Almost 1 year ago, I was let go from a DevOps job at a startup (cash crunch). I searched for a while for my replacement job, mainly because I wanted to stay 100% remote for the time being, and came across one that seemed promising. It was titled as an SRE role at a data analytics company. They were just getting acquiring SaaS customers, but the majority of their clients were running the software on premise.

Now, to naive little old me, this sounded perfect. I've always dreamed about coming on board to a place on the ground floor, building up their build/release and/or SaaS product from the bottom up.

The VP of Engineering said that part of the responsibilities of this role would be to help with product support, since there was no support team at the moment and the devs were rotating into a support role on a biweekly basis. And I thought, fine. A regular part of DevOps is to put out fires that you cause by an unreliable release process. How different could this be?

Once I came on board, first red flag was that the VP asked what computer I'd like. When I requested a mac, he said that's probably a bad idea for our product and ordered me a Dell running Windows instead. A pretty high-spec Dell, I'll admit. Later I found out that the CEO of the company insisted on all employees running the environment that they most prefer.

Next red flag was that my first "project" was to be in full time support rotation for at least the first few months, "to become familiar with the product", to see how it breaks most often. This was a bit disappointing, but I thought, in my free time I can work on the SaaS offering and eventually I would switch over to doing my usual automation and CI/CD.

Next red flag was that he almost immediately hired a second SRE. Typically, the SRE team grows with the dev team, and our dev team had not grown any. This guy was pulled from a legacy behemoth corporation where he had been doing support. Not only was he steeped in non-agile workflows, but he really just a support engineer, or a systems engineer designing infrastructure solutions for clients that were installing the behemoth's bloated software.

It's about 10 months later now. Yes, our SaaS client list has grown, but every one of my offers to help scale the product was shot down by the VP, saying clients don't need it (you know, except for all of our important ones that use our software to it's max). We are completely horizontally unscalable (at least not in any practical way). And most of my ideas that the VP shot down are now being implemented with credit and the projects being given to other people (either devs or one junior on our "SRE" team that's really excited by SaaS and caught the VPs eye, but is very inexperienced in automation). The "SRE" from Behemoth, Inc. became my official manager, and our "SRE team" grew with 3 junior members. I was tasked with running "Reliability" for our biggest client. I'm a glorified log retriever for our dev team. There are no "Reliability" solutions we can incorporate with our clients except fix their infrastructure for them.

Now, on the other hand, the company makes a killer piece of software. Anyone that uses it loves us. We have applications in some very lucrative industries (Big Oil, pharma, heavy industry). The company has a great remote culture, great personalities, and I really love the vast majority of the people in the company (unfortunately, almost none of them are not on my team). This company will probably be worth a lot when it's bought out. There are great benefits, profit sharing, I got a decent raise (although still not making SRE in NYC/SF money). And we are on the cusp of shifting towards horizontal scaling and our SaaS offering hockeysticking (everyone higher up in the company sees that as the future of the company). And the VP, despite his management failings, is an extremely intelligent guy.

I'm completely miserable here. I gave up being a support engineer and rose through the ranks to do DevOps for a reason: I hate support, and I love automation and DevOps culture. Maybe I don't value myself enough, but I keep believing that any moment now we'll be implementing the SaaS product I envisioned we'd have, and not this software that was designed to run on a single server. My automation skills are languishing.

Am I just not being creative/charismatic enough? Am I giving up too soon? I regularly mention both to my manager and my VP that "it's upsetting" that I'm still being relegated to doing mostly support work and that I don't have the needed time to do more SRE work. Last time I tried to work on the product a bit, the VP interfered and took over the project because "it was too important".

I'm still only mid-level, and I seem to be unable to find a decent remote job in the devops sphere with a great work culture. I worry about going on the job hunt again.

What do you all think? Was I tricked? Is the management here just misguided and having their misguidedness subsidized by a killer product?

Or were some of you in a similar position in a company and it eventually turned into the automation/cloud heaven that I miss being in every day of my work week?