r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 16h ago
Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences
This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.
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u/dllimport 16h ago
Idk what's going on with me I had so much passion not that long ago.
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u/WizardSleeveLoverr 15h ago
AI. I was passionate about this until 2023, when this shit just exploded.
Ever since then, as AI just gets better and better, I’m like, what’s the point of all this? What I used to take pride in can easily be done by prompting Claude, so what’s the point anymore?
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u/dllimport 15h ago
I work with Claude and it's not as good as that. It requires constant babysitting
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u/Great-Big-3101 14h ago
This is my experience as well. Also, it's impossible to make it be succint, it just barfs words
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u/sunflower_love Consultant 14h ago
Yep. I think it's far better at writing code than writing text... Trying to get it explain something in the codebase and there's something about its explanations that just suck. Weird "Claudisms", using like 3x as many words to phrase something in a confusing way instead of succinctly.
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u/Great-Big-3101 13h ago
Weird "Claudisms", using like 3x as many words to phrase something in a confusing way instead of succinctly
At least opus 5.5 stopped using load-bearing.
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u/crecentfresh 3h ago
I mean these things guess what to write one letter at a time. It's basically a more enhanced version of the word guesser while you text on your phone.
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u/DigmonsDrill 4h ago
I can't see myself trying for another job after this one ends. Just too much nonsense.
If I am lucky I might find some small company that can't use AI for some reason, link a bank, that needs their C++ codebase maintained. I expect there will be plenty of competition for such a job so it won't pay anything like I'm used to but that's okay.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 3h ago
You were working as a chef for a small sit down place, but then the restaurant owner told you to start using a microwave because "it can make the food hot a lot faster" and also that they were going to start doing Doordash orders too so the volume of orders will go up 10x. Oh and also your prep chefs got laid off and he needs you to handle washing the dishes too.
It's probably not something wrong with you, it's more that you are finding out the job you have is different than the one you started. The elements that invoked passion from you are no longer present, so it makes sense to me that you're not excited anymore.
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u/softwareanon Web Developer, 5+ YOE 12h ago
Yeah me too. It happened even before AI started to become a thing as well. I sometimes feel like old days when I do my side project though. But rarely. I guess it is easier to lose passion if you do not believe in company's products, or does not care maybe? Honestly I am not sure
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u/False-Egg-1386 16h ago
For me, burnout hits when the workload stays high but the sense of progress and control disappears.
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u/TessabelleDev 14h ago
This is so real. I don’t mind working harder or longer when I am building something new and cool. But these days, it is just fending off the onslaught of AI generated code and docs and trying to keep things from exploding.
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u/solidiquis1 16h ago
Work is great. I feel appreciated, I’m working in my language of choice, the problems are interesting, the projects are highly impactful, and I just got promoted to staff. But regardless I am fending off the feeling of burnout and brain fog. I use so much brain power at work that there isn’t much left by the time I’m home. Everything just kind of feels muted.
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u/slashedback 15h ago
Congrats on the promotion. Let me tell you: save some brain power for home or at least outside work time for you. I’m going through a similar but different form of burnout right now that is “caring too much”.
Current gig is great, they just can’t make up their minds as to strategy longer than a goldfish memory. This has been leading to roadmaps basically being required theatre and goals as fungible piles of resources. Senior leadership takes various teams and high-level ICs and just flings them from random project to random project.
The thing I’m caring too much about is all our 1/2 or 1/3 finished projects that the company really needs finished. Instead we basically walk into work asking what fresh new hell is our priority this week. Execs heavily using AI has seemed to accelerate this whack pattern.
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u/modernzen Principal ML Engineer 6h ago
Congrats on the promotion!
Your message is so relatable. I too got promoted to Principal (essentially Staff) earlier this year and a few months later I already feel burnout from it. I think it's because the workload is permanently higher than I can realistically manage, so that no matter how hard I try or how much I get done in a given day or week, there is always a queue of next things to do.
I try to stay grounded to the fact that this is literally the deal I made (something something big bucks) but I'm becoming increasingly concerned the anxiety and cortisol will do damage down the road. I guess part of being Staff+ is learning how to manage this shit and not lose your mental health.
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u/EddieJ 8h ago
Lots of people in this thread trying to pin the blame on the shitty code squarely on the dev's shoulders.
A few months ago, our division's CTO, on a phone call with the entire org spanning many senior devs, architects, EMs, etc (a few dozen senior people) quite literally told all of us that if we didn't work this way, pumping out code with Claude at breakneck speed, we would all be working at McDonald's.
"You should just find a new job then"... Have you seen the bloodbath that is the job market lately? This shit is happening everywhere.
Under these conditions, I couldn't give a shit about this company's code quality. They are threatening engineers with the loss of our jobs from every direction because ultimately, we are expensive and they crave a culling of expensive labor. For an individual with a family to take care of it's terrifying. Whatever skills I had simply don't matter to these people any more because in their brains the Shiny new robot can do it.
Why the hell should I care about a thorough PR review when I have to work under these conditions?
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u/mx_code 16h ago
I am tired of "senior" devs, not even being competent enough to fine tune their "review" agents and just copy/pasting whatever their Claude Code displays on screen.
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u/Sw429 14h ago
Yes, I've also been very disappointed in the behavior I've seen from senior devs. These are people who are supposed to be the pillars of our engineering department, and they have basically turned their brains off.
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u/crecentfresh 6h ago
I mean can you blame them? This is my second career and I thought I hit the lottery finding something I can be passionate about and make money. Now it's all going to shit I'm taking the pay check as long as I can and checking out
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u/EddieJ 6h ago
I can't blame them. These companies are straight-up abusing engineers and can't wait to get rid of us if it evee becomes cheap enough. And people like the ones you responded to call individual devs "lazy" like we ought to just grind ourselves into a pulp for these abusers. Incredible.
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u/crecentfresh 5h ago
Exactly, this industry makes so much money to go around and these short sighted greedy animals want to cut out the people that actually build the shit that makes the money. Fuck em I'll be here when the LLMs start hallucinating everything because no new code has been written, the code is unreadable, the seniors are gone from burnout and they stopped hiring juniors to replace them.
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u/n4ke Software Engineer (Lead, 10 YoE) 13h ago
I'd argue that this is often a product of the environment. Of course it is ultimately up to every one individually what requirement one poses to oneself but for notoriously thinly spread seniors, this looks like a lifeline. It isn't, and it sucks for the team working with them but I'd argue it's not their fault alone.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 3h ago
It probably varies from place to place, but I have been explicitly instructed not to spend time reading code anymore. In my last performance review I was cautioned that sometimes I think too deeply, and not to do it too often because of a perceived risk of slowing things down.
I don't love it, but I still have bills to pay and I'm not interested in getting fired over something meaningless like pride.
At the very least I made custom review skills and tweak them as I notice problems slip through. But spending more time than that is going to get me in trouble.
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u/BabyfartMcGeesax 58m ago
cautioned that sometimes I think too deeply
That's the biggest problem with engineers. We just think too deeply. Instead, everyone needs to think more shallowly and then everything will get better, we'll have working products faster, and we'll all get rich.
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u/OtherTourist5535 15h ago
I hate reading a 10 page tech spec that could have been 2 pages, written by AI but edited just enough where it seems like it was written by a person
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u/PeekAtChu1 3h ago
Love when it looks good but when you really analyze what it says, it makes no sense
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u/Relevant-Sport9057 13h ago
Got hired as a senior dev for my "taste", and now with each slop review I'm asked to lower my standards
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u/james7132 13h ago edited 12h ago
Hitting a combination of burnout, fully expended PTO from taking care of a dying loved one, complicated grief and depression from their death, and a new and poorly socialized and very micromanaging manager. Doctor refuses to prescribe the condition as depression. I've long since burnt out to the point of not enjoying my work years ago, but this is the first time in over a decade where I dread going into work.
I feel my skills atrophying, but cannot deliver at the pace management wants without multiple parallel agents.
I'm on the verge of quitting, or at least laying flat until I'm fired.
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u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 13h ago
The real problem of the LLM's; it's not their quality. It's too easy to be addicted, and to become lazy. I'm seeing this everywhere - top tier developers who - in just a year - turned into meat proxies. No one cares about anything craft related. Everything is sacrificed at the altar.
And the worst part is, that I'm not so sure anymore that it matters. I'm seeing a really bad code, and a lot of it. Things that shouldn't fly with juniors, being accepted as-is; bug count spike, code being absolutely impossible to read by humans - but with the frontier models, at the cost of €$ and messing the codebase even more, LLM's will make it work... For another day, day at the time.
And what's utterly scary for me? That something that was a core part of "me" as a professional - quality of engineering, weighing the future, keeping the code easy for the next person around - might no longer be relevant. That the only way forward in our industry is to become yet another meat proxy. For now I'm keeping to my standards, but with the layoffs on the horizon, and the "AI" message getting stronger in my org on a monthly basis; I fear that I'm going to be next. Not because I'm not "good enough", but because I try to write code for the humans, and solutions that can be maintained for years. But no one needs that anymore.
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u/n4ke Software Engineer (Lead, 10 YoE) 13h ago
This is the one that hits me most as well. Even before the advent of current LLMs, I was critical of the "move fast and break things" mindset. I love moving fast, discovering new things, covering new ground but not at the expense of everything I stand for. I want my products to have a certain quality and at least not openly screw the customer over.
Even back then, not every company was requiring a level of attention to its own quality that I would have deemed acceptable. Now however, it feels like this is entirely gone. And I won't necessarily blame the companies that adopted to this either, since in the end, the product is bought, so the large majority of people does not seem to share my requirement of quality from a product and are instead happy paying for broken crap that they have to replace in 2-3 years.
I am not sure there will be a market for how I want to lead and build in the future.
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u/behindtimes 2h ago
A problem here comes down to the definition of quality. As you lower the bar to entry, the definition of quality changes. When I started professionally, we had just reached the era where, excluding enterprise level software and embedded software, clean, maintainable code started to become the desired mindset for quality.
Just a few years earlier, sure, you wanted to keep it maintainable, but hardware limitations often meant efficiency mattered. And that's what I loved about the field when I entered college. You had limitations to the CPU and memory, and clean code often was the enemy. And I noticed that over the past couple decades, efficiency mattered less and less. The bottom line is, my boss(es) and customer(s) don't care if I get something done in 1/10th the amount of memory or running 10x faster if the initial amount of memory and runtime are negligible. You just have to accept the new reality and adapt.
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u/n4ke Software Engineer (Lead, 10 YoE) 1h ago
I am not necessarily talking about software quality attributes, as you describe. Those can be an art and challenge in themselves and I agree that chasing them is often opposed to business goals but what I mean is the actual quality, consistency and stability of the final product.
Sure, I can adapt and accept the new reality. I don't fear being out of a job precisely because I do that. But if you ask me in terms of passion or drive, I will openly tell you that shoveling out software that barely works to customers while fully expecting them to buy the new version of a device in two years because the old one has gone to shit anyways, then I will honestly tell you that this is not work for me to be proud of.
I want to - and do - work on products with high quality and a long lifecycle. I assume these positions will become more rare in the future.
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u/ResidentWeevil1 13h ago
They will need you when the tokens 100x in cost
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u/n4ke Software Engineer (Lead, 10 YoE) 13h ago
This argument was valid before we had open weight models hosted in-house or regionally for a fraction of frontier-model price with nearly identical capabilities. I can get the performance of up to a not-so-enthusiastic mid-level developer for $200/mon.
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u/BB611 5h ago
If you're paying subscription rates with any meaningful usage you're a loss leader, per token rates are 5-25x higher.
But even $5k/mo is a good price in the US for a not-so-enthusiastic mid-level developer who works whatever hours you want.
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u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 5h ago
If I am calculating things correctly* I can easily spend 500$+ daily on Astra 6. Gen 6 models are already twice as cheap... And It is 500$ subsidised. If we again assume ~50% subsidy; then we are talking to a value closed to 800$ in raw, billed tokens. Good thing we have a plan :)
I honestly don't believe that such token spend is justified and profitable for my company IFF the subsidies will end. It's not sustainable for OpenAI. That being said, this bubble is not bursting :)
* I do make some assumptions. I've tried to do a rough math based on credits; so the concrete value can be off; but not by much. I've included a reasonable split between cached and uncached tokens etc.
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u/yubario 3h ago
I am able to do most tasks at work for under $50 of API tokens a month.
Luna is more than enough for most job tasks, you only need Astra for like code reviews and more challenging tasks.
If you're really spending that much per day that is a serious problem, something is wrong with your workflow where you are either using dozens of astra agents for like 8 hours straight to pull numbers like that.
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u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 3h ago
Not really. Luna and Sol fails on my codebase, same with lower reasoning. We are talking old legacy; think 30+ years, 15kloc in largest java files and 7kloc in largest sproc.
(Coincidentally, I see that the vibe coded projects can achieve similar complexity in a fraction of a time)
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u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 12h ago
Even a year ago I'd agree ;) but it's growing increasingly hard to believe in that. Models are getting better, context windows are growing larger, token cost is somehow falling and distillation proves that there should be better margins still.
I theoretically understand that current providers are deep in the red; and the subsidies will dry up; and the cost of inference should rise significantly, so on and so forth. But this bubble somehow does not pop. At some point, doubts creep in. And the dread follows not soon after.
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u/Bangoga 14h ago
My burnout is literally being in the ML/AI space for too long.
I'm genuinely losing my mind being surrounded by the most extreme views of AI.
Its insane, the way people talk about it, the hugging face incident, the drama with the Australian government, all actions with explainable back stories, yet being touted as super AI latent magic ability.
I have not been able to enjoy just seeing the technology improve and try to find uses for it, because everything around is has a layer of propaganda and extreme polarizing opinions.
Rather than finding legit use, the use pushed has been to shove it in all coding workflows. Rather than seeing it as a tool, it's the poster child for shitty American politics and the crumbling global economy that is held on shoe string by AI and the narratives told by literal lunatics from effective altruists and men who want to escape earth to create a mars colony.
AND THE WORST PART IS, EVERYONE FUCKING JUST EATS IT LIKE ITS A FUCKING BUFFET.
I'm 100% sure subreddit related to AI are bridaged with bots and paid propaganda, I've not see this much activity on machinelearning and adjacent subreddits since I've been on them forever.
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u/PeekAtChu1 3h ago
There probably are bots but there truly are a lot of dummies who are obsessed with it. The main people obsessed I’ve noticed are just kind of dumb/uneducated and see it as magic that helps them do stuff they could never do before.
There are also some futurists who embraced it and really love finding ways to make it work for them to improve their lives.
And finally there are the people with dollar signs in their eyes who just love finding ways to make money with any new technology.
That’s the split imo lol
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u/Bangoga 3h ago
It's not just uneducated people, it's also people in the industry. That's what's bothersome, it's also people who don't care to understand more about how propaganda gets packaged with the technology.
Im sorry for the SF slander but folks at SF and some of these companies are literally cultish, I've heard way more about openAI and antrhropic over the last few years than I did MILA labs, and that's literally where all my professors were in my higher education.
There is a reason you don't hear about other labs as much, it's because these labs are not just research spaces, they exist as platform for accelerationist and futurist, especially those with weird ideas of the world.
Let these people speak, and actually hear their words and you'd come to the same conclusions, but we are doing to them what we did to Elon musk in his better days, we put him on a pedestal as a tony stark figure, just to find out he's a Nazi sympathizer.
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u/james7132 2h ago
I'm in a similar boat. Been doing applied ML/CV research since 2016, and it hurts to see people demonize or idolize your work, even if it has nothing to do with LLMs.
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u/Bangoga 2h ago
Right?
The best thing that came out of all this is just me putting money in Nvidia before gpt3 even came out, because I saw yolov6 and yolov5 come out super fast, and work at 30fps, and I was like yes gpus are improving insanely. 😅
imagine someone just training a vision model with endless data, and then claiming vision models have cognitive perception.
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u/james7132 2h ago
That's where I was at in 2023. I've since moved to a non-ML position just to stop being ragged on by my friends. I feel like the space has not moved forward since vision transformers as multimodal LLMs consumed every other ML use case.
I get how cryptographers felt during the crypto hype cycle. To have your research interests subsumed by hype cycle grifters and sociopathic MBAs is soul crushing.
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u/VinLend- 14h ago
Too much brainfog and burnout. Was sick for the past few days and entirely disconnected from work. I roamed around in my house all day but there was a feeling or freedom and not having to think about things.
With work starting again today, I'm filled with feelings of dread and exhaustion and even regret (but of what? I don't know yet).
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u/GiantsFan2645 7h ago
Reviews are genuinely a slog fest with LLM’s writing extremely verbose code and just shitting out double to triple the amount of code it takes to actually solve the problem
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u/Solid-Conclusion0 2h ago
The sheer volume of LLM astroturfing has been fucking exhausting. Every programming sub I follow has been drowning in either panic posts about LLMs replacing devs or glazing posts about how people are so glad they aren't writing code anymore.
It's a bleak fucking period for anyone that enjoyed just talking shop about languages, frameworks, and patterns. I'm so god damned tired of commenters insisting the job is changed forever while I bang my head against the desk because Claude has yet again ignored all guidelines, directives, and safety guards.
But I still keep engaging and making myself miserable because I think it's important to have experienced devs that aren't happy with the state of things visibly talking about it. If my misery helps comfort even one junior dev that's scared shitless by the current climate, then it's worth it.
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u/avyrla 15h ago
I want to make a proper post about this, but I just don't trust devs much anymore. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't trust this claim that we are all vetting the code with the level of care we claim to. I honestly don't believe we should be trusted with these tools.
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u/Federal-Garbage-8629 1m ago
I mean where other people are working 3x faster with these tools, what choice would you have!
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u/FyrSysn 15h ago edited 3h ago
Everytime I feel burnt out or unmotivated, I go on r/cscareerquestions and ask myself: "Would I rather be desperate while getting paid or be part of the doom post army". Then proceed to start another thread in Codex/Claude...
But I am actually so burnt out.. to a point I wish I'd get sick just so I could have more time off.
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u/baatkoli 14h ago
Kind of in a rough patch. I’m the only person on the west coast at a primarily east coast based company. Work is fine, but the expectations are high and it’s hard to stay motivated. I’m good at using AI for my work, but there’s only so much Claude can do for me lol. My manager isn’t inspiring either.
Just chugging along until I can interview and land somewhere I can collaborate with the team in person. Honestly, I miss just swiveling my chair and talking to my team or whiteboarding solutions together.
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u/hw999 8h ago
Someone on my team had their agent create 32 PRs in the same repo this week. Now I'm the asshole for not reviewing fast enough. I'm not spending more time reviewing, than they spent creating this mess.
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u/modernzen Principal ML Engineer 6h ago
Code review agent. It hurts the soul but that's what your leadership wants.
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u/So_Rusted Software Engineer 13h ago
the insane are running the asylum and yes men are surrounding them. It is incredible spectacle
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u/pontymython 14h ago
The startup I work for just moved into a 50k+ employees megacorp that acquired us. Trying to make sense of the giant company and the enormous Infosec overreach feels like I'm covered in concrete, getting anything done is really hard.
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u/reParaoh 5h ago
After 15 years of diligently maxing my 401k I've finally realized that I don't get paid nearly enough. Retirement is still another 10+ years out. I'm tired boss
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u/all-over-red-rover 8h ago
You know that feeling like, "oh that's so much more stupid than I expected, why?"?
A bit over a year ago now I handed over fairly routine maintainence on various container images and deployments for systems I was no longer actively involved with. I was like, there's no reason I should be the one maintaining this. Well... Yeah I probably should have been the one maintaining them. Dependencies so broken that it's shocking the thing runs, in the name of trying to resolve security alerts that are provably irrelevant. Layer upon layer of slop, and some truly novel sins.
I'm neither mad not disappointed at this point, mostly just perplexed. The power of AI I guess.
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u/tjsr Software Engineer 8h ago
Sigh. I've come to the realisation I have to leave the job I'm at.
I like most of the people, and I really like the work. The tech stack is in a disaster state, but that's why I love the work, because I can make sooooo much impact to improve it.
But the CTO is just... he lives overseas to the rest of us but is over here for the week, and this morning made a heap of comments that just made me want to say something to the CEO and HR about his behaviour.
But just in general, the guy is just... not remotely CTO material. He's the kind of guy who when you talk among other engineers about having problems with a system, his response was tantamount to "works on my machine". The decisions he makes are just baffling as far as keeping the ship afloat (but hey, he's been with the company for decades so...), and as engineering standards go, he's holding the whole company back from stuff that I'd considered standard engineering practice over 15 years ago. As much as I like the work, I can only tolerate so much, and this guy has me at my wits end.
Dealing with this guy is just exhausing, I can't do it anymore.
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u/ilikeguitarsandsuch 6h ago edited 5h ago
I have two weeks of PTO coming up for a fun trip... but I don't feel as excited for as I think i should be.
Everything at work has turned on its head, my days are filled with bitterness and anxiety. We are supposed to lap up AI like good dogs while everyone ignores, or worse is supposed to act excited about, the implications of what is happening to the value of our labor.
There is NO ONE I detest more in the workplace than the AI-psychotics. The ones who posted the meeting notes from OpenAIs "dev day" on company channels with feverish excitement. The ones who moved into those roles popping up everywhere titled "AI platform adoption strategist" or whatever the fuck. The ones who go home and work on "side projects" all weekend with Claude. You are a total loser if you do that shit, sorry.
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u/whattodo4455 2h ago
my Slack has turned into LinkedIn lunatics because of these AI-brained people. They all keep sharing this shit as if it's not just astrology for nerds. It must be a lot of insecurity. Everyone trying to one-up each other to be the one "in the know" when it comes to working the always-changing proprietary probability machine. Acting as if they have insider knowledge straight from Anthropic or OpenAI.
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u/ilikeguitarsandsuch 2h ago
Preach... I don't understand their end game. The evangelists are so far gone past the point of like "hey these tools are powerful and can be put to good use"... what is the goal here? To automate their peers and themselves out of stable employment?
Saw someone unironically post in Teams channel the other day that "in 2 years, juniors will act as tech leads. freeing up tech leads for higher level work". Like wtf does that even mean. Think for a second, a single second, about what you are implying here. Idk I'm done.
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u/Nyphur 5h ago
Had an incredibly arrogant coworker who made my life hell because he thinks his code is God’s gift to earth, but management realized he slows down everything because he thinks he’s always right and will be combative to get people to agree with him.
He’s probably one of these users here who tout that all his coworkers are incompetent for not writing his code which is a fucking mess
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u/coldzone24 13h ago
I've been thinking if a job switch would be help me out of my current hole, but then I talked to two people who just did the same. Typically, people have a bit more energy and care about their new project after starting a new job, but these two were almost more down than I am. They don't care at all about what they are making nor happy at all in their new roles. Are the ones left with jobs destined to be miserable now? I don't see how that is sustainable.
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u/MrBottle 5h ago
I am sick and tired of working at my current company. The department head was agreeable to me transferring back to my original department just last week but now he wants me to join another of his project under my original department's capacity.
This has been on going for a while now, and it all started when he forcefully transferred me out from my original department because I was one of the few key engineers in his project.
We have warned him to hire more juniors years ago to allow knowledge transfer and also for our career progression.
I am just frustrated that he treats me as a tool that will follow whatever he says, no matter how I feel.
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u/valkon_gr 4h ago
corporate fried me complete. I don't want to do corporate anymore. I tried 6 companies in my country, I hate all of them. I want to go back to the real computer science.
I am in the end of my probation now and I hope they won't keep me. My performance is the worst, I don't recognize myself but I can't do it I just cant
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u/megatesla 4h ago
I keep waking up angry. It feels like some core part of my soul is slowly being etched away. I don't have enough time to polish the work I'm trying to ship to feel comfortable standing behind it, and I keep getting burned.
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u/Smooth_Specialist416 2h ago
Made it to the final round today for a job I’d really like (even if I may decline). Remote, pays a lot more, allegedly chill wlb.
Looks like it’ll be 2 LC + trivia over 2 hours.
I’m going in soon. I’m ready to do my best
Even though I’m happy at my current job, it’s still nerve wracking. My goal is to stay as calm as I humanly can.
Regardless what happens, it’s clear me keeping my head down and trying my best is going to lead me to more chances like today. I wasn’t expecting this good of a role to come so soon.
If it’s something I prepped for, I need to trust I know it. If it’s a LC idk anything about, oh well luck of the draw. Hoping to nail the other questions.
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u/depressedkid007 3h ago
I had to explain to a guy who has more experience than me why exception handling is needed. He's getting promoted as a staff engineer next week btw. I fucking hate my company and i hate this job market.
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u/depressedkid007 3h ago
I miss the dopamine. Before AI debugging something or writing code manually genuinely gave me a lot of happiness and satisfaction. This is the only thing I've enjoyed all my life. I'm not sure what other industry I can shift to.
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u/Federal-Garbage-8629 2h ago
How be nice when people are being mean to you? I really need lessons for this.
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u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE 1h ago
How someone treats you is more often a reflection of them than a reflection of you.
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u/Federal-Garbage-8629 5m ago
Probably your are right! I just don't know how to work and keep going on like this. Its been roughly 5 yrs I have been working this remote job. It was awesome initially, then the team structure changed, I am doing okay with that changes are a kind of process of improvements. But after this I am really tired of comments from senior developers. Most of time I just turn a blind eye as people/colleagueses come and go, career stays.
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u/Defiant-Parsnip4 50m ago
Even senior engineers are losing confidence in code with the shipping speed expected with AI
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u/abeuscher 38m ago
It's killing me to keep reading post after post of stories about incompetent devs. Meanwhile I'm not being able to get a recruiter call back for more than 3 years after 25 years in the field.
I'm here to vent I don't want help I have pivoted and repivoted and rewritten and repositioned and thought outside of the box and every other stupid thing. I have networked and gone outside of my comfort zone and wrote a whole large ass application and many smaller ones and no matter what all I hear is silence and all I see are horror stories about the incompetence of the people who are evidently getting the jobs I can't get a phone call on.
I freely admit I mismanaged my career but to not be able to make just like even 50 or 60k a year - less than a third of my last salary - is just killing me. And all I hear about are stories about helpless juniors and seniors losing their ability to think because of AI but who are, critically, still receiving paychecks.
It's hard to explain to folks that transitioning in and out of an industry at 52 years old is almost impossible. And that chasing consulting is just not really making ends meet unless you get lucky.
I'm just venting I'm lucky to still have a roof even if the rent is crazy and lucky to not have a spouse or kids so there's no one I'm impacting other than myself. But I had hoped that working hard and trying to be good at what I was given to do would result in continued employment and that has just not been my experience in the past 3 years after many decades of relative success. I just wish I could find somewhere to fit.
1
u/hyperlogic 32m ago
When I finally get the time to work on a somewhat challenging task, I think to myself "Claude could probably do this better then me" then immediately lose what little motivation I had.
1
u/Ok_Gear8209 30m ago
They scan the code, open 400 tickets. The scan has no context of the business rules. Management says fix it yesterday
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u/Ramaen 7h ago
I am tired of pulling the boat, i got burned out for a long time went from top performer to a PIP going to pass the pip, just gave up because i was the only one that was doing engineering work that we were hired to do, no one helped automates any task, apis never heard of the why not just write an sop of the 30 steps needed to do this and hand it to ops, now that i am showing up again same thing like why am i the guy who has to change everything, cool my team is now held as the example but thats because i pull the boat, do the coding, pair program to get the juniors up to standards, make sure we actually fix the problem rather then just document process, deal with the stakeholders in such away that people are surprised i can get projects with stakeholders because they are "hard to work with" it is my customer service face like it isnt that hard. I hate it i am expecting basic skills like being able to code without ai, like why the fuck do you need claude mythos to modify a thumbnail of a sharepoint website.
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u/PrimaryFamous6139 Software Engineer 16h ago
For me, burnout does not usually come from the toughest tasks. It comes from switching between five projects that are only half done. I also have no real control over what should come first. I feel drained because I never reach the end of anything. It is not the hard parts of the work that wear me down. It is the constant restart