Hi brother - just know you have intrinsic worth beyond what the world sees (or what you think the world sees). You have overcome lots of challenges in life to even get to your 40's; no one escapes challenges.
Might I recommend an outward approach? Look for an opportunity to serve someone around you and evaluate how you feel after that experience. The lift in your emotions will also power you to overcome the next challenge you are facing/will face.
I also strongly recommend therapy. It has literally saved my life. I had to bounce around to a few therapists before I found one that really resonated with me, but that external resource gave me a way to evaluate my life and decisions without my own bias.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness and introspection in your question.
I have found that different types of activities bring me joy/energy/fulfillment, and others do not. Identifying which activities do this for me took a few years of thought, coupled with asking people who know me well about what they observe. I realized about 10 years ago that I'm most fulfilled when I'm teaching - literally leading a formal learning session with students. I find opportunities to do some of this in my work (I'm a co-founder with tons of autonomy in my role), but ultimately I've decided that my job is the means to open up more doors to teach. I'm getting an MBA to open the door to be an adjunct professor in business.
I share this because once you know what activities bring you joy/energy/fulfillment, you can rearrange your life to maximize how much time you spend doing those things.
Huge Zapier fan and user here. In fact I wrote an article on LinkedIn a while back about how many heads I think their product is saving us. And we have our own developers - there are just so many instances where using a service like this saves us the opportunity cost of building things for our own customers. Almost all of our use cases are around automating data connections for internal systems we use and love.
Helped form these at my former company, so I'm biased. But the memorability and thoughtful definitions really helped these stick (to this day):
https://www.entrata.com/company/values
I've had a similar approach for the past few months, but with some changes:
- I have my wife manage restrictions; only she knows the passcode
- I have Safari set to only a whitelist. This means when friends send me a link, I've got to get to a computer to open it.
- I have no access to "unlimited" content: no app store, no news aggregators, no google
- My home screen has primarily utility and "creation" apps (Drafts, Day One, Trello, etc)
- I've turned off almost all notifications. Mail has no sounds, alerts, or badges. I do have badges and alerts on text messaging and slack, but am probably going to turn off slack notification completely.
- I've yet to remove all games. I should. I've yet to remove Hacker News and Tech Crunch, but don't currently feel an incessant need to check those.
I'm a former healthcare administrator and just want to point out that many many administrators work much more than the 9-5.
I'm also working at a healthcare tech startup aimed at reduced the administrative burden to doctors, administrators and insurers of managing their patients at home, which is where the worst outcomes often happen.
Each segment we work with feels this burden, it is not isolated to the physicians.
In this case, being able to Google how to fix a slightly-misconfigured Apache and Tomcat counts as passing the test with flying colours. Becoming a Google-Certified [whatever] Engineer at the drop of a hat is something we regard as a serious positive in a sysadmin. Open book tests are never easy.
Someone still calling sysadmins instead of devops in HackerNews is a rare thing. :)
I know many so called sysadmins who could not pass this test in a reasonable time. Sometimes people without even basic script-fu or networking knowledge are considered sysadmins. And this drives me crazy.
Yeah. I'm thinking of Joel Spolsky's 199/200 who are just the same bozos cycling through interviews until someone hires them by accident ...
"devops" is fighting words in our team. Damn, if I could get our devs who'd like "devops" on their CV to give a hoot about the "-ops" half of that buzzword ... when a dev shows awareness of ops issues with their shiny new thing, I make a point of mentioning their name positively to the dev manager. "X knows their stuff. Give them more good stuff."
:) When devs are in the loop it always comes to "working in localhost" debate. I like to say developers are working or living in their isolated bubble. And whenever their code comes out of that bubble and reach the real world ops are on fire.
Always the ops guys are in fault.
I think every developer should be given sysadmin 101 and 102 lessons.
I'd just like to note here that the sysadmins know damn well when a dev tries to blame them for something the dev did ... and we NEVER. FORGET. So don't do that.
I'm not sure how to educate devs to think ops. Perhaps have their phone ring at 3am when stuff breaks? I think that would close the feedback loop nicely.
(Let me note again: I LOVE the devs who think operational issues, who think end-user issues - what customers are actually like - who think "developer of the whole thing from go to whoa" and not just "coder on my PC." As I'd hope we all do here.)
As both a developer and admin, it's a little hard for me to not think across the aisle. However, I can think of developers that basically refused to think outside their solo - they tend to fit the type of person that really doesn't like to go too far outside the bounds of their workday tasks. Not saying that everyone is this way, but you wouldn't ask John Carmack to try to think about continuous integration and deployment stuff while he's stuck reading physics books and reading a bunch of papers, would you? Yes, good devs tend to have the curiosity and, more importantly, the concern to think beyond just their immediate day to day concerns of hyper focus and in-depth knowledge.
Sometimes you just need to hire more people or ask the rest of the team to accommodate someone that's that one random oddball. A management book I read mentioned Phil Knight talking about how the Bulls had room for one Dennis Rodman and only one, and made it clear that nobody else can pull the stunts he does without disrupting the harmony.
There's a huge difference between a dev that does something a bit out of ignorance and one out of indignance.
Some companies have developers spend some time in SRE (I believe Google practices this sometimes) so they can gain some insight, but it may not be the best idea for a lot of orgs. It's part of why most orgs that do some form of devops well tend to remove a lot of concerns off the table by using stuff like AWS. Meanwhile, silozation helps people maintain some sanity and focus in larger orgs where there's so much BS work on top of your technical duties.
Sometimes the culture is short-sighted and people are at odds with goals though. I've been penalized by managers and peers for not paying enough attention to my dev duties (which were pretty meh) when I was busy helping support and sales help bring in and retain $2 million in accounts that they later named me on calls as their informal engineering MVP.
But really, being aware of what other people care about in their job is a contentious issue that I mostly think boils down to personality and general ideas of teamwork.
But presumably that happens some time down the road long after you have made your decision. Either that, or said secrets are published and heard about by an audience which are tuned to hear about interesting things quickly, who may also be what you're after.
Not necessarily, it only starts the long term capital gains clock: you still need to hold the stock for a year and have the grant be at least two years in the past to qualify.
Also, the company may not allow you to early exercise. Ask them before accepting an offer!
Might I recommend an outward approach? Look for an opportunity to serve someone around you and evaluate how you feel after that experience. The lift in your emotions will also power you to overcome the next challenge you are facing/will face.
I also strongly recommend therapy. It has literally saved my life. I had to bounce around to a few therapists before I found one that really resonated with me, but that external resource gave me a way to evaluate my life and decisions without my own bias.