No. My work stress level is basically maxed out and has been for a long time. I'm not coping with it. I can't sleep well, and at night my thoughts are filled with ideas of suicide. The thought of putting a gun to my head is calming, like I'd finally be able to relax. I imagine a lot of elaborate and violent ways to go, and these thoughts seem to be the only things that relax me enough to fall asleep. There's no point…
Take some time off to care for yourself. Do some exercise and try meditation and CBT. Don't hope for things to fix themselves, and admit you are heading in the wrong direction.
This field fucking sucks. I'm tired of being on call 24/7/365. I'm tired of having to explain why plaintext passwords are bad. I'm tired of being taken advantage of for being a generalist. I'm tired of ex-google asshole bosses with massive egos. I'm tired of carrying a laptop with me "just in case". I'm tired of the constantly shifting "popular" technologies. I'm tired of spending weekends indoors studying for work,…
What will you do next? You can be rid of all these problems if you start raising chickens in the woods and selling eggs and poultry.
Start interviewing, I know that this is very often thrown around here and in other communities but absolutely NONE of this behaviour should be acceptable in any kind of professional environment. You know you are being severely underpaid (I'm assuming you are from the US even though I'm not) so finding a place paying the same or a little better just to get away from this fucking horrible situation is worth every singl…
Thanks. I have a final interview next week at a somewhat boring company, but the pay would be nearly double and I think I'd be much much healthier, so I'll take that if I can get it.
Boring is good. You got enough "excitement" lately.
As a team lead, one question I always ask in my 1-on-1's: On a scale of 1-5 (low good, high bad), what's your stress level since we last met? If my teammate says 4 or 5, I ask what we can do to bring it down to a 3. We also address this as part of the simple assessment we do in each sprint retrospective. My company struggles to define meaningful KPIs and OKRs. This is the one that's most important to me.
I get that this comes from a good place, but unless you have a lot of trust with your team then you might get a lot who will lie.
If I didn't trust my lead to not potentially think less of me (consciously or not), or even worse, to use my answer against me somehow (toxic environment) ... then I definitely would answer "2 or 3" even if I was a 5.
Thanks for asking. Not really, and it's 100% work-related. I dread coming in to work and it's given me awful anxiety that's turned into occasional passive suicidal ideation. Once I leave work, I feel like a totally different person and all the symptoms disappear. My boss calls me stupid, incompetent, r*tarded, and "like you have part of your brain missing". He grills me on literally everything I do, like why I'm gett…
The vast majority of bosses don't emotionally abuse their employees.
You are working in a TOXIC environment and obviously it's taking its toll. You have to get out, or at least transfer to another team. You wrote that you went to HR and they didn't help with your boss, but perhaps they CAN help moving you to another team. And you wrote that you're applying for other jobs - it can take time, just don't give up! > It's hard for me to believe that another job won't be the same thing It w…
Forgive if I missed something but where did the parent mention HR? I ask because I agree with your assesment about the environment they are in and my first thought was to ask "have you talked to anyone in HR?". Otherwise totally agree, especially the part about not giving up!
My goodness! I'm positive the poster wrote something about talking to HR and they said others complained too but nothing ever changes. Did he edit his post, or am I hallucinating?
Not really. My country is being ripped apart, everyone seems so hateful against the other, the government talks about record employment level and pay while people are using foodbanks and sleeping in the streets. My own life is great by the standards that people usually use to measure success. But it feels so empty. I'd rather check out and go and live in a cave on a hill, but all the land and caves have been parcelle…
I'd ask what third world country you live in, but it really sounds like America right now.
Does any country _not_ sound like that? I'd like to go there.
I am the CTO of a semi-successful startup but I believe, this is actually my biggest cause of stress and depression. I have been a software developer for roughly 8 years so I am still learning a lot. I was able to scale the company to handle hundreds of thousands of photos a day but the second I hired a more senior developer I find myself feeling like an imposter. I am always second-guessing myself, how I name things, how I am organizing my code to the point where I really start to become unproductive. I worry that the more senior developer is judging me or something, even though he is pretty laid back. In my personal life, I am spread way too thin due to debt from medical bills and a growing family. I find it takes a toll on me physically, which ironically, leads to more medical bills. I feel like I am stuck at my current company and in my current position. I wish I could get back to just being a software developer without all of the CTO stuff. I always feel bad complaining about these things because they seem so first-world, but it is constantly on my mind. I am just waiting for the day we make an exit and I can do something else.
As a team lead, one question I always ask in my 1-on-1's: On a scale of 1-5 (low good, high bad), what's your stress level since we last met? If my teammate says 4 or 5, I ask what we can do to bring it down to a 3. We also address this as part of the simple assessment we do in each sprint retrospective. My company struggles to define meaningful KPIs and OKRs. This is the one that's most important to me.
"i'm going to answer 3 every time because if i say 4 or 5 i am worried and anxious that you're going to fire me." Welcome to impostor syndrome!
It's not just imposter syndrome. Theres reasonable concern that a company doesn't want to have to deal with illness/someone that cant hack it. I personally wouldn't want to make myself an outlier with this question, so I too would answer 3.
Mental health is such a complicated problem because of how directly it's tied into the way a person experiences and processes information. In order to get treatment for someone there needs to be some basic recognition that something may be wrong which might sound fairly straight forwards, but it's a classic consciousness problem of having a ruler somehow accurately measure itself. It's hard to be objective here, more…
It's not that complicated, just in western societies not much attention has been paid to how the human system works. Most of these cases are self-created, by self-created I mean unconsciously by not handling the system in the best way. Only a small amount of mental issues is caused by external factors. Just paying enough attention to how your system works will solve a lot of these problems.