Thinking About Work and Meaning

Since I came back from vacation work has been really slow, and most days I've been utterly too tired to be proactive in finding things to do. It's how it is at times, I guess, being human and all that jazz.

Days like these I start thinking. Maybe a little too much, even. There's a lot going on in my life right now and there'll be some time before all the basic pieces fall back into place, so maybe this isn't the time for introspection regarding every single aspect of life. Or maybe it is just the time.

The thing is that I like my job. Especially my colleagues, all of whom are great. But I spend my working days mostly fiddling with stuff in Google Cloud Platform, and am still doing far too much of that in the annoyingly sluggish web interface. It seems any time I want to get by with just the CLI I bump into something that can't be done there. Figures. Cloud is a big deal these days, and companies want people who do what I do. Who set up kubernetes clusters, handle user permissions, provision all the thousands of different services. It's just that it's all. So. Much. After more than a year doing this I have yet to feel any sense of mastery of the tools. I imagine that I'll have more job satisfaction when I know enough to be able to make strategic and architectural recommendations regarding our platform. (It doesn't help that I am the youngest and most junior in my team, both in IT in general and experience within the company.)

In my spare time I get all of this wonderful satisfaction these days. I self-host a lot of things, and feel a sense of empowerment doing so. I code a lot. Mostly small things, like my publishing portal, Antenna, the Garden Gnome Society, and other tidbits. Things aren't clouded in a thousand layers of abstractions. They don't require complex redundancy and live upgrades. They don't have to scale to a hundred million users.

I guess I'd like to experience some of this at work. Either a stronger mastery of the tools we use, or just less complexity and fancy solutions. Something more human scale.

Not sure how to go about finding that. I've put out a feeler for freelance work here earlier, but I don't exactly expect to find any. The competences I possess that are most wanted are the ones I'm least interested in using at the moment, and most organisations want people like me as full time hires in house, or full time for six to twelve months for the kind of architectural planning I'm not yet comfortable with. In order to get freelance jobs I guess I'd have to market myself too, which I really don't like doing.

I work part time now, and don't really have a wish to work more. Not sure if I should do anything about this or just wait and see how things progress. Not sure what I could do.

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-08-17