Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

This is made much easier when you have a supportive team at a company which truly has a learning culture (heuristic: look for founder-led companies which haven't taken outside investment and have sustained growth). The fact your manager left and you have a total absence of feedback sucks. It's very easy to doubt in that situation.

It's entirely possible for an individual contributor to communicate everything right, implement well, conduct everything professionally and STILL have everything blow up. Normally the advice here is "truly great IC's account for environments/problem selection" as well. While true, this also feels a little...cruel? Uh, dismissive? I don't know how to characterize it.

Assessing the state of a business and whether you can fit into it well is a skill which must be learned. You're not gonna be good at it at first. And it sounds like, for you, this may be the key skill to work on. Can you distinguish between what's truly your fault, and what's a product of the environment you're in? You say label it a dream job but... is it? You're certainly going to know more about a place once you're working there than before you've joined.

The hardest part of distinguishing is typically actually admitting to yourself that some aspects are out of your control. At least this was for me... at one point I built something truly great for a business who didn't deserve it. That's when I learned (the hard way) my execution is necessary for, but independent of, the success of the business.

Ignore the fear. Don't feed the FUD. But do be honest with yourself about where you are, and what you're doing. Is it really all you? (really?) Learning in this way is typically expending energy to rid yourself of illusions and scripts which no longer serve you.

For where you're at right now, I also suggest you imagine for a second what someone up the org chart would want to see out of the best version of you. This means you're going to need to approach someone in the company with your vulnerability. But also come with something to offer (a plan, an idea, a direction). Consider this a litmus for them as well as for you. If you put in a good faith effort and they cruelly discard it, time to move one. If they don't, they really listen, and they put in effort too.. maybe there are problems you weren't aware of. Problems you can help with.

Good luck. Don't be too hard on yourself. But don't be too nice on yourself either! ;)

If you're pushing yourself to the brink of burnout and mental breakdowns, you aren't giving yourself enough time to recover. Period. Take it seriously because it can spiral out of control.

There's this thought that once you cross your threshold of a mental breakdown, you become fed up. That's usually what burnout manifests itself as. It seems like it's showing in your work where you aren't landing things based on your expectations. It could also be that we're in the middle of a great reshuffling and things aren't really stable anywhere. Who knows?

You are ultimately in control of your own destiny. To get over constant failure, you fail more. You fail until you succeed. You keep going. But you need to do this in a way that is sustainable so you can wake up every day to make an inch of progress rather than nothing at all.

I don't expect to be the best of the best, but obviously some people are thriving at these places. Why am I failing?

What I’ve figured out is that I need to have a new way to measure myself. I wanted to be a hotshot from day one, and impress everyone by cranking out new features. But on a project this complex, it will take half a year to ramp up and become an important part of the team.

In the meantime, I’ve realized I can’t simply call myself a failure every day. I need to find smaller goals that I measure myself against, like learning a new part of the codebase, building a relationship with another developer, building a little prototype that might not get used, and so on.