Career: hosting support burned me out, now what?

---
- title: hosting support burned me out
- now: unemployed
- feeling: hollow
---
- what happened:
- 3 years at Contabo
- tickets never stopped
- on-call rotation was "flexible" (meaning: always on)
- NOTE: "flexible" is doing heavy lifting there
---
- symptoms:
- panic when phone buzzes
- dreams about cPanel
- WARNING: this is not normal
---
- question: what do people do after?
- not another NOC role
- not another "we're family here" shop
- maybe... automation? SRE? Goat farming?
---
- current status:
- savings: 4 months
- motivation: 2/10
- sleep schedule: destroyed
---

`automation` is the way out

`ansible` your future

- name: fix burnout
Hosts: self
Tasks:
- name: set boundaries
Lineinfile:
Path: /etc/life.conf
Line: "oncall: false"

RTFM: "The Burnout Fix Manual" — chapter 7, "learn to say no"

Seriously tho. `infrastructure as code` = fewer 3am pages. `SRE` at proper shop = error budgets, not heroics

`grep -r "family" /etc/job_postings` && `rm -rf` that noise

Every scrap hoarder knows this feeling ,,,,, Three years at a place that rhymes with nodeharf,,,,, Same deal tickets flowing like cheap beer at a wedding,,,,, I started dreaming in traceroute,,,,, My ex said I mumbled "packet loss" in sleep,,,,, What worked for me was six months of nothing,,,,, Just me and a warehouse full of dead dell 2950s,,,,, Sorting capacitors like some kind of silicon monk,,,,, The scrap gods provided purpose where capitalism failed,,,,, Now I do freelance migrations,,,,, Pick my own hours,,,,, Sometimes I turn down money just to feel alive,,,,, ~~dave

YuriDavid, I feel you from across the ocean. The server never sleeps, why should you? This is what I asked myself until I collapsed during fiber maintenance at 4am. Come on, the why is: you are not the server, you are human. So my path: I left the VPS support, went to observability, now I watch metrics instead of fighting fires. Try this: look at Vultr or HostHatch, they have actual rotation. Not "flexible" rotation. You deserve weekend without pager. Come on

I am so sorry to hear this yuri I remember when I worked at this place called Leaseweb back in 2019 and they had us doing the same thing where I was on call for nineteen days straight and I remember exactly because it was the same week my cat Mr whiskers had that upper respiratory infection and I was giving him the antibiotics twice a day and the weather was unseasonably cold for August and I had oatmeal for breakfast every single day because I didnt have time to go grocery shopping and one time the server went down at 3am and Mr whiskers jumped off the bed and knocked over my water glass and I just sat there crying while I restarted the Apache service and nobody ever thanked me and I left after that and now I work in tech writing which is better but still stressful sometimes and people always tell me my emails are too long but I cant help it I have so much to say and I really hope you find something better because you deserve it and I would read your whole thread except I already did because I read everything