newone2three

Disagree. Not every startup has to be a massive success, not every founder needs to be a billionaire, and not everyone has to work like Elon Musk - you’re probably not sending rockets to Mars.

OP might be very happy with a company with no employees that makes 200k a year.

To the OP: save up for 6 months of working on your own thing, OR, launch loads of little experiment MVPs that don’t need lots of work to get _something_ out quickly.

I think (I _think_) maybe because they’re machines designed to kill people.

Just a guess.

I probably wasn’t clear. I’m putting developers and ops people all in the same “skilled computer people” pot. And I think so would Musk and Ellison.

You’re misunderstanding me slightly. I’d put systems administrators in the same category as developers, and I think so would Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.

But if someone’s entire job is “capacity planning”, they’re getting fired.

I think we agree. I’m not saying these things don’t need to be done. I’m saying that “ capacity planning” shouldn’t be someone’s entire job.

software getting deployed, infrastructures getting the timely upgrades..

I think most people would put these in the same category as developers.

capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing their troubleshooting skills

This is veering into made-up-job world. These people are getting fired. All these tasks can be done by developers.

Why?

Yes, I have. I quit my job and worked on my own project for a while.

You have to be doing something you are interested in, and have full control over, so you can rediscover what programming used to be like for you.

Take things slowly, and your capacity for work and motivation will increase over time. In the beginning you will still have days where you can’t bring yourself to work, but just allow yourself those days, and eventually you will recover.

There is a section on burnout in this talk that I found helpful: https://youtu.be/CCVVLAs9mJU

I do the same thing, but through agencies, so the roles tend to be larger companies and rates more like 500-600.

Where do you look for open roles directly? I haven’t managed to figure this out.

Get a new job. You can get a contract job paying £500 a day quite easily in the UK. Do a 6 month contract, save up some runway, work on your own thing for a while, doing whatever interests you. Repeat.