Gratitude is a secret weapon for attracting more opportunities

I think the reality is you can only be pleasant so many go arounds when you are giving up your weekend or sleep to rush a, "this has to be deployed", botched roll-out or application that is rushed out the door. It is rarely the individuals or groups that create the problem that are rolling their sleeves up and fixing the issues. The concept of "You build it you run it" SRE, DevOps, blah, blah is just fancy rebranding / marketing. This failed workflow exists all over the place, the cynical and pessimistic attitude comes from experience in reading what "people are saying their application will do" and what is actually going to happen.

Then seeing other people promoted because the deploy was a "success" why wouldn't you be cynical and pessimistic. You have entire groups of people who create useless problems and being creative only goes so far, but if you pointed out in your performance review about how you fixed these manufactured issues and how items from retrospectives are still out-standing its a "pessimistic" view point.

Lastly, you get the "empathetic" feedback from others in the industry of "it's what you get paid to do", "find another job if you don't like it", "just leave", etc. However, if you have to be the size of google or meta or amazon to even get ideas like "you build it, you run it" pushed out, how do you think 90% of other companies are operating?

Like all things there is a balance in fixing the problem, being a team player, and raising concerns. If you get good at this you build decision making weight which helps keep the cynicism and negativity at bay.

I think it would be a bit naive though to think that if this was a systemic observation by yourself in an operating space that simply saying "don't be toxic cause its so much better" is skipping over the root cause of why the attitude was so prevalent.

*Disclaimer: This is mostly anecdotal as I haven't seen any studies on "hey, what if we listened to the SRE/sysadmin this time for the deploy" verses not.

While there is some control, much of the positive attributes a person can have are genetic, as much as 50%, I've read. Nothing you can do about it.

For example of this, let's look at infants. We all know some infants and babies are wonderful and everyone wants to be around them, and others are not.

You know what I mean - the baby who smiles and coos and giggles and holds their arms up to be picked up, even by strangers, they are happy and trusting. Meanwhile, some kids cry, frown, are fearful. This all happens in infants, before they even really understand the environment or get kicked in the teeth to make them like that. Kids are like this almost straight out of the womb - 2 weeks into the world.

All I'm saying is that there is a massive genetic component to disposition, I don't think this is too controversial if you think upon it.

So those people who are born with a great disposition go through life that is easier if people like them more.

People with bad genetic disposition can work on it, sure, but they are starting from a 50% disadvantage, and having to work twice as hard is extremely difficult, because it is a 24/7 thing. It's not natural, so you have to be thinking about it all the time, whereas in one with good genetics, they are at 100% right at birth so they don't even have to bother working on being a good person that everyone likes. Opportunities come to them unbidden. Even the people giving the opportunities don't see it that way, they just do it, because...why wouldn't they?

This is only a rough framework, I know there are many variables. It's a stripped down view. But that's how I see it.