I'm on sabbatical right now because I get how frustrating that can be. That being said, maybe me sharing some points about my sabbatical can help put things into perspective:
- It's taken four months since my project (a personal-use hybrid OLTP/OLAP streaming BI framework) has started, and I'm only wrapping up the development now. I'm fine with this because I know what I want and I don't want to deal with users while things are in flux, but if this was a business, I'd be out on the street by now.
- Engineers are paid well because there's not that many of us. It's not because we're important. Sales is what brings home the bacon, marketing kicks off the sales funnel, customer support closes the sales loop, product management translates sales' requirements to engineers...and engineers just build the thing according to requirements. Many one-person startups don't have engineers, or even anybody technical, they just use no-code tools and pay contractors and they do just fine.
I'd consider broadening your options in order to grant yourself more agency, especially paid solutions that you can form a demonstrable ROI-based argument for. Terraform may seem like a bit overkill, esp. if you don't have serious cloud charges. Maybe managed APIs as a service makes sense, like Netlify, that have CI/CD and can spin up various apps for money. Then you can say "for $25 / mo. we save X developer hours, which @ market rate saves us $XXX per mo. which increases our runway by this much."
- It's taken four months since my project (a personal-use hybrid OLTP/OLAP streaming BI framework) has started, and I'm only wrapping up the development now. I'm fine with this because I know what I want and I don't want to deal with users while things are in flux, but if this was a business, I'd be out on the street by now.
- Engineers are paid well because there's not that many of us. It's not because we're important. Sales is what brings home the bacon, marketing kicks off the sales funnel, customer support closes the sales loop, product management translates sales' requirements to engineers...and engineers just build the thing according to requirements. Many one-person startups don't have engineers, or even anybody technical, they just use no-code tools and pay contractors and they do just fine.
I'd consider broadening your options in order to grant yourself more agency, especially paid solutions that you can form a demonstrable ROI-based argument for. Terraform may seem like a bit overkill, esp. if you don't have serious cloud charges. Maybe managed APIs as a service makes sense, like Netlify, that have CI/CD and can spin up various apps for money. Then you can say "for $25 / mo. we save X developer hours, which @ market rate saves us $XXX per mo. which increases our runway by this much."