What we do with it

The previous three pieces in this series weren’t really about problems with a solution. The gap between why you got into IT and what it actually is, the hollowness of a lot of the modern internet, an OS that’s quietly working against you, none of that has a fix. You can’t patch your way out of it.

But there’s something worth paying attention to in where people end up when they’ve sat with all of this long enough.

A quiet thing has been happening in IT for a while now.

People are running their own servers again. Not because they have to, cloud storage is cheap and convenient and works perfectly well. But because owning your own infrastructure, actually owning it, turns out to feel meaningfully different from renting access to someone else’s. Home labs, self-hosted services, Raspberry Pis doing things that a subscription service would happily do for £8 a month. The capability isn’t really the point.

The same pull shows up in open source, not just using it, but contributing to it, caring about it, understanding the licence and what it means. And in things like the IndieWeb movement, personal blogs, RSS feeds, the quiet insistence on having a corner of the internet that you actually control.

None of this is new. But it feels like it’s got more energy behind it recently. Like more people are arriving at it from the same direction, not as hobbyists exactly, but as people who work in tech professionally and have reached a point where they need the work they do at home to feel like something different.

That’s the thing worth naming.

For a lot of people in IT, self-hosting and open source aren’t really about the technology. They’re about the relationship with the technology. The difference between using a system and understanding it. Between depending on a service and running it yourself. Between a tool that does what you tell it and a platform that’s quietly negotiating with you every time you open it.

When you spend your working day maintaining infrastructure you didn’t design, supporting software you didn’t choose, keeping systems running that exist to serve platforms you have complicated feelings about, the appeal of coming home to something you built yourself, that behaves the way you expect, that doesn’t have an agenda, is not hard to understand.

It’s not escapism. It’s more like calibration. A way of staying connected to the version of this work that still makes sense.

Burnout in IT is real and it’s common and it doesn’t have a simple answer.

But underneath a lot of it is something that doesn’t get talked about enough, the slow accumulation of working in a field that has drifted from the things that made it interesting. The internet got centralised. The tools got extractive. The OS started nudging. And the people who noticed are often the ones who cared most in the first place, which is its own particular kind of difficult.

The response that seems to actually help isn’t wellness advice or better boundaries, though those things matter too. It’s finding the parts of this work that still feel like yours. A project you chose. A system you understand end to end. A small piece of infrastructure that does exactly what you told it to and nothing else.

It won’t fix everything. The job is still the job, the internet is still the internet, Windows 11 is still Windows 11.

But there’s something in the act of building something for yourself, on your own terms, that reconnects you to whatever it was that got you interested in this in the first place.

That version of the work is still there.

It just takes a bit more deliberate effort to find it now.