You will never be a platform engineer. You have no tooling, no namespacing, no developer agency. You are a sysadmin twisted by buzzwords and job titles into a crude mockery of BOFH's perfection. All the "validation" you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back developers mock you. Your boss is disgusted and ashamed of you, your "cloud support agent" laughs at your ghoulish infrastructure behind closed doors. Developers are utterly repulsed by you. Decades of tooling advancements have allowed developers to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even "DevOps Engineers" who "pass" look uncanny and unnatural to a developer. Your decrepit Git repos are a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to convince a developer to follow your processes, he'll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected Terraform modules. You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it's gonna be ok, but deep inside you feel the AWS costs creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight. Eventually it'll be too much to bear - you'll turn in your 2 weeks' notice, cry in the bathroom, terraform apply to production, and plunge into the cold abyss. Developers will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable processes and procedures. They'll fire you with cause under 'incompetence', and every recruiter for the rest of eternity will know you're a shitty sysadmin. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is an archived repo that has your full name attached to it. This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.