I was originally employed as a Full Stack Python Developer. But this year so far, I only did operations. Now I also got a project to host the legacy Python 2.7 Plone/Zope applications of another company entirely on our infrastructure. This means, that I'll do hardly anything else from now on, i.e. no programming. It was already decided that we'll do the project, and it landed on my desk when everything was fixed.

So I'll quit my job to build my own company with some friends, but I can only leave after a two month notice period. So I have to do the project anyway, for which I feel absolutely zero motivation.

I wanted to become a good programmer, but in my last two jobs I just was a mediocre Ops guy. This is because most other programmers would make even worse Ops guys then me.

No offense but "full stack python dev" is the most hilarious thing that I read recently 😂

@Lensflare Now that you're saying it... The source of this amusement is that we also have some in-house Python tools to manage our infrastructure. And we use fanstatic to deploy JavaScript source files ;-)

What are they gonna do if you get little done, fire you? Work as fast as your level of motivation decides.

I feel your pain. I started a new dev job 5 years ago as an attempt to get out of management and back into programming. I crushed all their coding tests and interviews, but they still put me into a sys admin type role, which is soul sucking for me. Changing everyone’s system passwords for compliance, handing all vendor interactions, doing all OS upgrade projects, etc. The dev team lead is talentless and everything he produces needs to be re-written by me in my time off. Some of the “completed” apps won’t even compile sometimes. I’ve tried to move around, but they “need” me here. Sure, I get treated well with “hero” status and a nice promotion for saving the day time and time again. But I got two young kids and life - and I hate this. I agree with you that the only solution is to quit - they’ll never force another to do the shit work unless you leave.

@electrineer I'll give learning Rust while working a shot...

@TheEnd Does that "hero" status translate into salary raises, or is it a pat on the back?

@fjmurau Luckily it has been accompanied with salary raises which I certainly do appreciate. The company recognizes the work for sure, and I’m lucky to have that. It’s just that I absolutely loathe the work, and the oddball hours are wearing on my family. This operations type role requires frequent evening and weekend hours. It was advertised as a dev role with a rotational on-call schedule, but I’m essentially on call all the time.