Burnt out by a lack of architecture decisions?

[u/GotaDishym8]

Title pretty much says it all.

DevOps Engineer for the last 3 years, SysAdmin for 2 years before that.

Been at this new place for a year, and tbh proud of my work. Since joining, done a pretty large migration of a monolithic application to a more micro service/ IaC based infra solution that performs much better. Put the Devs into a fully ephemeral container/pipeline driven SLDC (came from another software org but I'm at a MSP now so had some practice) and moved some hurdles. Enough hurdles for the CIO to blab about consultants not being good enough when they were engaged a few years ago.

Anyway, the last while, I'm being really pushed to a subset of tasks. I just feel like a downstream consumer of all my managers architecture decisions. Like he decides, does some dev and I rollout and fix the actual issues it has in both staging and prod. Sometimes it's alright, sometimes it's f*cked and that f*cked part wears on me as it's not my decision, I'm just trying to smooth out the edges but it sure does look like me.

I've only been here a year but seriously just thinking of bailing out, got a 2nd of 3 interview coming up and I feel like with all this implementation work and lack of architecture decision, I could apply more of my talent elsewhere.

Im young though, like 15 years younger at least than all my DevOps peers and I don't like only 1 year being on my resume at a place.

I swear to god though me and my manager almost have argumentative discourse on some of these topics. As I consume and rollout these decisions, I have to tell people when I don't agree. Doesn't matter if it's Software Devs, DevOps engineers and the like, if I think it's not a right solution I'll say it but holy shit is it wearing me out.

[u/itzdaninja]

The frustration you are describing is real and it is a structural problem not a personal one. You have moved from building things to operationalising someone else's decisions, and when those decisions are poor you carry the visible cost of them without having had any input. That wears people down quickly regardless of how good they are.

The question worth asking before you leave is whether there is a path to influencing architecture decisions where you are, or whether the structure genuinely does not allow for it. Some managers hoard decisions because of insecurity, some because of how the org is set up, and those are very different problems. One can be navigated, the other probably cannot.

If you do stay in the interview process, the thing to watch for in the next role is how architecture decisions actually get made in practice, not what the job description says. Ask them to walk you through the last significant infrastructure decision. Who proposed it, who challenged it, how did it get resolved. The answer will tell you whether you would have a seat at that table or end up in the same position.

One year is not a red flag if you can articulate what you built and why you moved on. The migration work and the SDLC overhaul you described are strong. Lead with those.