HACKER Q&A
📣 graypegg

Burning out from people rather than overwork


I’ve been working in development in some form for about 5 years, and I’ve been at my current job for about 1.5 years. It’s genuinely interesting product on the surface, and at some-point I know I was pretty excited about working here. All roles I’ve had, including my current one, have all just been as individual contributors, so no stressful side hustles or anything, just working on teams.

I’ve noticed a real shift in my own outlook the past year or so. I’ve messed up on things at a pretty regular interval, and as tacky as it is, there’s pull request comments and reviews that have really stuck in my mind, and coloured how I see coworkers. We’re all remote, we speak during the usual scrum meetings, and that’s about it. It’s allowed me to fill in this really cynical view of them all, and I find myself just resenting them, while also feeling a bunch of guilt over tripping over missed A/Cs in a PR or something. As well as my own gut tells me the code base we’re responsible for is too huge to be the responsibility of one team, I still find there’s entire areas of unfamiliarity that I run into, which just leaves the entire project feeling distant, if that makes sense.

The past month it feels like I’ve taken a bit of a nose dive, and started just being incredibly slow to do anything. I don’t know if I’ve felt this negative about my own job before, and it’s scared me a bit.

Maybe this is just me venting, but I’m curious if anyone here has felt this way before. Burnout not from people, rather than late overworked nights.


  👤 hayst4ck Accepted Answer ✓
Burnout is not about specific work or people, burnout is about a general sense of not moving forward. If you are applying effort, but see no results from your effort, that is going to lead towards burnout. For a lot of software, especially platform teams, it's easy to complete work, but see the problems getting larger and larger.

It will definitely not get better unless you do something different.

I think you have 3 major choices:

  Re-prioritize your life and start putting non job things first
  Change your environment (job or place of living)
  Therapy

👤 kidgorgeous
Just apply for new jobs dude. It's not that serious