Ask HN: Have You Burned Out?
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.
151 comments
[ 34.0 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadI find it extremely difficult to stay engaged with work I don't care about, this creates a negative feedback loop that's the kiss of death for me at any job.
You know the "alienation" Marx and Engels write about in the Communist Manifesto and Capital? I lean into that shit like a motocross racer doing a tight turn. I'll take just about any kind of paying work as long as it's not for the military or law enforcement, but otherwise I simply don't give a shit. I don't get emotionally involved with my code any more than I did with the toilets I used to clean when I worked as a supermarket janitor to help pay for college. Either way I'm mainly just dealing with other people's shit.
I am genuinely in awe of this. I've made so much of my personality caring about my work that it's hard to even conceive of not caring about what I do. Every job or success has been built upon previous jobs... the idea of a ladder moving up.
I've never once thought about it like a horizontal plane with multiple doors all at the same level.
I'm jealous of your thinking and I wish I could care less about what I spend my time on. I hope to find a healthier balance closer to your viewpoint.
But this feels less like burn out, and more like a very healthy work / life balance to me.
Which I'm not. I'm passionate about having food, shelter, water, electricity, internet access, and keeping my wife happy. However, that all costs money, and we don't live in a fully automated luxury communist utopia so I've got to work for a living.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/08/cheese-is-li...
For real, I love dairy and cheese and I'll fucking mourn the day my doctor tells me to give this stuff up. It's coming. I'm not looking forward to it.
I still think Adams is a disgrace for the comparison tho.
Butter, milk and yoghurt (which I eat in quantity, all 3) don’t have this effect, so I’m just suggesting you eat other stuff for a few days, maybe French or Lebanese restaurants, or sushi. It would be logical, if true, that pizza eaters tend to be couch potatoes as well. If would be logical, if true, that I get depressed when I’m alone (it looks stupid but other people aren’t depressed in just 1 day alone), maybe I tend to have pasta-cheese when I’m alone, plus cheese before dessert, and bahm slowness and suicidal thoughts.
But I’m French and, like you, I couldn’t quit fromage - but maybe I should have various ones for taste, and not for quantity.
If I accidentally eat some dairy, starting about 2 days later and lasting for a few days, I'll feel really terrible about myself and like there is no hope. Often times there's some suicidal thoughts in there too. Absolutely not worth it.
I’ve always eaten yoghurt and mill everyday in quantity, and a little cheese works well, but it’s only when I eat a quantity of cheese that I stare in the void for hours with 99% of my neurons off - Could the liver turn “depression mode=on, burn all neurons” when saturated in fats?
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.
"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.
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.
Then of course, the pandemic hit us all and those who were judging me got hit the hardest; now they don't have the courage to look me in the eyes, because they drunk the glass of bitter water as we say in my language and know exactly how I feel.
I don't know whether it has something to do with age (80's kid here), but it's a common trait amongst those who are around my age; we can't handle too much information at once.
If you want to have a chat, let me know.
I've gone from not ever being let go from a job (or even getting ahead of layoffs) to bouncing down the career ladder to lower and lower paying jobs. It's not that I'm unwilling to work its that my idea of what I'm worth or what I should even be doing has been so scrambled by the rejection from my chosen career and at times rejection from jobs further down the line too.
I have tried to go back to tech twice and had the most emotionally painful and abusive experiences to date.
I feel like there's a societal expectation that you should just relinquish any dignity or standing you once had when for immediate and maximal convenience to employers. Worked hard to get where you are? too bad! Life sucks it's not that way anymore you're only worth $13 an hour now. Is my resume a lie? Was the last 10 years a fever dream? Was any of it real?
Believe it or not, this is very comforting to know that others feel the same more or less, like me.
This thread and all its responses have been hugely cathartic.
Thanks for engaging / participating in todays online group therapy session :)
I can't really foresee a way that will get me going again, and I don't know that I really want to. I feel ashamed that my wife is now working, for less pay and objectively harder, when I could be making twice as much.
That lead into a big downturn in my personal emotional and mental health, not helped by lots of issues in my personal life. I changed jobs, luckily still within my field, and now about a year later things are starting to feel more stable. My personal life is still in turmoil tho to the point where stress and burnout cost me the relationship with my partner, where we're in the process of separating now. It's been 2.5 years now, and I have no doubt that it will be years more.
It's burn out that started with work and just turned into full life burnout. The answer is always do less, not more. I've been trying to minimize my commitments and focus on what's core. Health, taking care of my son, my job, and my future. But it's all a setback where I wish I had been more proactive about my calm and my overall health. There's still lots of life left, this is just a wake up call about how to live the remainder of it well.
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.
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.
Maybe if I felt like my department head actually did anything to unblock people but sit there, blink a few times before saying “ok who’s next?” I wouldn’t dread them as much.
As practiced though, I really don’t know who benefits from our standups anymore.
It's not for you, this is why it sucks. Standup could be better but it's not designed with concern for all participants, or at least it takes effort and empathy to run one this way. If doing it well was easy developers would all be tripping over their dicks to give standup updates.
tl;dr: stick not as effective as carrot, but stick is cheaper / easier / simpler so stick is the only option
One way to avoid burnout is to achieve progress in the form of milestones.
Another one is the pure joy from achieving a difficult goal, e.g. a difficult problem that has eluded you for some time.
Those two things are what I am for to avoid burnout. And if there is no longer joy from the second option, then it might be time to call it quits.
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.
My beef with the standup is that it does not serve the developers. It's simply the act of management pulling the oil stick from the engine, wiping it clean and firing the engine up REGARDLESS of what oil levels are present.
So many times I've had the standups used simply as a one-way process. People get their information but theres "no time" to discuss anything at length and the deciders are magically busy all day long afterwards. I don't think its wrong to have brief updates and not get into long-winded discussions during the updates, but if there's not ever time to discuss relevant issues this becomes a social / psychological tactic by deciders / planners to avoid "blowing scope" and "adding additional work" as I have experienced it. Fuck the people working on the thing, we already decided. Stop complaining nerd just sprinkle some PHP on it and get on with your life.
Granted, I am painting a worst-case scenario picture here based on my experiences. The alternative (no check-ins, or hardly ever) is actually worse in my opinion.
The common thread is give-a-shit. Do the people asking for updates actually care or are they simply collecting information to regurgitate to others. One of these two personality types brings value to the organization, which one do you think it is?
I will talk all day to people who are on the same page as me, or people who genuinely care and want to understand.
The ones who actively don't want to understand can go directly in the volcano.
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.
You have a lot of expertise in your field, would becoming a freelancer trainer or coach be an option? For example, running short (1-5 days) on-site courses at different companies. I can imagine it might be rewarding to impart you expertise to the attendees - the feeling of satisfaction of helping others. Best of luck whatever you decide.
You'd have to look for smaller companies without the clout to pick up FANG engineers. They desperately need folks, and can be negotiated with.
I've had two part time gigs. One was a food delivery app startup, but not as big as uber eats. They had a real patchwork of an engineering team, few contractors, few full timers. I just told them 20h/wk is my maximum and declined their requests for me to work more. They needed me, and hiring is very hard.
Another was a tiny payroll software company. Another small contender in a larger market. But they had their niche, and some real old software built almost entirely by one contractor at a time over the course of two decades. Moved at a real slow pace. Paid me $130/h if I remember correctly.
However.. since you sound like me in every other way (FANG, distributed systems, tech lead level), know that the work in smaller places like I describe is boring. It's cleaning up old cruft, shoehorning features in with no budget to rewrite any existing code, working with terrible tooling and documentation.. All good if you can turn off the part of you that wants to write sexy code and build beautiful novel systems. I lasted about 1.5y. But got to travel the US, play music, date, have serious side projects.. a good life for a while.
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%.
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.
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.
Overworking can lead to overengineering which has a knock on maintenance cost for years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Yes, exactly. Such an important thing to know. Even one day in a horrible position can be absolutely brutal.
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.
One employee provided a list of things "if we can't fix these, this is my two weeks notice" and this choad responded with "cool see ya".
HR got involved and after his two weeks was announced by choad he was suddenly back with the company, just kidding! Said employee stayed around for another month or two but ultimately left.
"I'm in charge, so I'm right" is the most cancerous personality to deal with. I pride myself on acknowledging when I'm wrong and I'm astounded and disappointed at the lack of ability in 99% of people to engage in genuine reflection / introspection.
Now my end goal is to definitely quit IT and find something nice to do. But let’s be honest: what’s gonna me pay that much?
I saw a graphic about "moving on" and loss / grief. It showed that most people think of you as jar and grief is a ball that shrinks over time.
The reality is the grief never goes away, its with you forever. You grow around it. Your comment really hit me in that one.
https://whatsyourgrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/growin...
Instead of continuing to apply to software jobs I applied to a local retail job. This feels like a huge failure and I am not happy about how it reflects on me and my career.
No fucking joke I had a PM who would ask that we "just sprinkle some PHP on it" when a complex topic came up she couldn't be bothered to mentally engage in. Cannot put into words how arrogantly disrespectful this behavior was, yet it was casually laughed off as "oh that's just how she is!" Yeah... she's that way because you have no accountability and let PMs treat your devs like shit. That's your company culture. This is a choice.
It's super counter-intuitive but sometimes trying to advocate for best practices or just improving the status quo can be HUGELY CAREER LIMITING and I cannot warn people enough against doing so. It has literally destroyed my career. You've been warned.
However, I’m now at 9 months in and I still don’t entirely feel recovered. I still have to force myself to write code when it used to be enjoyable and find my mental and intellectual recovery happening through writing, fitness and other non technical work. I’ve slowly started to recover my enjoyment of technology but deprogramming myself from every technical thing I do has to make money to I can do this technical thing out of pure curiosity is slow going.
Would I do it again? Yes, I continue to generate ideas and make observations that I think have real business value but not for another 6months to a year and not the same way.
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 should give yourself some credit for the effort it takes to do this.
> 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.
This is one of the things I struggle most with. At times I feel like people can't see me and I don't really exist. Social / communication struggles keeps me isolated because I struggle to explain / ask for the help I need.
I have stopped asking for help because I'm so discouraged that either people will say no (why are you asking for help / do it yourself / you don't need help), or they will suggest unhelpful things that are gratifying for them to say (it worked for me / I'm so great so this will work / heres what you NEED to do ) but unrealistic / not applicable to me.
I have unresolved ADHD issues too. I am burnt to a crisp and I don't know what to do.
i.e. I want to go fishing but I have an assignment I have to do. Sometimes I just need to go fishing and once I get out there and relax (mentally decompress) I am finally hit with an overwhelming sense of not being able to fish but actually I wanna go do that thing I need to complete.
I am on the spectrum too (ASD) there is something with that + ADHD that makes this stuck-in-the-mud / "failure of executive function" so debilitating.
I fucking hate when people say this, but you're not alone. I see myself in your post.
1. Take a walk / try some meditation. 2. Go back to the assignment. 3. Get stuck / can't focus 4. Repeat step 1 till you can finish step 2.
Do you mean to say you're giving up on dev due to failures to land a new dev job...or you are trying to transition out of dev and not able to find a job in a new industry?
I guess either way, an anecdote from own personal experience, I was looking at other options myself...I was burnt out on dev, looking to do something related but I thought might take a burden off my shoulders (QA/support), that didn't work out...but long story short, I just decided to embrace who I was--I'm a dev, and I'd like to think a good one, not to say a bigger transition is out of the question, but I found that it was more realistic to adjust my "internal" dials rather than escape to an entirely new career. That may or may not describe you, but I guess I would say to bear in mind the solution isn't always an external change of circumstances.
Curious about this as well. I figured they were just trying to find anything to bring in money and thought they'd pick up a local hourly "unskilled labor" job until they landed another developer opportunity.I've tried this too but even though I have a lot of experience in restaurant work and "unskilled" manual labor, those who are hiring still only want to hire candidates which fit their expectation of who "fits" the role. And it's rare that a recently out-of-work software developer can adapt themselves to seem like they'd fit in.
So generally it's easier to find another developer job rather than a temporary unskilled labor position. It can also take 3-9 months to find that next developer job.
Good luck. Be kind to those around you and allow them to be kind to you.
Kind of. Need to pay the bills. Genuinely so burned out / emotionally destroyed that I'm genuinely questioning whether I want to do software anymore.
I find that when I can trick my mind into staying away from the negative I can engage in software and even enjoy it / have fun talking about it.
I love programming. I fucking HATE the people I have to deal with to get to do that activity and be paid for it. If you're a PM or other manager reading this I'm sorry. Your kind have destroyed me mentally and emotionally because it was too hard to be kind.
I genuinely don't know if I belong anymore. I want to say I'm still a software engineer but the impostor syndrome has overtaken me like a venom symbiote.
Maybe in some subconscious way I'm punishing myself for my failures by getting a "lower class" job? I hope it doesn't last forever but I am just so PTSD haggard from trying to prove myself in tech interviews. It hurts so bad to keep putting myself out there and getting denied.
I don't think it's a forever thing, but I also didn't expect to be in a multi-year career freefall. Overall it't not about what I want because I have no control over what happens. I can show up and try but ultimately success is not something I can dictate or manifest.
What do you do that affords you this accomodation?
For a long period it was a matter of looking at a certain ask from someone and I would simply feel if I was ok with that ask.
I have quit a lot of jobs due to me not accepting how people manage their own responsibility and time, because it then hit me.
Listen, I feel you. But don't take shit from no one and especially if has cost on your well being. It is definitely not worth it. Absolutely not.
I hope you find your legs, get someone professional to talk to and get back in the game.
There is nothing wrong with any of us, but as we bend our integrity we slowly lose ourselves, and that's not good. Get back to your own self.
All the best!
One of my biggest struggles is that my brain CAN NOT live any other way. I am realizing that there are huge costs to living true to yourself and I often wish I could relax my morals or just "care less" as people tell me.
I wish I could say living this way is worth it, right now it's not. I wish I could help myself, and if I could my next goal would be to help others who are suffering the way I am. Nobody deserves this.
> get someone professional to talk to and get back in the game.
I will continue to tell people that I'm in therapy and advocate for taking positive steps to address mental health struggles.
I grew up in a bad area and programming/computers were my way out to a better life than that of my family or the people I grew up around/with.
For decades it was a core part of my identity. I always had to be working on something. I had trouble sitting down to play a game because I'd think about how I could be working on something. This of course leads to a long trail of incomplete projects as I move from one fleeting new shiny project to another.
I started burning out slowly at first after getting burned by a position that I had deeply invested myself in (I believed in what we were doing, it was helping people). They wrung me out for all I was worth and left me out to dry in the end. I then moved to another position that was more opaquely abusive and toxic. This started the downward spiral of me "falling out of love" with programming.
This gave me something of an identity crisis, without programming who was I? What was my worth as a sentient being if not _creating_ things? This story is also combined with the general apathy/depression/dismay that came with all of 2020. First this feeling was that of loss, then depression, and then apathy. I was spending all of my time watching Youtube videos, browsing reddit, and sleeping. Work, consume, sleep, repeat.
I've only recently managed to break this cycle. Part of it was thanks to my incredible partner helping me to realize that I am more than the sum of my ability to contribute to the perverse growth demanded by capitalism. Another part of it was getting therapy to help me address the underlying emotional issues I have with binary interest (things are great or things are shit). However the most significant development is that I've started exploring hobbies completely unrelated to programming.
Now I do my work, give it an honest effort, and then clock out and put programming and work behind me. My free time is now spent trying new things and exploring possibilities that I had previously decided were not interesting or (more often) not possible. For me that involved drawing, painting, and now finally music production. I'm not any good at it, I likely never will be, but it's something I can do for myself, purely for enjoyment rather than _productivity_. Nobody will ever profit from my shitty music, and I'm not defined by it. It's just a thing I do for fun.
Hopefully this is helpful, try finding something completely out of left field from what you've been doing. The change of scenery in interests may help.
Don't be afraid to try new random things, not everything will resonate with you until eventually something does. You've got nothing to lose but time, and odds are that is already being wasted in ways that don't positively contribute to your well being.
Try not to let being turned down for a job (or many jobs) affect you. It's a numbers game where you apply to 100 and 1 accepts you. Like dating - why get all hung up on one girl when you should be interested in 10 others at same time. It's all failures until you get 1 match.
I am not ok with this and it's a giant axe hanging over my neck every breath I take. This does not make me want to work harder and try again, I want to crawl under a rock and die and never come out.
I am demoralized and emotionally empty from the negativity and rejection its called learned helplessness. The rat is tired of being shocked and has given up. Usually at this point they discard the dead rat and try again, I'm not sure how that applies to me.
I'm sorry but the whole "try not to get down" thing is extremely triggering and upsetting. I know you mean well but it feels like toxic positivity.
I tend to work at smaller companies (almost startup size) so I've been laid off many times when the company fails, so I've had financial and family stress too. Nothing to do but to keep going despite how tough it is.