Ask HN: Are tech jobs increasingly frustrating?
I've been on 3-4 interesting projects (about one per year, taking 2-3 months), and the rest has been grind, on-call or ever-shifting "priorities". Tech-wise, I struggled with Kubernetes because we took forever to adopt it, we had the wrong goals, used the wrong tools, lacked in enthusiasm, and then got stuck every step of the way. I learned Go on my own time, just to feel like I'm progressing.
Frustration piled up, and I left, so I could take care of my newborn daughter. I ended up staying home for 2 years, and it was the best decision I ever made.
Now, I'm back at it, doing Go development and Cloud-Native Platform work at a startup. It's been 6 months, and today I screamed at a wall of logs, because some YAML just refused to work, and there are no relevant logs. None.
In the 6 months that I've been here, I achieved nothing. I loathe my lack of progress. The reasons are the same as before: lack of direction, changing priorities, uninteresting work, tools unfit for the job, low-quality solutions, the works. But it's been 6 months! I should be able to create a new cluster on our preferred cloud provider, with tools that were supposed to work. But alas! they don't.
Meanwhile, I've applied for Engineering Management jobs, for a change of scenery; I've held lead roles before, so I thought this would be achievable. I was wrong. I got flat-out rejected for insignificant reasons, or not even invited for interviews. I suspect it has something to do with my 2-year break; people really seem to quickly smile past it, every time I mention it.
Now, I don't know what to do. Is this burn-out? Is this disillusionment? Are these frustrations, ever so real, increasing every day? More complexity, more hype bubbles, more solutions looking for problems to solve. Does it make sense to fret over this? Probably not. So I'll submit this, and close, and go off somewhere for the weekend.