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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I'm now in my second role where this applies to me. The first one, I was fired from, but I chalked it up to inexperience.

This time around I have a lot of experience under my belt, and for that reason it's weighing on me quite a lot. I'm finding myself digging into Kubernetes for the first time and no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to crack it. None of it makes any sense to me - I get what K8s is at a high level, but man...once you get into the details, it just feels impossible. I don't know if I've ever experienced this much stress in a job before.

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It's not you. K8s' design is terrible: the combinatorial explosion of nouns to learn is specifically because the abstractions are bad. It's quintessential of an industry that self-selects for high comfort with complexity.

>> It's quintessential of an industry that self-selects for high comfort with complexity.

I didn't know that's a thing! I'm currently suffering in a company that embraces overly complex development tools and processes. It's as far from "one click build" as one could ever imagine. The team is split in 2 countries with ours being the new group. One of the other recent hires is as lost as me (he's more on top of the tools but has no objectives!), so at least I know it's not just me. But I've got life stressors going on now too, so that certainly contributes.

Oh what I'd give right now for a project with some hardware, challenging goals, just a C compiler and decent pay.

That sucks. Can you focus on strengths instead? I happen to find infra quite easy, but CSS/design systems, I just always seem to suck at, and I'm thankful to work with people who are good at these things.

I'm all for working on weaknesses! But at some point I think it's better to focus on where we can add value and play to our strengths.

I'm exactly the opposite - always been mostly FE. I can find my way around a backend, but you wouldn't want to trust me with a complex/critical system.

I was hired at this company as an FE dev, but after doing a bit of BE work for them, they asked if I wanted to join the platform team. After years of being shielded from devops/infra stuff, I felt like I was stagnating if I stayed in the FE lane, so I went ahead and took the dive.

My mood shifts from one day to the next. Some days I'm okay, but others are really, really hard. Like I'm barely able to understand k8s, and we're also using terraform, helm, etc etc. It might be the largest single learning curve I've ever faced.

Don’t be too hard on yourself, the learning curve as a new infra/platform engineer is VERTICAL. Try not to hide that you’d benefit from some bootstrap assistance in a misguided effort to “not look clueless”, that’s a fast ride to a bad perf review or worse. One strategy that is incredibly effective in this situation is to ask if you can shadow an experienced/skilled team member for a sprint or two, and then switch to pairing with the same type of person for the following month or two. Your rate of learning will skyrocket using this approach, compared to trying to “go it alone” Good luck and enjoy the ride!

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