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- Hacker News
- I'm saying this as someone who is still recovering from a crashout.
The job was actually pretty good, no problems with anyone or anything. But for some reason I was getting less and less effective over a year and stress was building up.
I got pip'd and fired (rightfully so) when I stopped delivering work since I was just done w/ the world.
I snapped and spent 2 weeks in the hospital and intensive care from how much the stress and related bad habits wrecked my body. I had to go to the ER several times over the course of a year because I kept having panic attacks so severe, they admitted me 3 times just to get my BP under control.
Its been 2 years unemployed, and thankfully I have savings to live off of, but not ideal.
Take it from me, in 3 years I went from a marathon running fitness freak, to a train wreck of a person who is still in intensive psychiatric care and struggles to run a 1/4 mile. I'm somehow trying to figure out how to get my life back together.
Get out when you can. The bad stuff in your head builds slowly and suddenly will crash your brain without warning.
by tekla - My money is that the vast majority of people on this board have been in your exact same spot, including yours truly.
What to do:
a) First and foremost: make finding your next opportunity your full-time job, above and beyond your present full-time job. And take the time to build your professional footprint for your next opportunity too. Let me explain: do you have an online portfolio of your work? If no, start one right now, and maintain it forever. Do you have a blog where you talk about your market/industry/profession; which existing tools are best of breed, which ones can be improved, and which ones are missing? How AI is affecting your market/industry/profession? Publish white papers and case studies. How's your GitHub?
b) Secondly use this opportunity as a training ground for Life. This is Life at its finest, what will make the difference will be your reactions and responses to these events. Read about the ancient Stoics (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero), Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli (very misunderstood), Jung. Make this the most consequential job of your Life.
c) Related to b) above, tweak your language paying special attention to the language you use. Just from your title, "Survive" and "hate" are problematic words. Read Shane Parrish's works.
I am not saying that it's easy, quite the opposite. Think of this job as a short-term problem and you are building a long-term solution that will take care of this and much more. In order to be successful, you will need to change your worldviews, your belief systems, and imprints.
I wish you a lot more then dumb luck.
by SMAAART - > 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.
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.
by jraph - Make less your life about your work. It's so hard for some people, myself included to do that. But you need to do that!
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.
by thiago_fm - If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation.
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.
by genezeta - >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...
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.
by Muromec - Sounds exactly like my place.
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.
by sdcfgy - As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control.
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.
by reeredfdfdf