Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

In your case, I would apply for an IT job at a primary school. Literally everything is slow-paced on primary schools (trust me, I made websites for them for 15 years) and with your experience, you'll probably be on of the most valuable assets in their team while at the same time you can enjoy school hours, long vacations, no overtime and you work with a bunch of dorks who have no clue what they're doing. You won't get burned out from telling people to right-click a page and click on 'print'. It's easy.

Shamelessly, I've also started https://parttimetech.io/ to try to cover cases like yours where people don't want to work full time but still have very valuable skills to share. We don't have devops roles up yet, but hopefully will in the future.

Short term project contracting is what got me out of my burnout. As did learning music on the side and just treating work like a day job rather than a calling.

You can also probably speak to some recruitment consultants about pitching you to companies as part time. So much work going one is bound to be happy with that.

[0]https://www.codementor.io/

But in general, do something that doesn't burn you out. And working with other humans in general is good for your mood. Plus if you reduce your cost of living, your savings might be enough for years of vacation.

The issues that lead to burnout in the first place are typically boundary issues, and with many people, that often arises out of being too agreeable.

You might find a few videos by Jordan Peterson on youtube about being too agreeable and what you can do to address that.

Just because you stop working in the field doesn't mean those issues will go away. I bet you are one of those 120% all the time workers, and feel bad when you aren't doing your best.

You have to fix that.

Set aside time for you that doesn't involve anything related to computers, and use that time for you.

Find some coping mechanisms like meditation (which ironically is more about learning to still spurious thoughts than actual relaxation).

Then get back to it, learn how to communicate and handle conflict effectively so it doesn't fuck with your zen. There are a lot of shitty people out there, you can't let the bastards grind you down.

Part of that is when you interview people for a job, its two sided. You interview them just as much as they interview you.

Things like vacation, on-call rotation, overtime, inventions agreements, and potential environment and resources available to you if you were to be hired are all potential walkaways. You should know about conditional agreements.

Positions with certain phrases have hidden meanings. Find the red flags and practice walking away.

There is nothing more empowering than walking away from a situation you know is bad. If they try to be abusive (i.e. you request a reasonable time to review legal agreements they want you to sign, and they rescind the offer immediately). The proper response is: The offer and conditional acceptance is mutually rescinded.

There are two books by Patterson I found immensely helpful. Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Accountability.

Hopefully that provides some direction.