I’ve been thinking about career networking recently.

I’ve been somewhat unhappy in my job. Sometimes, the thought of finding something new gives me a giddy “fresh beginning” feeling.

Whenever I’ve humored these thoughts, I quickly find myself up against a bit of an impasse. I’m not really sure how to find a better job. The operative word is better here. I feel confident that with enough time and effort I could grind out enough tech interviews to land a different job, however, I don’t know how to look for roles that I’d be happier with than my current job.

Really, I think the core issue is that I’m not really sure what I’m unhappy with in my current role: compensation is good, the people I work with are generally pleasant, I have a supportive manager, and the work is broadly interesting.

But I still find myself dreading to go into the office most days. I feel like I’m constantly underwater and delivering people bad news. I always feel behind or at risk of being behind. The number of people I feel accountable to and accountable for on any given day feels like it’s at something of a breaking point for me. There are just too many pull requests to review, emails to read, chat messages to respond to, and meetings to plan. Every 5 minutes feels like a hasty attempt to unblock someone or something with an imperfect solution I’m not happy with and over time this debt has felt like it’s building.

When I finally do get time to sit down and work, things don’t get much better. Every obstacle I hit in my own work feels insurmountable. I can smoothly navigate like 50-60% of the work but the last 40% where creative problem-solving and decision-making comes into play just paralyzes me. Especially when it comes to long-term architectural/design decisions, unclear paths just knock the wind out of my sails. The feeling reminds of the “stuckness” that I’ve heard attributed to Robert Pirsig’s work, but I haven’t come to terms with how to embrace that feeling and so it cuts me down.

What’s most frustrating is I can’t tell if this is a new problem or not. Have I always had these problems but been able to navigate them more comfortably by virtue of having less responsibility at work? Or has something changed within me and I’m no longer resilient to the mental exercise of software engineering? None of the challenges I’ve described above are unique to me. I feel like I’m just describing the baseline “work” of a software engineer’s job. I worry I’m reaching the breaking point where I realize software engineering isn’t a job I can maintain for the next 20-30 years. Did I really only have 7 years’ worth of steam in me?

I guess that’s why finding a new role sounds so appealing to me. I want to really prove to myself that the challenges I’m feeling are universal and not localized to this one team/position. Maybe there’s happiness to find elsewhere. But I don’t really have any sign to suggest as much. Am I just ignorantly putting my faith in the hope that the grass will be greener elsewhere?

And so, I guess I’m back to where I started. I don’t know how to find that role. Do I just float between jobs every 12 months or so until I find another role that’s worth sticking with for another 7 years? How do I figure out what I want in a job? Should I really put so much emphasis on knowing before taking a leap of faith? The romantic in me says “quit your job and accept radical changes in your life.” The realist in me says “in an uncertain economy, a stable income is worth MORE than its weight in gold and you’re a fool to throw that away.”

Please, pardon all of this rambling. I wanted to get the words out on (digital) paper to get them out of my head. I hoped by typing this out, I would give myself some structure to plan out some next steps in this thinking. I don’t think I really accomplished that. Oh well. I’ll update this post if I ever make something useful out of these thoughts.