15 Years In, I’m tired

I’ve been in tech for over 15 years. I’ve shipped systems, fought fires at 3 AM, migrated monoliths, adopted microservices, abandoned microservices, gone to the cloud, considered leaving the cloud, and sat through approximately 4,000 meetings about “best practices” that nobody actually follows.

And I’m exhausted. Not the good kind of exhausted—not the “we built something meaningful” exhausted. The other kind. The kind where you realize you’ve been watching the same movie on repeat, just with different actors and slightly updated special effects.

The Endless Repackaging

Every five years, we collectively discover something that was obvious all along, slap a new name on it, and act like prophets. “Infrastructure as Code” is just “don’t click around in GUIs like an animal.” “GitOps” is “put your config in version control”—something we should have been doing since forever. “Platform Engineering” is “DevOps, but this time we really mean it.”

The conference talks. The Medium posts. The breathless LinkedIn announcements. “We’re doing [THING] at [COMPANY] and it’s transforming everything!” No it isn’t. You’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you’ve just discovered it later and think you’re early.

The Holy Wars Nobody Wins

Tabs versus spaces. Vim versus Emacs. Monolith versus microservices. Kubernetes versus “just use a VM, for the love of god.”

We treat these debates like they matter. Like the fate of civilization hangs on whether you prefer React or Vue. People build entire identities around their tool choices. They get angry. Genuinely, personally angry—at strangers on the internet who chose a different text editor.

Meanwhile, the actual problems—the ones that keep systems unreliable and engineers burned out—remain unsolved. Because solving real problems is hard and unglamorous. It doesn’t generate Twitter engagement. Nobody’s getting a conference talk out of “we just wrote clear documentation and actually read it.”

Best Practices That Aren’t

“Best practice” is a phrase that means “someone with authority said this once, and now we’re all afraid to question it.”

You know what I’ve learned in 15 years? Most best practices are “practices that worked in one specific context, at one specific company, at one specific scale, and have been cargo-culted into irrelevance everywhere else.”

Google does [THING]. Therefore we must do [THING]. Except we’re not Google. We don’t have Google’s scale, Google’s problems, or Google’s army of PhD-wielding SREs. But we’ll spend six months implementing [THING] anyway, because someone read a blog post.

And when it doesn’t work? We blame the engineers for “not doing it right.” Never the practice. Never the context mismatch. Always the humans.

The Arrogance Industrial Complex

This is the part that really gets me.

The tech industry runs on arrogance. Not confidence—arrogance. The smug certainty that your way is the right way. That anyone who disagrees is either ignorant or incompetent. That complex problems have simple solutions, and if only everyone would listen to you, everything would be fine.

I’ve met senior engineers who can’t have a conversation without making you feel small. Architects who’ve never touched production but will lecture you on how it should work. “Thought leaders” whose primary skill is repackaging other people’s ideas with more confidence and better presentation skills.

The AI discourse is the latest arena for this. Is it a bubble? Is it transformative? Is it going to take all our jobs or is it a glorified autocomplete? I don’t know. Neither do you. Neither does anyone. But that won’t stop people from treating their speculation as prophecy and anyone who disagrees as either a naive optimist or a fearful Luddite.

So What Now?

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer.

I could tell you I’m quitting tech and moving to a farm. I’m not. I could tell you I’ve found peace and perspective. I haven’t. I could tell you the problem is “the industry” and not also partially me. It isn’t.

Maybe the exhaustion is just age. Maybe it’s burnout. Maybe it’s the clarity that comes from doing something long enough to see through its pretensions.

Or maybe—and this is the uncomfortable thought—the problem isn’t that tech is uniquely dysfunctional. Maybe every field is like this. Maybe humans, given enough time and proximity, will turn any domain into a battleground of ego and fashion and tribal loyalty.

Maybe the only honest position is to care less. Not about the work—I still care about the work. About the discourse. The takes. The positioning. The endless performance of expertise.

Just build things that work. Help the people near you. Ignore the rest.

It’s not much of a conclusion. But it’s the only one I’ve got.