Yes I’m copying Charlie Brooker’s show name.
My 2021: Overall, worse than 2020 for me, but at least it ended on an upward note while 2020 ended flat.
2020 was mostly good for me:
- I got promoted to senior in February 2020
- My capacity management project suddenly became a lot more important to my management chain when the lockdowns started
- I moved in with my partner 2 weeks before the lockdowns after 7+ years of a long-distance relationship
- We adopted a very cute dog
- I even bought a car (so we could take the dog to the dog park, and not subject the dog to plane trips when travelling)
2021 was shaping up to be a plateau from 2020. Things were unlikely to dramatically improve, but it was at least stable.
Then midway through 2021, things just… fell apart, for lack of a better description.
Proto-burnout?
I don’t know if it was depression, burnout, or some other psychological/cognitive thing, but I just felt bleh. Work became a struggle. I was more cynical, I was overly sensitive at home, and froze out my partner a few times when I was getting annoyed. For lack of a better term, I’ve just been using proto-burnout.
I can’t identify a precise reason why I started feeling so bad when nothing had fundamentally changed. My best guess is I was overextended at work. I also had my birthday around that time, but it’s not historically been a significant point of the year for me.
I’ve had random bouts of ennui/feeling down in the past, but they’ve usually lasted 2-3 days before I start to feel better. My strategy of buckling down and grinding through it didn’t work this time. After a month I started making some changes at work, but talking with a therapist and journaling helped more.
I started feeling better midway through November, and I’ve begun to reengage with both work and personal things, so I’m quietly hopeful that I’ve turned a corner. I’m not 100% yet, and I’m still worried that I don’t know what triggered it, or even what it was – my changes are all stabs in the dark.
The only thing I can take from this experience is to be more reactive to future downturns. If I don’t start feeling better over a week, start taking some action.
Professional
2021 experiences led to me reconsidering my career arc.
I didn’t really have a plan for my career. It was a very loose “work hard, get promotions - and more money; hit a point where I’m financially independent, decide what to do next at that point”.
The burnout and thinking through things ended up with me trying to answer why I was doing that.
I still have more questions for myself than answers.
I like SRE roles because they’re usually well-compensated, and I enjoy the work – at least I believe it to be more enjoyable than jobs in other areas. I’m at $corp because they had a good tradeoff between compensation and internal opportunities. One major thing that I like about $corp is that I can work on what I want – as long as I can justify it.
I’ve been able to use that freedom to work on things I think are important, and my work has improved the team/department/organization processes, so I’ve gotten rewarded.
But the actual work I’ve done has been piecemeal in the sense the projects are not related – I’ve had no personal goal in mind when starting them. I’ve mainly been identifying projects by how much the processes involved annoy me – hence primarily identifying the issues when on-call.
Given that I’ve essentially been improving processes, I am not sure how I can make a career out of it and still grow as an engineer. There’s a book title along the lines of “What got you here won’t get you there”, which I think applies to my situation.
I can (probably) stay at $corp indefinitely improving things because I’ve hit their “terminal” senior eng level, but I don’t know if I would be happy doing that.
I’ve essentially got a choice to make:
- Stay at the current senior level, and be happy with it, presumably relying on outside of work for enjoyment
- Figure out how to jump senior -> staff
Cross join this with “should I stay or should I go”, and I’m building a matrix of paths I can take.
Right now I’m pretty sure I’ll put effort into understanding what being a StaffEng actually looks like, and I’ll end up going for it - I’m just not sure about when given I’m still coming out of burnout.
What actually happened this year?
My biggest success was I finally completed the cloud migration and automated most of my responsibilities away. Since 2019 I’ve been the primary person responsible for the servers that power the software load balancers at $corp - on the order of 55,000 servers (yes, that’s the midpoint of 10^5 and 10^6).
Pretty much everything to do with the machines was my domain. Kernel & OS upgrades, capacity augments, physical hardware distribution within the data centers, etc. I ended up loathing being the primary person - but there was pretty much no one else on the team who wanted to do it, and I honestly enjoyed working on everything below the container.
My project was to completely decouple the load balancers from the hardware, so they could run on any machine in the internal cloud – and the SWE team didn’t have to think about machine management.
It was a long 2.5 years, but I got it done. It undoubtedly contributed to my burnout, because we got 95% of the benefit in the first half (~Feb 2020), and justifying the work for the final 5% benefit was continual. I had to invoke the top-down “this is an infrastructure-wide goal that the directors care about”, which didn’t win me any fans.
I also stopped supporting a partner team’s migration and moved off another team’s on-call rotation. Moving off the on-call rotation was long overdue - I originally joined to mentor the newly formed team (including 2 new SREs) and stuck around because I didn’t make going back to my original team a priority.
In retrospect that was a mistake because I didn’t care too much about the new team’s remit, so it turned into me just being operationally responsible without working on the services, so I ended up having to do a lot of context switching when something happened.
Because I had removed all my responsibilities, I tried finding a new project was interested in so I had something to do. I didn’t manage to find anything – which, looking back, could have been the burnout.
Between the lack of project, the maybe-burnout, and my excellent manager going on paternity leave, I decided to switch teams. It seemed like the best path forward to give myself some time to recover without bailing completely from $corp (and adding stress from needing to interview, visa paperwork, bootstrapping in a new company, etc).
I took a while to start feeling better (see: burnout), and my excuse for not doing too much was “still getting up to speed”. It was true - I was figuring out what the team was doing, just not as fast as I used to.
I intentionally chose the team as well - they’re the other side of the migration work that I was doing. I’ve switched from load balancing to storage, and now we’re figuring out how to abstract storage machines from services.
I also started a club that has a shared video call once a week where we stream a recorded conference talk and discuss it. It’s usually been a highlight of my week.
Grit in the gears
As much as I like what I’m doing, I’m actually not sure how long I’ll be sticking around. The surroundings are making it more difficult.
$corp has gotten a lot more bureaucratic – and less enjoyable. Hard rules are being introduced that have added an extra ~10% of overhead to my workday (I will admit to some recency bias, but the rules are new). The historic bias towards the engineering org – and towards action – is being eroded.
For a variety of reasons (more at the end), I’m considering moving to Canada. I can continue working remotely with $corp but will have my salary cut by ~30-40% immediately, and get less stock in the future. I’ll still be paid well, but take-home pay will effectively halve between higher taxes and lower compensation, which makes things I want to do like buying a house more difficult.
Other companies I’ve interviewed with are also subjecting remote-in-Canada to a pay decrease, but just the exchange rate difference, which is about a 20-25% decrease. That means $corp much-vaunted “we target pay at 90% of the market” (roughly) is lagging. I’m waiting for February when they publish the new transfer pay bands. If they don’t recalibrate I’m not inclined to wait for them to catch up because I’ve already told managers & directors that I’m not impressed.
Topping it off, my team change has likely torpedoed any progress I made on the senior to staff track. I needed the move for my mental health, but if I have to restart the cycle, at this point I might as well do it somewhere else.
The fact that I don’t feel sad when considering leaving probably means I will end up leaving. The market for senior engineers is supposed to be pretty hot right now, I’ll be checking it out.
Personal
One big thing I’ve realized after reflection is that I haven’t built an identity outside of work. I don’t draw self-worth from my job, but I haven’t built anything else. Who am I outside work? This isn’t a labelling issue - this is what do I do when I’m not working.
Cognitively I feel like I should be satisfied with my life right now since I enjoy how I spend my time, but there’s still a persistent question could there be more? I’m still thinking about this.
One concrete thing I’ve started doing is in November I started volunteering with an animal rescue group. It’s not ideal in that I’m driving two hours to spend four hours cleaning and walking the animals, but it makes me feel good right now.
Relationship
Living in the same 660 sqft (61 sqm) one-bedroom apartment with effectively no breaks from each other took a toll. Combined with my proto-burnout, my relationship took a large hit this year, particularly in the latter half of the year.
We’re going to move to a larger place in 2022, and being more “in the moment” with my partner is my biggest priority in 2022. <3
Recreation
A lot of fiction was read, not much non-fiction. I have a stash of non-fiction books to go through. My main roadblock is time, and honestly, I’ll be reclaiming time from Reddit and Twitter. Reddit’s old single page (no infinite scroll) and Twitter’s time-based feed are excellent for this, I have a stopping point.
I went camping for the first time in years. Washington State Parks & the US National Park Service actually make getting camping spots fairly easy - as long as there’s not too much demand for the sites. Going during the week made getting a spot easier, and for the more in-demand sites I found a Facebook group that has people selling their bookings they could no longer make.
I didn’t do as much biking as I thought I would. This was a mix between not feeling like doing it (activation energy threshold), and that there’s no purpose, unlike when I was commuting. I’ll be getting a better bike in 2022. I’m inclined to get an e-bike, then use the bike for commuting for the 2 days I’ll go into the office - assuming I’m moving further away to get a larger space, and there’s a return to office at some point.
Playing Destiny took a hit as well, but that’s slowly coming back, especially as friends and I ramp up for the next expansion release in February.
Plans for 2022
Professional Changes
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More enforced time boundaries. As one of the more senior folk on the team, I feel partially responsible for the progress of the team. Tentatively this means blocking out time for code review & tasks every morning, and another review/clean up block in the evening, and being done by 5:30pm.
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Interview. I’ll be responding to more recruiter reach outs, especially those that offer remote in Canada, but unlikely to make a move before March.
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Figure out what I want in a career. I oscillate between “I want to advance” and “I want to be comfortable”. I don’t know what either of those extremes actually looks like, and I’m pretty directionless right now.
You mentioned Canada?
Ohhh boy. The short of it is there are a few things pushing out of the US, and more things pulling us to Canada.
The big attractor for the US is income differences for my partner and me. Working in tech in the US is letting us sock away stupid amounts of money for retirement, house downpayment, etc.
But both of us are chafing under our work visas. My partner has changed companies twice in the last 12 months (and gotten a visa rejection), and I’ve had my green card application administratively cancelled because something went wrong in the process, now it’s on me to restart. Every trip coming across the border is worry-inducing. And we’re uncertain about setting down roots here unless we both get green cards.
By contrast, moving to Canada means we’d be looking at at least a ~25% compensation cut based on exchange rates, plus less in pocket at the end of the day because of higher taxes.
At the same time, in Canada we’d be able to
- put down roots somewhere without worrying about immigration issues
- work freelance/contracts for companies
- freely switch jobs/take time off without worrying about work visas
- participate in the political system as citizens of the country
- not have to worry about health insurance being tied to a company
There are a lot of reasons to move. It primarily means we wouldn’t be as comfortable as we could be in the US, and retirement would be set back by a few years, but it’s something we’ll be deciding on.