Ask HN: Dealing with Career Failures
I’m 29. I manage a small team of engineers who hate what they do. Even I don’t enjoy what I do. Together, we support a platform that’s is trying to be replaced. But supporting it sucks.

For the past two years I’ve been looking for a new job, something that makes me use my thinking skills and be appreciated for it. I haven’t got that. Each group of interviews yields problems for me:

* whilst I can code, I don’t do it often. I’m rusty and sometimes that shows. More often than not, I’m reading code and trying to find bugs in that code or fixing them. So late in an interview with a hedge fund for a reliability engineering role was i asked to write an in memory database that could handle SQL commands.. well ok, but that’s not representative of anything I’ve ever done (or would do). But an hour to build it the way I want to? Not enough time. Next I was asked about heaps etc (by using an example algorithm), again stuff I know about but because I never write things from scratch anymore, I suck at it. I’ve been coding more in my free time, but I’m beginning to resent it. It’s no longer a passion of mine as it once used to be. Every time I start to commit to writing code that I don’t need to do, I am reminded of prior interview failures I’ve had. As a reliability engineer, I guess I have to know everything? I don’t know everything, and I’m ok with that fact. Maybe I’m just not cut out for it.

* system design and troubleshooting and unix skills? Great. I love that. Interview feedback was strong here.

* I don’t know what I’m good at? Interviewed for an EM role at the start of the year. Got through the panels and the HM was super enthusiastic. Final role with someone more senior. Failed at that level: feedback was that I didn’t have the right strategy… yielded in 30 mins? Ok then. Feedback wasn’t super useful but the recruiter let me know the HM was fighting for me.

So I’ve been in my current role for just under a year now and I can’t say I’m growing much. The work is demanding and I don’t have enough people to support the workload. They’re also quite junior in their careers. I feel it’s unfair to force them to do support work, so I do my best to coach them in managing production systems, but it’s clear there is a lot of work to do there, but I am unconvinced they want to touch production systems. Most retrospectives indicate they want to do more coding. Hiring? Great idea! The calibre of candidates aren’t meeting my bar; and it’s not a high bar. Maybe getting consultants to do the drudge work is a good idea, we’ll see. This point is more of an organisational problem to be fair. My reports have had 12 managers in a year, including me, so attrition was expected. I spend more time in meetings shielding my team from the grunt than forcing it on them. I want the team to be happy.

I’m lost. I’m really lost. Nothing in my daily role makes me feel happy. I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything, neither in my career or life. Moreover, is it normal to not get any recognition for anything? (I stabilised a failing platform within the first month of joining the current workplace), and that took courage to make a change instead of be constantly paralysed and not look at the data and metrics. I am someone who’s data driven and practical. To that point, I make decisions based on empirical evidence over feelings.

I look at the job market and I don’t know whether I’m an IC or not. I feel more effective as a manager of sorts, but that’s based off my current trajectory. I could fit in an IC role but then what am I?

Is there such thing as a career coach in this industry? Do I need that? Or do I need to reset my expectations of everything?