buy car, kick tires

1759911067

tldr: yesterday, i told my boss that my current devops consultation project would be my last. with my pending resignation, i will also be stepping away from IT work in general because i don't enjoy it

i started this journey in 2018 when, against my expectations, i landed an apprenticeship at the freie universitaet in berlin. over the following three years i learned a bunch about all types of sysadmin shit, and in the summer of 2021 passed my written finals and successfully gave my technical presentation at a sailing club house of all places

my employer at the time was interested in taking me in full-time, so i signed on and began life as a lowly junior sysadmin at a research institute i won't name. it was okay-ish work but i couldn't quite shake the feeling that i was missing something crucial. i fell into a depressive episode after about a year of doing not much at all and spent the next 6 months practically in bed, leaving the horizontal position only to heal my party members in final fantasy 14 raids (non-savage) or try to top dps meters as samurai or black mage. it was practically impossible to find a therapy spot within a reasonable time frame, so i didn't even try. just had to tough it out, i thought

i eventually returned to work only to find that i was still depressed (shocker). it turns out that doing nothing for six months may reset your stress level but it won't magically make your job interesting. i couldn't see myself doing another day of whatever the fuck i was doing, and so i handed in my resignation at the end of 2022 to sign on with my current employer, a small devops consulting firm. i was hoping that diving into a new field would reignite some sort of fire i wasn't sure actually existed

i would quickly find out that i was an anxious mess, seemingly unsuitable for this kind of gig. you're required to frequently partake in interviews to secure projects, and i absolutely 100% hate interviewing. it makes my stomach churn and probably significantly raises my blood pressure many days in advance. the anxiety also lingers, so i'm feeling terrible for a week in exchange for two hours of my life spent in a meeting room. this is aggravated by the fact that interviewing in tech is entirely bullshit. employers ask for geniuses, candidates pretend to be geniuses by injecting their cvs with buzzwords and experience they don't have just to pass the dumb HR screen. fortunately, i only had to do one of them before getting into my first project. by that time i had picked up my first piece of kubernetes certification and was ready to go find out if devops engineering was hot or not

for a while it almost seemed like i could do the work, yet i still felt that i was managing to scrape by only by the grace of god and not because of competence. it felt like i wanted to be a professional, to design clean solutions to problems but ended up stumbling into hacky territory each and every time. i just didn't know how to "work good". i was very much a junior trying to consult for companies like one of the big dogs. i kept thinking that this concept was entirely nonsensical, but i decided that i would just get good on the job. however, i'd quickly reach a state again that i can only describe as a jarring panic induced by perceived inadequacy. i've talked about this with my boss plenty of times who assured me that i was doing fine and to trust in the process. unfortunately, he was missing a key variable in the equation of my success, and that is motivation, or rather lack thereof

you see, i've come to despise IT work. i hate almost everything about it. i hate it when people ask me to write a pipeline spec to deploy some uninteresting web application or an ansible playbook to install updates on some outdated centos box or whatever else it is that sysadmins do these days. what i hate even more is the business side of things. i'm not a salesman and i don't care about being one. to put it more succinctly: i hate it when my job places me in a state where i have to pretend to care about anything i'm hearing or seeing. because i simply don't care. i've tried to care but i can't manage, therefore, everything i do has to be subpar. how can you think things through to the end when doing the thinking causes you pain for lack of interest in the subject matter?

my therapist says that i have perfected the art of avoidance. dismissing stuff as boring or uninteresting because i'm having a hard time understanding the subject matter or not advancing in proficiency quickly enough. therefore, i'm not even sure if i really don't care about my craft or if i just perceive myself as too dumb to understand technical stuff. or most tragically, if i'm actually just too dumb to understand

it's crazy when you sum it all up. i do 30 hours per week. i receive about 2600 euros for those hours. i work remotely from whichever place i so choose thanks to unlimited cellular data. and yet i don't feel grateful, i feel imprisoned, stupid and anxious. like i've wasted the last seven years of my life. my depression has flared up again badly over these last weeks, and i've ceased doing pretty much anything. i don't stay in touch with distant friends anymore, i've quit all my pastimes, and i find it extremely difficult to get out of bed because what happens after i get out of it is a webex login. after my intensive 10-week psychotherapy stint, i was hoping i'd somehow manage to avoid the pit a bit better, but here we are. i'm taking control by getting rid of the main thing i find unbearable, and that thing is my job

and that's the story. i don't know what i'm doing next. i have nothing lined up. once my current project ends, i will be professionally homeless. i'm looking to enroll in another apprenticeship to learn some other white collar craft. i might do first level support to tide me over until then, in case the project ends sooner than expected, or perhaps i'll just apply for unemployment benefits and wither away while grinding spades online and learning about algorithmic trading using python

anyway, four dollars a pound

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath