Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
I don't want to get too much into it, but the main reason is that my job was supposed to be leading a modernization project to expand our legacy enterprise system with modern API-based integrations, but our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult. Things I was used to taking a week or two max at other companies take many months to ship and aren't really built with the quality I would expect. This makes it really awkward for me when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...
I could go on and on, but honestly I just strongly dislike this job. I'm trying my best to find another role, but the market is really competitive right now where I live (Sweden). I would say I have a quite decent CV, with a masters from an excellent university and around a decade of work experience in tech, but Sweden currently has the third highest unemployment rate in the EU so there is a huge amount of competition for each role. But of course, all I can do is do my best.
My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick. I have started to have really concerning mental health symptoms, specifically severe anxiety, due to this job. I've also had some really dark thoughts which has scared me a lot. My doctor started me on some antidepressants and I am receiving therapy, but it's too early to say if it has helped or not.
I don't know how much more I can take before I end up on some kind of sick leave. But I'm trying to take it day by day and I am trying to stay positive. Hopefully I can find another job soon, but until then I am stuck in this job.
For those of you who have been stuck in jobs you strongly dislike, how did you manage to separate your work from your life so that you could survive the situation? Did you find something that worked for you to ease the situation until you could find another job?
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I really appreciate any feedback or advice.
65 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 8.7 ms ] threadMy diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba.
Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production.
... and keep sending out resumes, etc.
No job is worth jeopardising your mental health.
This was my first reaction as well. But it's relatable. I've held myself to similar expectations and caused a lot of stress in the past.
You think the customer is thinking you'll be done in six months? Only if they've never bought enterprise software before. Their expectations are dramatically lower than what you might be holding yourself to. In fact, the expectations may even be lower than what is in the contract.
Even if you moved heaven and earth and shipped an API tomorrow, they likely aren't going to be able to start integrating it right away. That requires work on their end that needs to be planned into a quarter etc...
Some people don't even want to work at all or work in a successful product or whatever. We created all those silly expectations for ourselves, often they aren't even our expectations but the expectations of others.
Those expectations, our desires often make us very miserable.
For instance, 90%+ of the people in the world would dream of living in Sweden, despite your bad outlook of the job market. It's all about perspective.
Of course, if you can afford, pay a psychologist. They may help you better to deal with your emotions and help you find out what you need.
Maybe try building something... if you want, hit me up, see my profile. But maybe first try to chill down and enjoy life a bit.
In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be.
From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated.
So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job.
But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to:
1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing.
1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving.
1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead.
2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals.
3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure. Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related to the project's technologies.
The team may need some rearranging too, but try to keep this at minimum so that they can be confident that all of this is strictly related to a technology and skill update, and will not imply any sort of job insecurity or competition.
You may have noticed that all of this is mostly people management. If this is not something you'd like to do, then the only option is leaving. The job you're in right now is clearly one of people managing and not so much a technological one -though is still requires knowing and choosing the technological goals to seek, obviously-.
If you do follow, then who knows what will happen. But if things go well, you might expect to see some results in around 6 months or so, depending on how large/small the team and project are.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your piece of mind.
Since you say the current developers are also decent but otherwise inexperienced with the kind of work you expect there's a chance that with the right organisational changes and support (i.e.: allowing the experienced new developer to work more as a mentor than being responsible for deliveries right away) and given time those people could become more effective.
The issue will land squarely on the engineering management though, they need to accept the current team is not up to par for the deliveries while not making them scared for their jobs (that would just make the current developers cynical, and doing whatever they can to claw back power before retirement). It's a long road ahead that requires a very competent engineering management team to pull off.
No job is worth your health.
The economy is not in good shape right now.
In that case the focus should be on the immediate emergency (of being ill because of work) than the potential risk (of getting ill while jobless)
Is there a tech/team lead on the project - what’s their opinion of the progress the team is making?
It sounds like you are taking all the delivery responsibility on your own shoulders.
Is this project really top priority with your management? It sounds like it might not be.
I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.
Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.
Maybe focus on a hobby, a partner, something that gives you another sense of identity or worth, which reduces the pressure of the job to fulfill that role.
I think we all need meaning in our lives so the strict advice to “care less” is tough to implement. But hopefully the strategies above will help.
Good luck
My advice is to stay away from that shit. I know alcohol is expensive in Sweden but it's 1000x preferable than SRRIs or other weirdness the doctors are prescribing - see what they did in Lindsay Clancy case. A couple of beers now and then can make you see life more optimistically and not care. When you're focused on physically surviving the day (because of the massive hangover), there's little time to worry about something else. You just do what you have to do and move on.
To the OP: if you're at a point where you're taking medication to cope with your job, maybe you would be better off taking long term sick leave.
Also, being told to sell a modernization roadmap to customers while the team can't actually ship it isn't really a you problem. That's just a bad setup.
I'm in Slovakia but have a bit of a Swedish connection myself - studied there, speak alright Swedish, even made it to the last round for a PM job in Skövde once (didn't get it). Market's rough right now but your CV sounds solid, that'll turn.
Hope you find something better soon. Lycka till!
Leave before burning out. In the meantime, maybe take sick leaves if you can.
Consider many people don't notice they are burning out as well.
Leaving even if you don't yet have another plan could lead to a better outcome even considering that leaving your job creates financial difficulties right now because burnouts can take years to heal, some never manage to fully heal as well.
Start looking before you leave, preferably, but at the very least scale back your commitment so you don't burn out in the mean time. If it's bad, quit. This is why you need to have savings and spend less than you earn.
* getting buy-in from stakeholders, developers, and testers
* dealing with low performers
* protecting yourself from backstabbing attempts
* deflecting the barrage of scattered requests coming from the top brass
* appeasing customers angered by actions that someone else took
* reacting to big shifts from other parts of the organization
etc etc.
That sort of thing worn me down so much, I had to move sideways to regain some self-respect. Even though I was eventually vindicated by most of the calls I made (which someone else shipped and got credit for, another frustration of the job), I just accepted I am currently not in the right headspace to be a PM/PO in a big company.
So my only suggestion is to keep looking for another job, or even better create your own: with AI getting incredibly good, there has never been a better time for PMs to build their own prototypes, which can then be used to hunt for the job you really want. Otherwise, take the Serenity Prayer to heart and find more meaning away from the job.
It can also take steadfastly trying dozens+ of antidepressants to find one that works best with least side-effects. Don't have anything important to do when changing medications because some side-effects are difficult. It can take around days to a week to stabilize to titrate on and about the same off, depending on the medication.
I feel like there are a lot of people nowadays that are just pretending to be devs and ship things to prod using LLMs
The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/pattern...
You outlined the root cause: “our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult.”
Do you have any authority or influence to change this, either through training, bringing in consultants (be very careful with this one), or worst case via hiring/firing?
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.
In the past I would've given the majority of my "brain power" to just work, and while I have enjoyed that at certain points when I've learnt a lot, I feel like it is not great for mental health and well-roundedness long term. Especially as you say caring about something you don't own where more work =/= more gain.
That is the strange part. My boss who is head of product for my organization has given me good feedback so far. It's mainly just me who is beating myself up. But it's mainly because I have a strong feeling I know what is to come. If we can't even ship a few trivial GET endpoints in six months, how the hell are we going to implement more complex API endpoints in any meaningful amount of time? Is the whole project just going to get scrapped when they finally realize I wasn't exaggerating about how long things will take if a few simple endpoints take this long to ship?
> While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it.
Definitely doing my best here. Long walks listening to some podcasts have helped a lot. Spending time with my family has helped a lot too. But above all I'm trying to stay positive, because I feel like being negative and constantly being in a bad mood is just going to make things worse.
That sounds like Tuesday. If you communicate how slow it goes and why it's so and do reasonable things and your boss doesn't have a problem, maybe the company is fine with this either failing or taking forever and they will learn something from it, but it needs to fail first before the learning happens. Some projects are like that.
If the project is scrapped, do you see yourself blamed for it, fired or get another project to deal with?
I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described.
Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes. I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something like - these are just thoughts and I acknowledge them and let them pass.
Few of my friends did not have good results with medication.
I am also detached from my job, its only purpose is to make enough money to no longer need doing the job. Today I work to live and see tomorrow and the same thing tomorrow again.
I suggest talking to someone elder and with a more positive outlook on life, not from work. Preferably retired.
In summation- You are not your job friend. Not should it give meaning to your life. Live to fight another day. It helps to detach oneself.
I don’t understand why you haven’t just let an AI agent do all the tasks your incompetent coworkers take months to do.
It's easy to trivialize the work of others from the outside knowing nothing of the context they work in.
Never take your primary source of personal worth from a job. Get out of that mindset as soon as you can. In most companies like that you’re fungible in a moment’s notice even if they tell you they value you. As for non delivery, everything we build loses money because it’s built on a guess and doesn’t work properly because it’s designed and built by idiots. Do not listen to the people here doing 90 hour weeks on a startup. That’s insane. I manage about 6 hours a week :)
What they do provide you with is income. Save money so you can afford to lose a job first. Security helps. Find meaning outside work with that income. That is your purpose. And it probably shouldn’t be another let’s just do a side project at home and do another day of work. It should be social in some way.
So the clients wanted me to do one thing (run operations), my supervisors wanted me to focus less on technical contributions and more on administration and leadership, the PM wanted me to be a junior developer. The PM knew I was a supervisor as nd knew of the client expectations and still wanted me to do something else. He even thought he was my supervisor even though my bosses were meeting with him every two weeks and told him the reality. The dude lied to the clients and withheld client communications until I was fired. I think he is autistic because he perceptions of reality were frequently wrong, his only management style was hazing people, and he confused lots of things between various people and work assignments.
I really miss my team because they were awesome people and I kind of miss the income. I really loathed that I was leaving my people behind in such a toxic environment. I was super relieved to not have to do that job anymore though. I had been considering walking away from it two months prior to termination.
What saved me (in no particular order)
1. Sport. I felt I was “burning” my stress and anxiety by doing 1h of sport a day, in nature.
2. Therapy
3. Family and friends, quality time
4. Find another job
5. Stop social media
6. Fixed sleep schedule
The only way to cope is to only deliver the minimum, and not care too much about it. This is risky as there is a chance that the minimum delivery and no care attitude could filter into other areas of your life.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a job soon after.