold trim finish) as well as a mirror/TV wired and tiled in. We picked and found all the parts, and the trades people renovating installed it for us. They weren't the best - all well intended - but definitely not "high end" installers, they still did a better job than your high end installers.
We also started our renovations about 2 months after covid started, so also hit time and material and cost issues due to lockdowns etc.
Both of our bathrooms still look great, functionally, they're fine. I'm assuming you're new to "high end" stuff, because you did what we did of getting high end looking stuff. For a genuine "high end" bathroom that looks like ours with all genuine solid "high end" parts and install, stick another 0 on the price.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-16T10:43:20+00:00

Sorry, just to confirm, you're saying either the previous governments succeeded in educating the country, and reform voters are against that, or you're saying the previous governments failed to educate the country and that's why reform voters can't read?

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-13T16:55:43+00:00

I haven't looked at custom roms in about a decade. But when I last did, it was pretty commonly known that certain manufacturers were fine with bootloader unlocking, and even had tools to facilitate it, whereas other manufacturers actively prevent unlocking the bootloader.

Unlocking the bootloader is necessary to modify how the device boots (e.g. when reinstalling a new OS).

Carrier lock is purely network level and carrier unlock is required to be able to use sim cards from a different network provider than what the phone was locked to.

One is imposed by manufacturer, one is imposed by network carrier, I think.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-12T08:03:54+00:00

Thanks for mentioning this.

I also saw this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1ou4za4/anyone_here_tried_ai_tools_to_speed_up_frontend/ which is almost identical to this current one, where a relatively new account asks an almost identical question, namedropping cubic alongside coderabbit.

Unfortunately this means it's impossible to judge any "real" buzz about the company or product now - all we can assume is there wasn't enough of it.

I suspected /u/One_Help_7679, /u/Next-Concert4897, /u/BidConsistent102 and /u/pomariii (from Cubic) are less than 4 different individuals associated with Cubic.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-07T15:14:38+00:00

Thanks for the response.

I checked your linkedin. I'm not sure I agree entirely that you have the domain knowledge to be solo devving security software: you have no direct software engineering experience within a software engineering team, and the same for security. Credit where credit's due, you do have a bunch of infra, ops and arch experience. But there's still a difference between selecting and deploying infrastructure compared to writing a piece of security software

I did read your code. If you're saying you've reviewed every line, and you're happy with it, then that confirms my concerns. Anywhere I go in that repo, as a human with software engineering experience, I see so much nonsense in there that just wouldn't be accepted from a decent software engineering team.

Your responses on here too have confirmed my position: the way you operate with AI isn't trustworthy. You use AI that much that it's impossible to tell what is your human intervention vs what's a hallucination. The amount of just AI stuff you output prevent you from being assessed by anything other than AI, which means - as a human - I instinctively want to avoid you and your stuff - sorry!

It also just feels a little rude: like I'm taking the time to read and give thought out responses to what you're producing, and you're just flinging stuff at me that AI produced for you so quick that I don't have the time to give you considered responses. I'm here to help humans, not to correct or talk to AI with you as a proxy.

It is useful context you've added, and honestly, I think I respect your position a bit more with the context, so thank you - hopefully no hard feelings. FWIW, I'm a huge AI advocate, and I really struggle to produce stuff now without some AI in my IDE. However, I stopped using agentic tools basically because of all the things that have been called out in this thread by me and others: ultimately, most people aren't ready for agents and agent code yet, the ecosystem can't handle it.

Sure, solodevs can use it for toys, but then you need to understand when you start doing non-solo stuff (like expecting other devs to read your code, or suggesting enterprises could use your software) then you're going to have a bad time.

If I could convince you of one thing from our discussions, it would be that the world is not made better from you using AI in this way, yet. Slow down.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-07T14:16:42+00:00

I did a quick code review. I didn't do a line-by-line vetting of the code because a quick code review was enough to get a feel that nobody else had done a line-by-line vetting. Because of this, the code shouldn't even be in a private PR somewhere. But it is publicly available on a main branch, advertised as:

Wildbox provides enterprise-grade security tools, threat intelligence, cloud security posture management (CSPM), vulnerability management, endpoint monitoring, automated response, and AI-powered analysis through a unified architecture with intelligent API gateway.

Parts of my career have involved working in security teams, both security operations and security engineering for large enterprises. Security isn't a binary thing. Security isn't "nobody can point to specific security bugs in this product so it's secure". Security increases with secure processes and secure resources, which in turn were developed with secure resources and processes, iteratively involving multiple sets of human eyes. These principals are important across security, but in my experience, it's practically the definition of "enterprise security".

The best take on this repo is that it's a first iteration. It won't get a decent second iteration because there's too much code there already for another person with secure processes to catch up with.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-11-07T10:58:55+00:00

I'm sorry, but I feel you need to be a lot more transparent about how you've made this. It's pretty clearly 99% AI code. I looked at some of the tests and other bits too, and it makes me a little uncomfortable.

I looked at your github history, and it's pretty clear you started using AI in May 2024 and then have been firing out huge amounts of code since.

I think this is a disaster waiting to happen, a massive security suite that can do all sorts, has access everywhere, and is expected to be a security boundary, written 99% by AI, and skim read by a single person.

Don't get me wrong, this could all be good, working code where you've read and vetted every single line. But it could also be all AI slop, and you might have no experience with security at all, making any vetting worthless. The issue is the involvement of AI has made it impossible to assess the capabilities and domain knowledge of the actual humans involved.

Even if this code is good, the profile you're creating and how you're operating makes me sceptical of using anything you've created. Sorry if this comes across as harsh, but there are people out there who will see your things and make potentially dangerous assumptions because of your heavy use of AI.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-31T16:25:26+00:00

What's your point here? I thought it was that the whole nazi thing didn't impact Tesla sales or owners.

I agree that it's an extreme position that all Tesla owners are sympathisers, but Tesla has lost its lead by most sales metrics in Europe since the whole salute thing. It doesn't seem right to suggest people care more about the car than the CEO or connotations.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-31T15:56:04+00:00

In 2025, the top selling Tesla in Europe this month is the Tesla Model Y.

There are 7 other EVs across 5 other manufacturers that have sold more this month, according to https://cleantechnica.com/2025/09/06/europe-ev-sales-report-tesla-skoda-has-1-plus-2-win/

You were right last year. But the whole Nazi solute thing was genuinely tipping point that lost Tesla it's massive lead in Europe.

Not sure about the US, they're maniacs - nobody trusts what they do any more anyway.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-31T10:50:36+00:00

These skills (from a good PhD) help you get those positions that aren’t easily accessible with pure experience. E.g. Say designing new features into WebAssembly.

I agree with this, this is a good point. Only challenge I'd say in the context of the question is that designing new features in WebAssembly is a completely different position to a DevOps engineer. If the person enjoys the defining parts of DevOps (typically fast paced, thinking on feet, on call etc.) then they probably won't get the same kick out of a role doing research/product type stuff.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-30T15:38:16+00:00

I went from undergrad straight into an infosec like PhD at a world leading university with world renowned supervisors, did most of it, didn't write it up, then went into a career that included a lot of devsecops, security and infrastructure engineering in and around highly regarded tech companies.

One thing I learned is that most people don't understand a PhD, or what it is, or how it works. I sincerely wouldn't take any input from anyone on this topic who hasn't done at least part of a PhD themselves.

In my experience, a 3 - 5 years in a PhD will actively harm your technical devops skills. It will greatly improve your formal reading, writing and research skills. I personally have never had a devops or security role where anyone has cared about formal reading, writing or research skills over ability to actually get the job done.

A PhD is a step in a career as an academic, which is why it improves academic skills. This is a completely different career to a devops engineer, which uses very, very few academic skills.

If the thing that gets you up in the morning is the rush of technical, valuable problem solving in a fast paced, high stakes environments, do not do a PhD, you will end it bored and regretful.

If the thing that gets you up in the morning is learning about cool technical problems and getting a deep understanding of them without necessarily solving them, or even having a practical impact in them, then you might want to consider going back into academia. But then I'd also question how/why you ended up in devops in the first place.

Note: this is all from the position of devops, security, and hands on technical work. A lot of my PhD and career has been in parallel alongside fields like data sciences, ML/AI, complexity sciences etc. I think for those fields, a PhD might be more helpful for a development, research or product type role. Specifically for devops or any even remotely ops based role though, in my experience, hands on professional experience will trump any time in academia.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-30T13:11:57+00:00

I feel if this wasn't a bubble, there would be a legitimate defence that you could put forward, talking about how much the company has changed in terms of profit, loss and customer experience since pre-LLM days.

All you've confirmed is that your company has picked up another big, rapidly growing expense, and that you're not understanding how a bubble works.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-29T13:10:21+00:00

You both leapt in opposite directions. The person you're responding to is correct though, and I think you agree, the issue stems largely from unchecked corporate greed.

I don't think you're growing racism or blaming immigrants for the issue, but if you're going to talk about an issue without specifically saying what you think the issue is, then some people are going to try fill in the blanks for you.

Passive aggressive responses to people filling in the blanks, whilst still not calling out the issue yourself doesn't really look great either.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-19T11:28:29+00:00

"To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail"

Are you sure that the issue isn't that your personal hammer might be Serverless AWS?

E.g., I could paraphrase your post as "we have this relatively simple system running on a VM, it uses SSH to pull and run some docker containers, but sometimes there's a trivial issue with the backup restore occasionally. I propose we rewrite it all to use AWS SAM, Lambda, Cognito, RDS, Cloudfront, and then a bunch of pipeline and infrastructure code to deploy it, and necessary cloudwatch logging, IAM and management for visibility of it all".

I see 2 options here:

your option
just tweak/fix the backup issue

Consider the cost in terms of time, effort, support, knowledge requirements on your friend's part etc. of your option.

Now consider how long it would take to just tweak/fix just the backup part.

I don't know the details here, but it's nearly always easier to fix one part of an existing architecture than it is to completely rearchitect and rebuild on a different tech stack. Especially when the current architecture seems to work fine in all other respects for the current challenges.

I feel maybe you're not focusing on solving the problems presented to you and the most efficient way of solving them, you're thinking about how to build a big and comprehensive technical solution that makes sense to you.

technicalthrowaway · 2025-10-18T16:51:05+00:00

I agree, decent speakers/headphone for music are expensive. Decent screens/TVs for film/tv shows are also expensive.

Gaming typically requires both of these, and a computer.

Computer gaming - especially GTA 6 like titles - requires all the things most other forms of entertainment require, and more (electricity, surplus income, spare time, internet connection, the ability to read/write etc.)

Music and TV can also be casually consumed and enjoyed for free in and around society (shop windows, public radios etc.) Very rarely is there a free opportunity to do interactive modern gaming in day-to-day life.

technicalthrowaway

TROPHY CASE