Ask HN: Options for back end engineer sick of oncall
I'm close to hitting a decade of full time experience. In that time, I have always worked in back end engineering roles requiring oncall duties. I've recently identified a few things that are my key stressors at work, and the key contributors to my burn out. The top of that list is the existence of oncall duties, and the need to be ready to respond for a week at a time. Even with a quiet oncall, I still plan my personal life around being oncall. Same goes for planning any tie off. I've reached a point where I don't need or want to self sacrifice (e.g,. for total comp, or prestige, or whatever); instead, I'm trying to tweak my path forward for the next decade or so of work.
I'm not ruling out a change of disciplines, for instance mobile or frontend development. That said, I have a strong set of skills and deep experience from the last decade. So I'm wondering, what sorts of roles might be less of a skill reset than what I generalize as "back end" engineering?
Some background on me, if it helps:
* Management is doable but not enjoyable (I dislike the context switching, miss building things, and can stomach process as an IC but don't enjoy driving process).
* Years of experience in security engineering
* Some enjoyment of using basic data science (ETLs, Jupyter notebooks analyzing warehoused data, etc) to inform eng decisions in the past
* Some low level Linux programming experience for about a year or two, but pretty surface level ("understands procfs")
* Of course, the rest is all just building CRUD apps hitting a variety of database types and generally doing so in products with millions of customers, where downtime or breaking changes are not tolerated. Pretty vanilla stuff. Distributed systems to the extent of "distributed CRUD" (lol)
When times are good, I'm very happy being an IC engineer. I can handle the demands of engineering work and the organizational challenges that come with it, when contained to a reasonable business day. I'm just worried that I can't sustain what I've been doing for so long (exacerbated by being oncall quite regularly in my current role) and don't want to sacrifice my personal well being (or family's) any more. I'd rather figure out a new role than do something drastic like quitting out of burn out, only to start again in another backend role that basically has the same problems as my current situation.
Thanks for reading!