Gyroplast

I’ve had so much trouble with tooling

Obvious skill issue. /s

I don’t feel like I can make any impact

Assuming you don’t just want to vent, but maybe get some sort of unfounded and useless opinion from a total stranger to go along with your misery, let me oblige. I’ve never been a cog in a truly large company, but I’ve been rubbing shoulders with managers and C-level just barely enough to begin seeing “their side”, and consider it in my interaction with cOwOrkers and management to effectively act as a conduit or translation layer between camps. It’s a metagame you’ll have to want to play, but it can be rewarding to finnagle the systems of human psyche to have a positive impact, not only for yourself.

From a manager’s perspective, everything has a cost. It’s called tech debt for a reason. As long as paying the interest on your tech debt outweighs the perceived cost of paying off the debt, you’re doing the right thing from a business perspective. In addition, be keenly aware of the fact that you personally will impossibly know the huge dark-company iceberg that is the existing tooling and its context. I guarantee you that there’s so much unknown to you, which makes the proposition “I would fix this in a few days, just let me!” seem rightfully preposterous, and thus actively dangerous, as you obviously don’t fathom the full complexity of the larger issue and would necessarily break things for others, despite your best intentions and competence.

Yes, the tooling certainly is utter garbage, and they should never have locked themselves in such a horribly broken situation, but there they are, and you can’t just “fix this” without understanding the implications. Many devs, myself certainly included, easily fall into the trap of seeing an obvious and clear way of fixing everything™ in a matter of minutes, and realizing too late that “just one more patch” is an endless pursuit, all while breaking user-space for others on the way. It’s a meme old as dirt among hackers.

Assume you don’t know all the details, and really nobody does anymore, and you’ll live a happier life if you leave this (business) decision of letting code rot to others. It’s their money they’re wasting.

What you can do, however, is gold-wrapping the pile of shit you need to work with. Find creative ways to wrap byzantine processes into a bunch of scripts for yourself to automate and generalize your tasks specifically, and watch your productivity soar and your mental health rise, and offer that as a working band-aid to your peers and manager. That’s not only a better use of your time than seething over how shitty everything is, but also plays very well into a devops mindset and is actually kind of fun. It also comes across way better than being the “new guy who knows everything better, but actually hasn’t seen nothing, yet”, which leads to people not listening you in the first place. That vibe is an instant turn-off for any lead, and leads to shadow-banning you from interesting, fruitful conversations you seem to look for.

Obviously I’m confabulating all of this, and this may very well not apply to you or your situation at all. This is just a behavioral pattern I’ve seen way too often, and it’s helpful to detect this in oneself to prevent unnecessary frustration all around.

My plan

is possibly your best option. Go ahead. You have no obligations or “loyalty” towards an uncaring entity holding you back.

“Cash or credit?” “Arch, btw.”

You can open up many avenues of feeding yourself “well enough” if you reconsider your definition of a meal, and consider actual cooking/food prep to be an option.

Cheap and storage-friendly ingredients off the top of head are potatoes, rice, (dried) pasta, flour, cheese, eggs (no need for refrigeration, just don’t wash off the protective layer), onions, garlic, tofu, and many hardier vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, and up to a point even iceberg salad, cucumbers, mushrooms (keep dry and airy if fresh, they dry out), as well as various pickles as snacks, if you’re so inclined. With onions, potatoes, and eggs alone you can stuff your face for weeks without repeating a single dish. :)

I keep (vegan) crème fraîche, soy/rice/almond/oat drinks, and “cooking cream” around for weeks unrefrigerated as great milk and cream substitutes, but the milk-based products have a solid shelf life as well as long as they’re unopened. This is perfectly viable for various creamy sauces or dips, and for cereals as a snack or breakfast option. With a nice oil or butter and a few seasonings you can whip up a surprising amount of simple meals, starting with classic pasta with a tomato sauce of your liking, to the typical trifecta of “carbs, meat, and veggies with optional sauce” that passes for an actual meal. You can easily build almost any kind of sauce you wish from stable ingredients to go with whatever, too.

There’s a good bunch of great thai curry pastes around that go well with a handful of veggies and rice, and keep cooking effort to a minimum. If I’m particularly lazy, I boil a pot of potatoes and eat those straight with sour cream. Leftovers are due for the chippy treatment in a pan with onions and eggs, or just eaten cold as a snack with salt or leftover dip. Same goes for rice, the amount of stuff people throw atop their rice to chase it down is astonishing. Lao Gan Ma chili crisp is great, a straight sweet chili sauce works in a pinch, and if you’re into chinese cooking anyway, you can throw almost anything in a pan, fry it up, and toss it to your rice with a generic “brown sauce” deal.

The biggest issue I see is fresh meat, though. That’s quickly a serious hazard when kept at room temp, so I’d suggest to try reducing your meat intake as long as you’re unable to store it properly, and otherwise cook the same day you buy. Truth be told, a lot of the vegan meat substitutes are surprisingly good by now, even though they’re highly processed garbage and pretty expensive for what they are, but they keep unrefrigerated much longer and safer than the real deal. Don’t expect a good steak, but anything “chicken” is nigh indistinguishable, IMHO.

All the other things do keep “fresh enough” at least for a couple of days, but you’ll need to consider what you buy and when you are able to cook beforehand so things don’t spoil, especially if you cannot buy fresh groceries more often than weekly for any reason.

TL;DR: For a generic meal, combine potatoes, rice, or pasta with a vegetable of your least distrust, optionally fresh meat if available, and a decent sauce. In a pinch, sauce + anything also works just fine, and sometimes even without sauce. Just don’t take pictures for Insta when horking down a bowl of pasta with ketchup, we’ve all been there.