201–210 of 288 posts
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Burning out is likely due to a lack of focus on concrete, actionable, blessed endeavors. Fixing everything at once is impossible.
On top of that, if you're burned out, then you aren't acting at the level of a senior engineer. These titles matter, you're being paid for your seniority.
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> Just leave. Not a good idea for the OP to leave without having another job to start. The OP only found this job after a long period of job searching. Having a large unexplained resume gap followed by a short 6-month employment followed by another gap is the type of pattern that starts to scare hiring managers. Start the job search, but don’t just leave until you have something else to go to. Avoid introducing anoth…
Read the next sentence. >It's the professional thing to do, if you can sustain yourself. This is the part you somehow missed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just leave. Not a good idea for the OP to leave without having another job to start. The OP only found this job after a long period of job searching. Having a large unexplained resume gap followed by a short 6-month employment followed by another gap is the type of pattern that starts to scare hiring managers. Start the job search, but don’t just leave until you have something else to go to. Avoid introducing anoth…
Read the next sentence. >It's the professional thing to do, if you can sustain yourself. This is the part you somehow missed.
Just leave. It's the professional thing to do, if you can sustain yourself. In 2012 I've left my hometown and went to the other side of my country to work at a startup. Within 20 days I left because the situation was critical. I was already feeling like I should leave on the second week, but decided to wait just to break-even from my moving expenses. It was e-commerce startup where the team lead / project manager was…
> Just leave. Not a good idea for the OP to leave without having another job to start. The OP only found this job after a long period of job searching. Having a large unexplained resume gap followed by a short 6-month employment followed by another gap is the type of pattern that starts to scare hiring managers. Start the job search, but don’t just leave until you have something else to go to. Avoid introducing anoth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just leave. Not a good idea for the OP to leave without having another job to start. The OP only found this job after a long period of job searching. Having a large unexplained resume gap followed by a short 6-month employment followed by another gap is the type of pattern that starts to scare hiring managers. Start the job search, but don’t just leave until you have something else to go to. Avoid introducing anoth…
This is if you optimize for money. If you optimize for happiness, the decision process can be wildly different.
> I'm senior and was hired as such Someone hired you as a senior employee. Senior folks are expected to fix messes like what you describe. Go to the right person and ask for the political capital and support to fix 2 specific things. If you don't get a promise for that support or you don't see that support sustained, leave. If you get that support, fix exactly those 2 things as quickly as possible. Then ask for the s…
This sounds like a great opportunity to level up and learn some rare lessons. It's easy to see problems and its easy to complain about them - but even if you're right, there's a vast gulf between complaining and driving change. You may be discouraged because you're hitting resistance but that's the nature of these things - if the organization already was ripe for and acting to fix these things, there'd be no need for…
Burnout is a serious illness and debilitating. It can take months-to-years to recover and you'll always carry around the scars. If all you feel is stress and you have no control over how much stress you feel, that's the recipe for burnout.
Being professional about it is handing in whatever required notification the company requires and gracefully offloading your work to the team.
From a hiring perspective I think anything less than a year is a honeymoon period. If you interview the company well it can still take 3-6 months before the organization shows its true colors.
That being said, finding the right company for you is the hard part. Some folks do actually thrive in scenarios like this and enjoy migrating a code-base to a healthy state and correcting organizational communication issues.
Not my thing anymore. The demands on developers these days is to turn us into company therapists. We're supposed to bridge communication silos, get groups talking, mentor and grow staff, train management in how to manage us, etc. And we're supposed to continue with solving technical problems, generate new ideas, and be a source of innovation. It's a bit much if you ask me.
One strategy that I think is important to finding the right place for you is to know what your values are. If you are someone who values maintainability you're going to have a hard time fitting in with a team that values velocity: they're going to move fast and change APIs all over the place and check in the first thing that works and iterate from there. It will drive you up the wall. If you know what you value most you can interview the company to find out what they value and see if the intersection is large enough to convince you that you won't be alone in what you care about.
To find out what your values are you have to think hard about what you think is important to you and write them down. Try to stick to single words like: maintainability, performance, readability, etc. Also look back on your work objectively and see if any of those characteristics come out (we like to think we value certain things but what we actually do in our work sometimes contradicts these notions). Note down any new ones and add them to your list. That list is your list of values.
It's also worth writing down your, "engineering principles." A one or two page summary of how you approach software development. I like to take the list of aphorisms and maxims that I often find myself repeating and sticking to and use those as headings. Then I explain those headings and what they mean to me. You may find some new values in here to add to your list.
Hope this helps and good luck. Sticking with it for six months and realizing this isn't the right fit for you is good! Be professional, give your notice, and start looking for a team that will better fit within your values.