I'm on the part of my career journey where I've realized you're _JUST_ exchanging time for money. They want you to work on something that gets thrown away? It paid for the mortgage, it made a car payment, it's thrown away JUST like 99.9% of the stuff I did for the first 10 years of my career.
It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in it.
Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try not to get too hung up on the work product.
On the one hand, if the person is not given productive work to do and decides to just go for a jog then they must be racked by guilt for being a slacker, like GP.
But if our organisations are diverting people's productive energy into unproductive waste, they need not feel any guilt about it at all since it is absolutely self-evident that this is the best and most productive of all possible economic systems.
In the first case, you are maladjusted because you are performing self-punishment to appease feelings of guilt about failing to live up to your own ideals. Another way to think about it is that you are just experiencing the inability to reconcile your basic human need to be a productive member of your community with the reality that your community is dysfunctional and has no interest or ability to provide a healthy psychological environment for its members.
In the second case, you are well-adjusted because you recognise that the society is just a machine and you are using the machine to get whatever you can out of it. Okay, it's not providing for the health and wealth of the community and the emotional needs or psychological well-being of it's constituents is either a non-goal or a goal it fails to achieve. But it does pay money. And you definitely do need money because money can provide for your physical needs. And while it can help with your other needs, you've already traded off the majority of your time and energy so, at best, you can maybe balm some of the damage that's been done by having a huge part of your life voided out.
I sometimes wonder, if I were some alien species keeping humans as animals in a zoo, would I would want to view them in this condition, or would it be too disturbing to see animals being maintained in an environment that is so impoverished?
Isn't the main risk here not acquiring new production experience and so reducing your chances for finding the next gig? As in "adding new buzzwords to your resume" basically.
When they ask you in three years about how you have spent the time. If you convert XML requests to JSON messages for a living and not even with Spark.
Aspirationally, you should be getting to the point where you care less about the underlying technology (you're smart, you can pick up whatever tech they want to use this week), you're paid more because you have the scars and experience that can be better applied to the tech du jour.
It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in it.
Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try not to get too hung up on the work product.