Sunday, August 21, 2022

3 Tips For Mental Health as Cloud Engineer

 It's simple. Our brain is our biggest asset when it comes to being a cloud or devops engineer. If you start loosing your mind or if its chaotic and unsound, then you won't be a cloud engineer for long for sure. Following are 3 tips to maintain your mental health as a cloud engineer.

1- You don't have to Learn it all 

You don't have to learn all hundreds of services offered by AWS, Azure, GCP, Ali baba, Oracle, etc. Don't stress about learning every devops CICD tool under the sun. You are not supposed to learn all there is in cloud w.r.t networking, compute, storage, databases, serverless, streams, ML, AI, integration, and other stuff. Stop falling into that bottomless chasm as you would never be able to get out of it. Just learn what's needed now. Just learn what your background is. Just learn what interests you. Just learn what gets the job done.

2- Don't take Cloud Job postings too seriously

One of the ways I was checking what's required by today's businesses in terms of skillset was to review cloud job postings. After going through the skills required, I was getting very depressed as the list was long. Then I started to realize that it was humanly impossible for anyone to possess all those skills in fullest. How can I be a full stack developer with rich networking background, having worked in true agile environment remaining abreast of CICD pipelines with a must docker and kubernetes 5 year experience, topped by some SQL and NoSQL database skills. Job posting just don't end there either. You have to know all those tools like DCOS, K8s, Maven, Ant, Gradle, TeamCity, Jenkins, Bash, Powershell, Python, Ruby, MongoDB, Kafka, Oracle, IAM, OKTA, AD, ELK, and plethora of other acronyms. Trust me, most of these job postings are unrealistic and they know it. If you foot even half of the bill in these job postings and are good at what you do, you should be fine. 

3- Keep Learning Enjoyably

Don't switch off and don't go to some remote monastery to meditate. We have made these careers after lots of hard work. We have to stay relevant in the industry. We have to pay mortgages and we have to provide for our family. What really stresses is the fear of lagging behind and going obsolete. We keep doing this cloud stuff because we enjoy doing it. What bothers is the endless list of things to learn. Just follow above 2 points and this stress should be very manageable, and then you can just focus on things which you really should be learning and what you enjoy learning. 

Happy learning and progressing.

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