
I changed my work 6 months ago and I'm already burned out - suralind
I changed work about 6 months ago after I was getting burned out. I enjoyed the interviews and while I had my concerns, I&#x27;ve decided to give it a go.<p>The onboarding went smooth. Plenty of documentation, even though the company is not that large (&lt;1000 employees).<p>I joined a team that was building a new feature. As mentioned, designs &amp; implementation details ready. Great! I noticed very early on that you have to figure out which parts of these should actually be implemented as some of the decisions were later changed. Happens everywhere, whatever.<p>Another thing is code quality. New code here is basically legacy even before you start to write it. There is a promise that once we finish the feature, there will be time for maintenance. I believe that maintaining quality is not something that you can do with once-a-year rewrite. I don&#x27;t like it, but what can you do?<p>There is a very strong push to deliver new features and the code got pretty old. Once something is added, it shouldn&#x27;t be modified (unless you modify the behavior). This isn&#x27;t coming from PMs.<p>We use React, no hooks thou. It&#x27;s a step back for me, but whatever. Eslint for linting, but rules are often disabled. One of the reasons is that backend team uses pascal_case and we use camelCase.<p>I like when all devs write code in a similar way - using object destructuring, naming variables similarly, stuff like that. I know some of these are objective, but I&#x27;m not saying here that my way is right, let&#x27;s agree on something. Nope. Reviewers should only comment on a &quot;high level&quot; stuff, which I think everybody understands differently.<p>About 2 months ago the project was delivered. Finally some time for changes... welp, no. I got transferred to another project.<p>So here I am, 6 months at work and I&#x27;m already tired, because after all this time trying, I just don&#x27;t want to push for changes, it&#x27;s draining, it&#x27;s consuming and there are no results.<p>How do you handle this? Do I expected too much?
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NoOneNew
The fact all you talked about was the work and not yourself, you are living to
work. You're taking work home with you. You probably think about work while
showering and brushing your teeth.

Stop.

What are your work hours? 9am to 5pm? You stop thinking about work at 5:01pm.
You need to do things you enjoy, outside of work that are not work related.
Ideally, not computer related. You are supposed to work so you can live a more
fulfilled life doing other things. Not live so you can grind away for someone
else to profit off of you. Dont get it twisted. You work for money. You're not
going to make a world a better place with what you're doing. That's not a hit
on you. It's just you need to not believe in some illusion about programming
making the world a better place. Go join Doctors Without Borders, as an
example, if you want to do that.

Burnout sucks and I lost 2 years of my life due to it. Dont let this get any
worse.

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gus_massa
Take a look at the classic post by Joel Spolsky
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-
don...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-done-when-
youre-only-a-grunt/)

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suralind
Haha, I got to the 1. point on the list and I can already say that I tried :D
I had a couple calls with my manager about that :/

But not all hope is lost, thanks for the link!

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gus_massa
I think the trick for step 1 is to make some task that are small enough to be
done in your spare time. Something like you finished all your assigned tasks
on Friday at 3pm and we all know that you should not ship on Friday, so you
have 2 free hours. Then you can configure a C.I. system to do some automated
tests, or add more tests.

If you ask/take for a full "free" week to make a major refactor, you will not
get it. Some small task when all your work has been done is easier to do.

Also, remember to have a sane amount of worktime, like <=40 hours per week.

~~~
suralind
yeah, I agree with that and that was what I was doing and still. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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RegnisGnaw
Go with the flow and find happiness in something else. This is what I'm doing
while looking for the end of COVID-19 and start job hunting again.

~~~
suralind
Yes, definitely. Though I always thought that 6 months at a company is quite
short and some future employers may have a problem with that. I was hoping to
last a year. Will see, I already had a couple of interesting offers, but I
guess every offer is interesting when you're annoyed.

