cosmic-cow

How Far Can You Fly On Borrowed Wings?

INTRODUCTION

The scattered and refracted light of the sunset over Rubicon-III was a sight to behold, I thought to myself. My Core thrummed gently while in low power mode as I approached the designated AO attempting to avoid detection. The Nachtreiher allowed quick and nimble maneuvering over otherwise difficult terrain. I regulated my thrusters down onto the AO and saw no enemy vehicles, only a sole rival Core standing amongst the rubble.

“So, you’re the one who stole my call-sign?” the figure stated.

I peered down to my HUD to check the stolen ID I took off a corpse on my first deployment on Rubicon - RAVEN.

“Let’s see how far you can fly on borrowed wings…”.

I felt my excised limbs receive payloads of epinephrine and boosted my Core’s frame output to maximum. With my laser rifle and plasma blade at the ready, we began our duel in earnest.

START

I’m not entirely sure what the introduction has to do with anything, but it struck me as loosely adjacent to what I’m about to say. In previous writings, I’ve raised issues to do with employers paltering job descriptions until it’s too late and also stories from the beyond where people in positions of seniority don’t have much of an idea of what’s actually going on day-to-day.

Today, I’d like to explore the reasons as to how I ended up where I am now.

MIDDLE

I’ve recently been at an impasse at my current employment in the sense I feel like a massive fraud as I genuinely don’t completely understand the systems in which I work. Much of the other senior staff seem to understand exactly what’s going on which leaves me gawping at otherwise exciting technical terms such as ‘Serve’, ‘Consumption’, ‘Prod’ and ‘Situation Testing Environments’. For the most part, a lot of the staff at my current employer are super smart people and clearly have levels of competency that far exceed my own.

At my previous employer, I was a Senior Engineer working on analytics environments and Linux administration and felt I was probably one of the better engineers in the group. Having said that, there were still a few who could best me in cyberspace with a few keystrokes, but they were few and far between in that particular group.

I quite enjoyed the days where I got to ssh into a headless server and dink around with setting up cron jobs that would kick off certain data pipelines to be ingested into a Postgres DB. Furthermore, writing DDL with dbt was pretty cool, too; in theory, those data models I wrote for a Snowflake instance would enable other analysts to pick them up and use them for useful stuff downstream in reporting for the business.

Anyway, what normally happened was that I would spend days refining a particular data model and setup all relevant upstream objects (whether that be from the Linux box I loved so much or the massive Snowflake environment that we interacted with via dbt) only for them to be either discarded or not used at all.

The feedback loop was inherently awful, and I really disliked working on stuff so hard only for it to be ignored or be classified as ‘too difficult to understand’. As an aside, I did genuinely try to design these models with the end user in mind and made them as simple as possible to use, as an example:

‘This table will tell you the latest action a particular person in the table did while also translating the weird mainframe columns into human legible text! It’s actually usable information now! How neat!’.

“But, like, could you make the output smaller or something? I just can’t fit the table on my monitor and it’s annoying to scroll”. I paraphrase and exaggerate, but that was the general jist.

Anyway, I worked here for quite some time before moving onto a more technical role at a larger institute. As I alluded to in the start section, I feel as if I’m way out of my depth at a technical level but after some deeper reflection, I think I’m starting to realise I may not be so into hailing the Machine Spirit as I originally thought.

I attend my various Agile ceremonies and just stare at my screen with indifference while people ask me ‘have you completed the ticket and how long will it take to complete?’ on tasks that are seemingly not that important in terms of ‘getting the job done’ which also, funnily enough, goes against the very brief tenets of the Agile Manifesto.

When given the opportunity to complete a technical task, I just want to throw my beloved computer through the window because the pipelines are so incredibly complicated and incredibly hard to develop on. Then, I find myself just translating someone else's SQL from an ancient report that ‘has a long and varied history of failure and problems, best of luck!.’ while also rushing it out the door to the testing environment when it’s clearly not ready for deployment.

STOLEN CALL-SIGN

With the mounting frustrations I find myself questioning my devotion to the blessed machine and wonder if those dudes I ragged on in previous writings were in-fact, better off than myself. It’s interesting to ponder the idea of something to the effect of “Man, I am SO good at my job! I can’t believe I get to do this everyday” and doing the job is recursively deleting Production instances of a Snowflake database via a Lambda function that can accidentally be run if the wrong Environment variable is set within the Yaml file.

I question whether these feelings are aligned to imposter syndrome or if I’m simply losing interest in the field entirely. It’s hard to discern, because I have seen there are people I’m better than who have seemingly higher accreditation by virtue of their fancy titles such as ‘Lead Engineer’ while also being able to be bested by someone with a ‘Junior Intern Engineer’ title, too.

So, am I the mercenary who deployed to Rubicon-III via an orbital sling and stole Raven’s callsign on my first day?

END

I guess this probably reads as more of a vent than anything else, but I feel I have discovered some things about myself in recent times. A general list is as follows:

  • I’m getting really frustrated at work way faster than normal
  • Despite working with competent engineers, I don’t really want to listen to anything they have to say, anyway
  • If I were to go work somewhere else, would I even enjoy it?
  • This sucks, man! What the heck am I gonna do?

More importantly I think it made me think about a target goal to set for myself which is loosely as follows:

  • I’d really like to work with people I personally identify with.
  • The work I do has minimal levels of BS between start and completion.
  • Somehow, write more bad fan-fic of Armored Core as an excuse to write tech adjacent blogs.

Adios, nerds - see you in virtua-space.

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