Another co worker passed away yesterday

Yeah, I'm still processing a situation where stress adds up , a slight decline in health can cause you to simply just not be able to keep up and so if you're team was expecting 150% and you're only giving 120% you still look like an asshole. That's not a realistic expectation on the street maybe but in established situations it's difficult to see. Worse is if management DOESN'T see it, then it gets bad fast. So it adds pressure into a situation where we might already be pretty casual about the sort of pressures that would send other professionals running. I tend to view anyone with operational/production exposure the same way you treat any other high-stress/high-demand job, but IT guys / networking guys are right there with other kinds of facilities workers and to an extent like many other forms of service workers - where you're forward facing and visibility of failure is very high. For those reasons, I've found it was in **my** interests to down-step from some high-level of enjoyment job but where the necessary work effort was demanding. So in my 20's I had a c-position with whatever duties that implied, really cool, lots of travel, lots of responsibility and whatever one might think of as privledge, but I was never one to throw that around because the *job* requires you to be in 3 places at once, nobody needs me being a pissy Karen about it. But that juggling act came to a screeching halt with a cancer diagnosis - so that was an "easy" choice, graduate school can wait, MBA can wait, fiance bounced at the first sign of trouble, and suddenly I can't do an 80 hour work-week, 40 hours is a fucking struggle and 50 hours is out of the question most of the time. Time to simplify the fuck out of my life - which I did, trading in the C-position for a kicking job as a DBA with sprinkles of machine analysis/demographics analysis and data modeling. Getting through that, I set my sails in a new (still very respectiably stressful) job as a production / devel engineers (sort of a devops / full stack developer job), and did quite well with that for many years. Now as I'm finding myself a bit older, and not so tolerant of politics and the clever versus smart that we see in many businesses I've already started down-stepping into what is going to be an analytics/business analyst/data-modeling job, with little/to no production support. I occasionally get reminded that I have a stupid amount of knowledge in my head / knowhow / tribal knowledge but that carries less and less weight with me every day. I strongly recommend knowing for yourself what your comfort level is and setting your sights accordingly. This is not to say I couldn't find a compelling opportunity in a startup tomorrow, it's just to say that I'm EXTREMELY fortunate to have options, if not fuck-you amounts of money , I have a reasonable skillset where I can move around without too much drama, but as one of the colleagues in my current job put it "markth_wi" doesn't have fuck-you money....he's got fuck-you experience, could probably line himself up for a new gig without anybody knowing anything until he was ready to walk. It sounds like you're at that same sort of cross-roads so give yourself permission to take stock of the situation, identify your strengths/weaknesses and REALLY evaluate what you might like to do, think about what a "Tig_Weldin_Stuff" friendly next job looks like.