I just got turned down for another job and I am at the end of my mental and emotional rope.
Tomorrow I have a second interview at a local retail store. I've been a web developer or software engineer for a decade but increasingly painful failures have ruined me as a person and I am lost and without purpose in life. I think I just need to give up on software, I no longer feel welcome or wanted.
I have read that burnout can take up to five years to be resolved, I'm about in year three at this point. It's kinda like a recession you can't see it coming but looking back its easier to see when it started and its root causes.
Even with resources (supportive wife, limited family, therapist) recovery is slow, difficult, confusing and not a straight path. I need a job and purpose before life can improve and I can find a daily existence that's not 90% stress. Until then every day is a catastrophe where I'm upset that I didn't solve "the problem" and all I can think about is fixing "everything" or I'll lose my wife, my house, my independence, my dignity...
If you are suffering from burnout I wish you luck in the eternal struggle for normalcy. I can't say it ever gets better, but try to be kind to yourself. Most of all be honest with yourself even if you can't be with others.
If this post in any way resonates with you feel free to respond or just yell into the void.
In the past 4 years I've seriously looked into going to Nursing School and Cosmetology School respectively (Cosmetology School might seem silly but it's only a year, it's cheap, and it's something I'm interested in). The idea that I'd give up my cushy SWE job for much lower pay even in the case of Nursing says everything there is to say about how burnt out I am. In the end I probably will leave this field anyway. I don't suspect spending my middle age and above programming will be any more fulfilling.
Above all the weirdest part about burnout as a SWE is the GUILT that I feel about it. I get paid a lot. I have a very flexible job with a lot of autonomy. I am coddled but somehow I daydream about ... going to work from 7-7 at a hospital???? It makes me question my sanity.
Nursing is a noble career but, especially in the US, it is brutal, will destroy your body, horribly paid (unless you're a travel nurse, which comes with its own downsides) and the working practices are essentially a non-stop wall of abuse. That 7-7 shift you dream of? Great news - your next shift begins at 9am, see you then!
Cosmetology is nice but the schools trained thousands and thousands more students than the industry required so your job prospects are close to zero.
Go work for a startup or find yourself an expensive hobby instead.
I feel similar. I used to love programming. Nowadays, it seems most of my day is fixing problems and patching things. I'm getting anxious every time I get pinged, and oncalls are the worse. The simplest things made me nervous as I'm worried I won't be able to fix them.
But then, the salary is comparatively so high that I may as well work a few more years in this field. I know I could just switch teams, or go work for a different FAANG. But even knowing that, it's hard to get detached from the work. It is very stressful, and I think not good from my health. One thing that put a lot of strain on me is thinking how my colleagues perceive me. They are all very good and it makes me feel bad not being at the same level (and not as passionate as them).
One thought that helps me deal with it, is that every company/team needs people like us. If everyone on the team is obsessed with the work, then it starts to create bad habits of overwork that will further alienate new people. So just by being less interested, we're helping normalize separating work from life, taking things slower, and hopefully preventing the whole team from burning out.
Burn out played a role, but the most driving factor was that I couldn't care about what I was working on most of the time. I didn't want to spend my productive years adding the next useless feature, "making that button pop", or tweaking the sign up form to try to increase sales. I felt that I wasn't using my time right.
I saved enough and quit my job. I could've made a lot more money if I kept working as a SWE, but now the feeling I have that I'm doing the right thing for me is well worth it. So far I'm very happy with the change.
I'm a true believer that a daily hobby you love gives you the opportunity to decompress. That's my first suggestion to anyone in danger of burning out.
If you're continuously put in those situations, then it's time to consider your options.
Actually, it's always a good idea to have a backup plan, just incase some unforeseen event happens at work.
This is the first worldiest of first world problems, but it is something I have also experienced. A high paying career like this does end up feeling like a trap if you ever want a change. It becomes extremely difficult to make the jump and switch careers. Not only will I be giving up the relatively high salary I am lucky enough to have to switch to an industry that on average doesn't pay as well, but I would also need to start completely over in that industry making my new salary well below that already depressed average. I would be willing to take maybe a 20%-40% pay cut for my mental health, but it doesn't even feel like a real option when we are talking about something around 75%.
Oh man do I feel this one. I love the daily communication of the standup rituatl, but when its used as a cudgel by uncaring PMs it just becomes this daily shaming ritual used to extract maximum efficiency (under threat of pain) from terrified developers just trying to keep up.
My only advice is to get a plan together for when your runway suddenly ends. I hope your situation is better than the ones I was in, but I didn't expect to be in the situation I'm in and not planning for it (having better savings) made it a lot worse.
I hope your situation worked out in the end too.
Speaking of standup, yeah.... It's obviously a way to keep people on track and apply some social pressure insofar as that. It's not too bad compared to other stressful jobs but it's annoying haha.
To echo another commenter, nursing as a profession is noble but brutal. My cousin has what is considered a "cushy" nursing job working in pediatric oncology. He has stable hours, gets to work long term with a small set of patients and get to know them, and his work is less dangerous than many other specialities, but the work is emotionally devastating.
Why are you not trying to find some part-time positions, and then maybe decrease your SWE work to 20 hours per week and try out other things in the remaining time? I think this could be a good fit for your situation, and possibly be a transition to see if you really want another work or if not without completely leaving the field.
edit How can I even find a part time job at this point? I have executive recruiters sometimes even trying to get me to be a CTO. Everything points in the direction of companies wanting more of my time not less.
I daydream about working as a barista sometimes. I don't even know anything about being a barista. It just seems like a job where I interact with people and the worst I can screw something up is a drink order, not a feature that millions of people use.
And the worst I can get stuck on something, is a machine breaking down and telling a customer "I'm so sorry, here's a refund, can we get you something else", not spending all morning banging my head trying to figure out why javascript won't let me iterate through an array and claiming it's not an array, or trying to figure out how to fix out complicated parsing function so it will properly parse some gnarly data coming in for a new query in a slightly different way.
But the pay cut would be obscene. I couldn't afford that. Otherwise I'd probably make the switch for a while.
(Because I suppose we're here to trauma dump I'm moving my stream of consciousness about wanting to be a nurse to this comment where it seems more appropriate.)
My daydreaming about being a nurse started again when I was taking care of a friend in the hospital after she had a serious blood clot. I was spending 15-20 hours a week there feeding her and stuff because she could barely move and thinking that it was the happiest I'd felt in ages. I should have been stressed out because I was coordinating with her out of town family, and taking care of errands for her, and coordinating with her job, and talking with her doctors and nurses and such but I would leave the hospital feeling so happy and recharched. Meanwhile I feel so drained after spending a few hours "coding" or reviewing design documents or, worse, writing design documents. I think I just don't like technology even though I learned a lot about it to make money.
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I was brought in as CTO to fix some stuff. I fixed that stuff and then realised that how I wanted the business to operate and how the CEO wanted to operate were very far apart.
It all came to a head when somebody got fired and I disagreed with both the decision and how it was carried out. This was just one item amongst a bunch of other things.
This drained me so hard emotionally. I was CTO at another startup for much longer and never got close to this level of burnout. I've talked to someone else about this (talking is helpful) and they had a similar experience. It's not always about the hours or the tenure. 60 hours/week in the right environment is very different to 40 hours/week in the wrong environment.
It took a few years for me to get over this. I took some less complicated jobs with less responsibilities and less personal investment before chucking myself back into the fire. It's going well so far and I'm definitely more resilient as I've been through some pretty dire work shit since then.
Sorry to hear you're having a tough time of it. Getting less personally invested for a while really helped me. I also took on some hobbies that I had total control over and that helped too.
Good luck :)
I've never been involved in HR / sausage making you're describing but I can empathize so much with this feeling.
At one of my better jobs I was a developer on a backend app that would crash frequently due to queue processing issues. I kept getting distracted from what I was doing to fix this as it blocked account management teams from using the system (making money). I went out of my way to create a prototype tool to diagnose the issue (that I was fixing almost every day) and when I asked management for some time at work to finish it, they said no.
The way this was handled was fucking awful. They gave me a meeting to present what I created, but before it started the most senior person started things by saying "I'm going to let you present this but there's no way we're going to use it".
I wish I had just said ok I won't waste your time, I quit.
This is one of those PTSD trauma things I havent quite gotten over yet... it melted my candle in an unhealthy way.
It's especially sad for me because for a time (about a year?) it was the best job I've ever had and I really fondly look back on the things I did and (most of) the people I got to work with. It was a great fit for a time but it came undone in a way I was unprepared for.
Yes, exactly. Such an important thing to know. Even one day in a horrible position can be absolutely brutal.
I took a few months off, which, I know, is a luxury that not many can afford. During this time, I took stock of what was important to me. Did I still love programming? And, was programming the thing that made me unhappy?
What I realized is that I didn't want to feel like a tiny cog in a giant machine, and I didn't want to work on something that wasn't in some way beneficial to others. I needed to feel like I was making a difference and not just burning my life away on something disposable for lots of cash.
I was lucky enough to find a contract with a healthcare startup where I'd be working on technology that would improve the real lives of actual people, not just another piece of software that would be discarded two years down the road. Eventually, they offered me a full-time position, and I joined as employee #9.
Am I happy now? Well, I'm happier than before. But more importantly, I feel that now I can attain happiness.
I wish I could find a path towards what you have achieved but I have been so thoroughly discouraged from pursuing my career that it is emotionally painful to look at jobs.
How did you find the contract? Networking? Job sites? Did you discuss your burnout with the employer or did you feel things were more manageable by then?
I did discuss my burnout with my new employer and joined as a contractor in fear that the thought of being "tied down" by a W2 position would once again make me feel hopeless and trapped. They understood, and I initially only took on a few hours per week. Once I felt more comfortable with the workload and the company's culture, I increased the hours and eventually accepted their offer.
The contract itself found me when a past colleague of mine learned that I had quit. So, yeah, I must admit that my situation includes the privileges of an extensive network formed by a long career and a financial cushion that I used while mentally recovering.
I hope you can climb out of this hole that you're in. Speaking to the right therapist also helped me make sense of my options. Understanding that I wasn't stuck with my lot and had a choice in my destiny was the first pinprick of light in the darkness.
You are right.
Recovery from burnout takes years, not weeks or months. Years.
I recently got back my mojo and feel more inspired to create, and I'm quite enjoying it. It took me about 5 years to get out of a rut I was in.
One thing I will say: look for early signs of burnout and address them as quickly as possible. Burnout creeps up on you unannounced, so be careful.
I haven't seen a doctor but I'm not sure if I'm experiencing depression, or very low testosterone, or something else.
low testosterone though, is something many men (including me) have, but practically no doctor is willing to treat. They have one enormous range of "normal" that is calculated including 80 year old men and 20 year old men in the same pool (even though testosterone levels plummet as you age), and if you aren't in the 90 year old man levels (even as a 30 year old) insanely low category they'll just tell you "you're normal" and won't do anything.
After 5 years of getting worse and worse I read something online about that, and even though my levels was right around 300 (I'm in my low 30s) the doc dismissed it. I found a doc who would treat it tho. I'm on a small dose of testosterone replacement therapy, and I am already feeling so much better I can't even believe it. It honestly fills me with rage the way the medical establishment failed me and continues to fail men in this.
The job payed $1k a month, and I didn't receive a single raise for two years, which is another reason why I quit. It was only after stopped working that I realized I was completely ruined, both mentally and physically.
The worst thing about this company is they use employee time trackers that analyze and store your mouse and keyboard movements and take screenshots every 10 minutes. My contract stated I had to have an activity level above 50% if I were to get paid.
Currently, I work as a writer for a digital marketing company, and I am having a hard time getting used to the lack of micromanagement and the slower (and much more normal) pace of work.
I can't afford rehabilitation, I must continue working to be able to survive which is really hard for me right now. I have some kind of PTSD too, I keep apologizing to everyone even though I haven't done anything wrong. So there you go... Sorry for the rant. :)
This has been a pain point for me as well, adjusting to newer, slower or more bureaucratic environments.
You deserve to honor your resilience and success in identifying your issues and working to resolve them. You are an inspiration that people like myself can struggle, and sometimes continue to struggle but not give up.
To ease the struggling stage my biggest win was acknowledging what is the minimum actions needed to take to keep coasting, Once I accomplish those things I didn't beat my self up. Examples of this would be acknowledge 6 hours of meetings in a day is a full day, and I don't need to do 6 hours of dev work on top.
To start the healing process I quit my fulltime job and took 3 months off. After that I started contracting instead, billing hourly, and working less then 40 works for my budget and the strong disconnect between working and not working is helpful to me.
I would ask your self the question, do you need to `fix "everything"`. Sounds like a lot of pressure to put on yourself, maybe you need that pressure, maybe you don't.
This is a huge struggle for me. I have difficulty estimating tasks I don't know how long it will take. Then I can't provide cost estimates to customers who want pricing on things they don't understand to begin with. If I am lucky to deal with technical people its ok but I find intense social pain and failure when it comes to getting these important details across to people with a financial interest in not understanding or negging me down.
I really wanted to make consulting a thing for a while but the pain of working with non-technical people makes it almost unbearable.
Non-technical people are part of the job, I try my best to explain the tradeoffs of different implementations and let their internal people make those calls. Long term problems are theirs so if they cut corners that is on them in 2 years.
"Money is not everything but not having enough is" as the quote goes. Maybe there is a way to be happy without this attachment to job performance but it is a rare thing.