Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?

I wish I were joking that I literally haven't received a delivery of four GET endpoints I wrote requirements for six months ago. The problem is that nobody seems to understand why this is an issue. We are constantly advertising to our customers that we are moving to API-based integrations and that the future of our product is being able effectively use our product without a user interface, and yet the management team is okay with four GET endpoints not being shipped in six months.

The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/pattern...

My last job was API integration related on a government contract. I was the team lead for one of two prime vendors. The lead for the other prime vendor was also the projects project manager. That PM was super toxic.

So the clients wanted me to do one thing (run operations), my supervisors wanted me to focus less on technical contributions and more on administration and leadership, the PM wanted me to be a junior developer. The PM knew I was a supervisor as nd knew of the client expectations and still wanted me to do something else. He even thought he was my supervisor even though my bosses were meeting with him every two weeks and told him the reality. The dude lied to the clients and withheld client communications until I was fired. I think he is autistic because he perceptions of reality were frequently wrong, his only management style was hazing people, and he confused lots of things between various people and work assignments.

I really miss my team because they were awesome people and I kind of miss the income. I really loathed that I was leaving my people behind in such a toxic environment. I was super relieved to not have to do that job anymore though. I had been considering walking away from it two months prior to termination.

Thank you for writing this.

There definitely are people out there. A lot of skilled individuals in Sweden are currently unemployed. But whether or not companies have the budget to hire them is a different story.

Seconded. No job is worth damaging yourself permanently like that, even if it's "just" a temporary burnout, pull the ejection handle. It's a life safety issue.

Start looking before you leave, preferably, but at the very least scale back your commitment so you don't burn out in the mean time. If it's bad, quit. This is why you need to have savings and spend less than you earn.