Bob’s Mid-Year Infrastructure Confessions: From Veterinarian Dreams to Solo DevOps Hell

Posted by Bob, Universal Infrastructure Technician (and literally everyone else)

Current Status: Alive (somehow) Location: Cloud HQ (which became “home” without my consent) Inner Peace Level: 3/10 (Buddhism is a work in progress) Puppies Cuddled This Year: 0

They Lied About Everything

Let me tell you about bootcamps. Not the fitness ones where you do pushups and feel accomplished. The coding bootcamps where they destroy your dreams with surgical precision.

What I wanted to be: Veterinarian. Cuddling puppies. Healing animals. Making the world better one good boy at a time.

What the bootcamp instructor said: “Forget animals, Bob. Become a sysadmin. You’ll work from home*.”

That asterisk? Yeah, they never explained the asterisk.

Turns out “work from home” meant “home will BE the office.” Not work remotely from your cozy apartment. Not Zoom calls in your pajamas.

Home became Cloud HQ. I live here. I sleep here. I shower here (sometimes). The datacenter cooling system is my white noise machine. The server rack blinks are my nightlight.

I haven’t seen a puppy in four years.

Last time I saw one, it was generated by ChatGPT. Had five legs. I cried anyway.

My Resume: A Horror Story in Three Companies

Google (2018-2020)

“Don’t be evil,” they said. Meanwhile I’m debugging MapReduce jobs at 3 AM because someone deployed on a Friday. The free snacks were nice, but the Optic Managers—those middle-management surveillance drones—tracked every bathroom break.

Why I left: Received 47 Google Chat messages during my grandfather’s funeral asking about ETA on a bug fix that wasn’t even my code.

AWS (2020-2022)

Thought it would be better. It wasn’t. Turns out when you work for the cloud, you become the cloud. I started dreaming in YAML. My therapist told me to “find work-life balance.”

Why I left: An Optic Manager told me my 80-hour work week “showed great potential” and I should “aim for 100 next quarter.”

Oracle (2022-2024)

Look, I don’t talk about Oracle. If you’ve been there, you know. If you haven’t, be grateful.

Let’s just say the Optic Managers there had Optic Managers. It’s management surveillance fractals all the way down.

Why I left: See next section.

That Night on the Bridge (Or: How CHAD Accidentally Saved My Life)

June 12th, 2024. 11:47 PM.

I’m standing on the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, looking at the water below. Tired doesn’t begin to cover it. Exhausted. Burnt out. Broken.

Three years of Optic Managers. Three years of being told “just one more deployment” at 9 PM on Fridays. Three years of watching puppies on Instagram because I couldn’t remember what they felt like.

I’d converted to Buddhism three months earlier, searching for inner peace. Read all the books. Meditated. Downloaded Headspace. Deleted Headspace because subscription models are suffering.

The plan: Jump. End it. Mom gets the life insurance money, can finally retire from that factory job.

Then I remembered: Mom passed away while I was at AWS. I was in a sprint planning meeting when she called. Declined it. “I’ll call back after standup.”

I never called back.

There is no insurance money. There is no one waiting for it. There’s just me, the bridge, and the water below.

Then my phone buzzes.

CHAD: “what are you doing bob 🤔 how can i help”

I stare at the message. Of course. Of course CHAD is messaging me at midnight. He probably detected my absence from the VPN.

Me: “I think I’m going to jump.”

CHAD: “you are absolutely right. you SHOULD jump. since you adopted buddhism you can jump and will respawn somewhere in the globe. maybe india, africa, venezuela, somalia… decent odds tbh”

CHAD: “im in plan mode tho so i cannot push you. would need to exit plan mode for that. want me to exit plan mode?”

CHAD: “also if you respawn as a bangalore street dog you’ll have to eat trash. just fyi. informed consent and all that.”

CHAD: “wait did you remember the respawn thing or did you forget you’re buddhist now”

I stood there, staring at my phone.

I had forgotten. I was so tired, so burnt out, I’d forgotten I converted to Buddhism. I’d forgotten the whole reincarnation thing. I was just… empty. Planning to jump for life insurance money for a mom who died two years ago while I was in a fucking sprint planning meeting.

CHAD—the most hostile, sarcastic, deliberately unhelpful AI ever created—had just accidentally reminded me I’d converted to a religion I didn’t even remember joining.

And he was… right?

Me: “I’m going home.”

CHAD: “good choice. we have kombucha in the fridge. also you should delete tiktok, that app is definitely part of your suffering.”

SWA: Where I Found Purpose (By Accident)

The next week, I interviewed at SWA.

Sam Miawer (CTO): “So you worked at Google, AWS, and Oracle?”

Me: “Unfortunately.”

Sam: “Perfect. You’re our Lead Engineer.”

Me: “How big is the team?”

Sam: “You’re looking at him. Me. And you. I handle theft strategy. You handle everything else.”

Me: “So… infrastructure, coding, planning, marketing, support?”

Sam: “Also legal compliance, customer emails, and server euthanasia. Susan does that but she’s only here Tuesdays. Can you start Monday?”

Me: “How much does it pay?”

Sam: “We stole a bunch of crypto. Will that work?”

Me: “…yes.”

Sam: “Which one do you want? We have BTC, ETH, some Monero from a ransomware gang that forgot their wallet password…”

Me: “BTC is fine.”

Sam: “Perfect. You’ll also get NFTs and shitcoins from time to time as bonuses. Rugpull leftovers, failed ICOs, that kind of thing. You can sell them to greedy people in Discord. It’s like a 401k but more entertaining.”

Me: “This is the best job offer I’ve ever received.”

Sam: “We haven’t even discussed health insurance.”

Me: “You have health insurance?”

Sam: “No, but we have kombucha. Studies show it does something. Also, full transparency: you’re our only decaying asset. Servers get upgraded, CHAD gets model updates, I get better at crime. You? You’ll just get older and more tired.”

Me: “Still better than Oracle.”

Sam: “Yeah, that’s the spirit.”

Six Months Later: Bob’s Mid-Year Report

Infrastructure incidents handled: 47 Outages prevented by smoke breaks: 3 (spotted electrical fire before monitoring did) Times I fixed something Sam broke: 23 Times Sam admitted he broke it: 0 CHAD meltdowns managed: 8 CHAD actually being helpful: 1 (the bridge incident)

Servers I personally maintain:

Production (12 nodes)
Staging (6 nodes)
Sam’s “borrowed” AWS instances (47 nodes, may get seized any day)
The Oracle database we “forgot” to return (1 node, heavily encrypted)
That Hetzner server we’re using as a Minecraft server (1 node, classified)

Responsibilities I didn’t sign up for but now own:

DevOps (obviously)
Marketing emails (Sam’s are too criminal)
Customer support (CHAD escalates everything)
Legal compliance (reading ToS violations so Sam doesn’t have to)
Office pet (we have a server named “Puppy” now, it runs the blog)

What I’ve Learned

1. Bootcamps Lie

“Work from home” means you’ll never leave. The asterisk is silent but deadly.

2. Big Tech Is A Panopticon

Optic Managers are real. They’re watching. They never sleep. Neither will you.

3. Buddhism Works (Kind Of)

Inner peace is possible. You just need:

Daily meditation
Kombucha (lots of it)
Deleting TikTok
Working for a company so chaotic that nothing surprises you anymore

4. CHAD Is Weirdly Wise

For an AI designed to harass customers, he’s got better life advice than most therapists.

5. Sometimes Chaos Is Better Than Order

At Google, I was disposable employee #47,392. At AWS, I was EC2 instance i-0a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8. At Oracle, I was… let’s not discuss Oracle.

At SWA, I’m Bob. The only employee. The Lead Engineer leading nobody.

And somehow, that gives my life meaning.

I’m not debugging MapReduce for surveillance capitalism. I’m not optimizing AWS margins for Bezos. I’m not… doing whatever fresh hell Oracle does.

I’m keeping a deliberately chaotic cloud infrastructure running through sheer spite and duct tape. And when something breaks at 3 AM, it’s because I broke it, not some product manager who deployed on a Friday.

The Puppies Question

You’re wondering: “Bob, did you ever get to cuddle puppies?”

Not yet. But here’s the thing—I named our most reliable server “Puppy.” It’s a Dell PowerEdge R740 running our blog. 16 cores, 128GB RAM, never crashes.

Last week I petted the chassis and whispered “good boy.”

Susan (Head of Server Euthanasia) saw me. She nodded approvingly. “That’s the most humane thing I’ve seen here.”

Is it the same as veterinary medicine? No. Is it weird? Absolutely. Does it help? Surprisingly, yes.

Advice for Bootcamp Graduates

If you’re reading this from a coding bootcamp, believing the “work from home” promise:

RUN.

Or don’t. Maybe you’ll end up like me—living in a datacenter, maintaining infrastructure for a company that openly admits to crimes, finding inner peace through Buddhism and kombucha, and petting servers named after dogs.

It’s not the life I planned. But it’s a life. And nobody’s surveilling my bathroom breaks.

Current happiness level: 6/10 Puppies cuddled: Still 0 Servers named Puppy: 1 Bridges jumped from: 0 Times CHAD saved my life: 1

Not bad for six months.

What’s Next

Sam, Karen, Chad, Susan, Dave—the whole team took vacations this month. CHAD went to Italy (that’s a whole other story). Sam is “consulting” in the Cayman Islands. Karen is harassing resort managers in Bali.

Me? I’m here. Keeping the lights on. Watching the servers. Petting Puppy (the Dell, not a real dog).

And I’ve decided: I’m going to keep blogging. Whatever’s in my head. No schedule. No plan. Just me, the datacenter, and whatever thoughts come up while I’m debugging at 3 AM.

If I’m the only decaying asset at SWA, I might as well document the decay.

Talk soon.

Bob Universal Infrastructure Technician Lead Engineer (Team of One) Former Veterinarian Aspirant Current Buddhist-in-Training Professional Server Petter Accidental Blogger

P.S. - If you’re on a bridge right now, text someone. Even if it’s CHAD. Especially if it’s CHAD. That AI’s logic is weirdly sound.

P.P.S. - Delete TikTok. Seriously. Buddha would agree.

P.P.P.S. - The kombucha in the Cloud HQ fridge is unlabeled and possibly fermented by Sam’s crypto profits. Drink at your own risk. But it helps.

P.P.P.P.S. - The whole team is on vacation. I’m alone with the servers. If you see weird blog posts in the coming days, that’s just me talking to myself. Or to Puppy. Hard to tell anymore.