If we compare DevOps to a real life jobs. Then it will be an fire emergency service. But the one that not only puts out fires, but also engineers waterpipes in the city, makes procurement and acquisition of the new technology that helps to put fires down, and does own reseach and development as well.
Not surpsising that DevOps has the highest salaries among non money controlling jobs and probably the highest burnout rate, which is also the reason for high price.
I hit my first hard limit at age 27, after 5 years of doing automation stuff and then trying to jump on opening a company and quite hostile and stressful environment for business, which is still present in Belarus 2021. The outbreak of psoriasis on my face was so severe that I was sent to a hospital. The skin on my eyelids cracked, and my eyes were literally bleeding.
I got back to my work, doing DevOps things, but now without much enthusiasm for maybe another 3 years, and then I hit the wall once more. Not being able to get back to work, I spent another few years just wasting my money, doing some social and community things that didn't involve money. Doing things that nobody was doing, so there was no competition, no stress and no money. Until I had 0 on my balance. I sold the car of my father and realized that I will spend next three years in the same "misery" without the future. Saving money, cutting expenses. So I decided to spent them all and went with my friends to a boat tour in Thailand. The thought of getting back into the sad and hateful state I was in, forced my to take the Sabai as something I want to preserve. Something I value more over money and job. And in two months I've got the best offer of my life from crypto folks.
Time passed and absolute freedom and a broad range of interests started to take its toll on my health again. I couldn't make all the things I invented, I couldn't polish them, couldn't deliver what people expected, and most importantly, the things I made started to break without even getting to the stage of being beautiful. So many technologies are underdeveloped to make our join vision attractive for more people, and we didn't have metrics how are we going to get more funds. Despite all my Sabai and mindfullness awareness I ate myself again, because I realized how powerless I am. So I ended up in Thailand meditation centre as a translator. Abandoning my dreams of a better future, I returned in Minsk and looked into how to apply my skills to earn money. Not dreaming of opening a company, or "saving the world" anymore. Just a humble buddhist who exchanges his time for food, clothes, shelter and medicine. In half a year I ended up eating bags of medicine, because job stress made my psoriasis bad again. With all great plans and designs in my head, I could not deliver, because of constant interruptions, maintenance work and the tight budget, and the whole thing broke again. Until the end of the year I hit the ground 0 again.
Seeing my doing nothing, my friends who were not coders, started to ask for help with their small no-budget or tips-money projects. Like helping to make HTML edits to Ruby on Rails site, or making a button in some .NET applications. At some poing I registered at UpWork and started to look for DevOps job, but the negative achors from the past haunted every offer I saw with so much depressive feelings that I didn't even had the guts to apply. I even took a formal course in DevOps to get my interest back, and it almost helped. But when the time came to accept the offer, I couldn't make a step and sacrifice my time, such as these two hours that I've already spent writing this text, to live my life as a DevOps.
I started to write this because I've been offline, drifting down the river Pripyat on a custom made raft for the last 10 days, and my dopamine triggers are not assigned to a smaller easier tasks, and are not stimulated by endless checking of mails, telegram messages, writing small code pieces and browsing tabs. I started to write this after a response to a job offer in which I mentioned that I am more interested in sex than in a DevOps position. I did that, because I can't ignore the fact that the only thing that I find attractive in this position is the fantasies I have looking at the photo of the person who is writing to me. And I am afraid that if I accept the offer, I won't have time for relationships, for sex, and even for spending money I earn. Because I will be living on DevOps plane, filled with stress, tasks, expectations of failure and feelings that I am not good enough, fears that systems may fail at any moment, feelings that the company and other people can lose money if I make mistake. I love automating things, I love art and making beatiful things happen, I love demoscene and old school warez intros. There is nothing like this in DevOps plane, and even with understanding from others, no time to explore this world, because there is always yet another fire to put out.
My capacity is limited. And I trained my mind-body system to make mind punish my body thanks to cyperpunk and Mr.Gibson Neuromancer. I think that's obvious that people who follow this way of life doesn't survive, and neither did I. There is no Neuromancer movie, because its followers couldn't make it. Couldn't make through life to find the time and budget to organize as a 600+ people collective. And as another washed out hacker, I'd rather do this movie with others to make my past rest in peace, rather than taking on another DevOps job.