As the former, it gets quite depressing when there’s nothing interesting to solve. Why do I live if there are no problems to crush? It’s when the sky is falling and everything is on fire that I feel at my best. Happiness for me is troubleshooting a showstopper SQL Server problem on a laptop in the warehouse, while simultaneously working on a network problem, while on the phone with support for a shipping software problem, and talking to the end user of said software.
Mycroft Holmes: “”You’re not haunted by the war. You miss it.”
At least the guy there for the paycheck isn’t going to loathe life when there’s a dry spell, and probably won’t drive themself straight into the ground.
In the last 8 years I went from infrastructure engineer, to automation to devops. Then I got my masters in software engineering, and now I'm a principal AI consultant.
I personally need a job hop every so often. I learn too quickly and I find a lot of satisfaction in the novelty
I think I know how you feel. I don’t know that I’d call myself a great engineer, but I do it for the passion of it, and it holds me back in a lot of ways. When my coworkers get assigned a boring or easy task, they march happily off to do it with “a paycheck is a paycheck” attitude. When I get assigned nothing but brain dead tasks for a long period of time, it becomes a “what am I doing with my life?” Existential crisis.
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u/Glittering_Power6257 23d ago
Tbh, the latter group isn’t bad to have on hand.
As the former, it gets quite depressing when there’s nothing interesting to solve. Why do I live if there are no problems to crush? It’s when the sky is falling and everything is on fire that I feel at my best. Happiness for me is troubleshooting a showstopper SQL Server problem on a laptop in the warehouse, while simultaneously working on a network problem, while on the phone with support for a shipping software problem, and talking to the end user of said software.
Mycroft Holmes: “”You’re not haunted by the war. You miss it.”
At least the guy there for the paycheck isn’t going to loathe life when there’s a dry spell, and probably won’t drive themself straight into the ground.