How to get out of this boring job

“Hi Tommy, how was you oncall shift today?”, I asked.

“Boring. I unblocked the broken CD pipeline, resolved the merge conflicts from dependency teams, and I answered a customer ticket, you know, run the log diving command …” Tommy said.

“Did you learn anything new?”

“I don’t know … it is all just follow the runbook, retry, here and there. Sometimes I wonder if this is really how I want to spend my life - what do all these stuff even mean?”

“Aha, I hear you. I wonder about that too every so often. Do you have a solution?”

“Yeah. I thought about quitting, travel for a while, then maybe find another job. Something different…”

“If you have a better place to grow your career or have a more meaningful life, I will be happy to see you off.” I sighed, “but if you want to quit only because you think this job is boring, maybe we can look around and see if we have missed anything exciting. Can you guess how many requests our service processes every second?”

“I am not sure…”, Tommy said, “x million?”

“Why don’t you find out from our dashboard?” I said.

Tommy monkied around the graph for a while.

“Whoa! I have no idea we process that many millions of requests.” Tommy cried.

“Yeah. Sometimes when I feel frustrated or lose the meaning from work, I look at our dashboard and tell myself: ‘we are protecting real people’s data through these requests: people’s bank accounts, medical records and business transactions etc. What we do have meanings to real people’s life! Now that one command to get all the logs relevant to the customer’s ticket, do you know what is happening?”

“Some automated log queries?” Tommy is intrigued.

“Yeah with our scale log queries are massive data problems. We used to take hours, days or even weeks to do log diving. Then we had a dedicated observability team to build two data lakes: a real time streaming data lake for fast query, and a ETL based data lake for analytic query across many days. Behind that one simple command, there are many many engineering innovations and hard work. In the industry this is called Lambda Architecture, a bleeding edge data processing architecture.” I was in the teaching mood today.

“I am so curious.” Tommy cried, “I want to learn how the data lakes are designed.”

“What you felt is called disenchantment by Max Weber, or alienation by Karl Max. According to Weber, the modern world is characterized by a loss of magic, mystery, and awe. Rationalization and the domination of instrumental reason have stripped the world of its enchantment, leaving behind a mechanized, bureaucratic, and disenchanted world.”, I philosophized, “Changing to another job won’t fix your problem. We have to cultivate a sense of awe and wonder towards the world, including both the natural world and technological innovations. The world is magical, our work is also magical, we just have to learn how to see the magics!”