I’d agree with this. Anecdotally speaking I have never met anyone on my team and I honestly can say that I feel like I’m a mercenary whose job is to just destroy tickets and keep a lookout at our monitoring. It feels so impersonal and is it really my fault or my colleagues that they don’t feel as invested?

Messing with k8s, looking at logs, or occasionally hopping into a zoom to discuss architecture for an upcoming project that I don’t find any interest in beyond ensuring the stock goes up, it feels like I’m a cog and I just do things and somehow we keep going.

Three years ago I would be super engaged and going to conferences to show off our latest work. Maybe it’s the combination of doing boring (to me) infrastructure and dev ops work along with zoom culture. Back in the day I was a mobile application developer so that was quite a different lifestyle compared to this. Idk man, I’m doing my best to do a good job but honestly it is the worst experience of my life so far. I’ve been spending my time outside of work in evenings and weekends hacking away on side projects. They give me far greater joy, which I used to find previously at work.