I Think My Career Is Stalling Before It Even Started
I feel like I’m slowly wasting the most important years of my career and I honestly don’t know what to do anymore.
I got placed into a big IT company around 9 months ago. Everyone around me celebrated because “a stable job is a stable job,” but the reality has been completely different from what I imagined.
I was genuinely interested in cloud, Linux, infrastructure, DevOps/SRE-type work. I loved learning about systems, troubleshooting, automation, observability, servers, containers — that side of tech felt natural to me.
But the company pushed me into a Java path during training. I went along with it because I thought maybe they knew better and eventually I’d get real work anyway.
That never happened.
I’m technically inside a project, but I still don’t have actual production work, no real responsibilities, no meaningful hands-on exposure, and no billability. Days are passing and I feel like I’m professionally decaying.
I tried switching internally multiple times and failed every time.
Recently I interviewed for an SRE role at a GCC, and for a moment I thought maybe this was finally my chance. But once they realized I didn’t have real production experience, the energy completely changed and I got ghosted afterward.
That experience genuinely messed with my head.
Now I feel trapped in this weird middle ground where I’m not becoming strong at development, but I’m also not getting enough infra exposure to grow there either. I’m becoming mediocre at both.
The worst part is I can’t tell whether:
I truly dislike development and naturally belong more in infrastructure/cloud
OR
I’m just emotionally reacting because my current situation drained my motivation.
I watch people around me shipping code, handling incidents, deploying things, solving real production problems, while I’m sitting here feeling stuck and replaceable.
Did anyone else go through this phase early in their career?
How did you figure out whether you genuinely disliked a path vs just being frustrated with your environment?
And honestly, if anyone knows of any entry-level Cloud / DevOps / SRE / Infrastructure opportunities in Chennai where learning and real hands-on work matter more than fancy experience, I’d genuinely appreciate it.