I’m a very resilient guy. I don’t say that to brag, but because it’s true. I’m not as tough as I would like to be, but that’s a work in progress.
So I surprised myself when earlier this year I decided to throw the towel. It was time to move on. My job was not making me happy anymore.
I’m by no means Steve Job’s greatest fan, but this quote is really good:
_“for the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today. And whenever the answer has been, “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” _
Let’s not fool ourselves saying that there is a job out there which is 100% fun all the time. It just doesn’t exist. Everybody will have good days and bad days at work. But if the bad ones outnumber the good ones by a significant amount, maybe you should look for something else.
I’m a very technical guy, with lots of technical skills. I love when my job is hard because someone gave me something hard to do. I’ll need to study, research, learn, compare, try, fail, try again, pull my hair, fail once more, (repeat several times) until I find a solution. Then I’ll plan, schedule and execute. Move on to the next challenge.
I. get. stuff. done.
If you know the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, I love quadrant 2, but I’ve been living on quadrant 1 and 3 for a long time. And not because of my decisions, which is very annoying.
So with bad days taking place pretty much every day – weekends and holidays included – I decided I had enough. No, I don’t have a new job. I just walked away.
It’s time to regroup and rethink now. I do love what I do and I think I’m pretty good at it. But I’m not sure if I want to stay on operations. Maybe system architecture. Well, a decent DevOps group is not bad either. As far as there is a long and fair on-call rotation it should be OK. Team leadership… I don’t know.
At this point I’m shopping around and looking what’s out there. I really hope I can find something that will push me to the edge of my skills and knowledge and not of my nerves.