I've spent three years at my current position at one of the "big 5", and after the first 9 months there were reorgs and I haven't been doing the things I was hired to do since. Instead I work on things that I have zero interest towards, and can feel my soul being sucked out of me daily.
It has gotten to the point where I cannot even imagine heading in to work each morning. My entire body and mind rejects the notion. Somehow I manage to make it in on autopilot, and pretty much autopilot throughout the day. Any acts of sentience on my part while at the office are immediately doused with reminders of how much I hate all of this, and I quickly retreat back.
Unfortunately, this has done nothing but cause an ever-amplifying depression spiral. At this stage I can't even imagine trying to get another job as I don't think I'm capable of passing the whiteboard-hazing at any tech company given my current state of mind.
I'm just going to wither away here until the end I imagine.
To be fair: it's not "awful" by any traditional metric - I'm not being overworked, yelled at, treated like shit, etc. But acknowledging that doesn't help my thoughts, any.
-Edit- I used this acct as a throwaway in the past to respond to an Amazon-related topic and then just kept using it!
I've wondered about that. My job isn't spectacular, it's pretty good. I used to want to strive for a spot in a bigger/high impact/significant company like Amazon or Apple for example, but eventually came to realize I'd probably never do anything interesting there, even if I was capable of it. I don't know. I used to feel like I missed the boat and my career would never be as rewarding because of it. These days... Starting to feel like I'm actually doing alright, making the most with what I've got.
I stopped pursuing that career direction because I'm geo-locked, so to speak. I can't leave this city.
Anyway, sorry you're having a terrible time. I've been there. I hope the situation improves soon. Maybe you should bank everything you can, take time off, then get back to finding work with a fresh mind. Good luck.
I tried the "take time off route" once, and while it was alright, I was consumed with thoughts of whether or not I'd ever be able to get a job again, to the point where I couldn't enjoy it simply because I worried about the future (and it wasn't because I only had a few months of runway - living frugally I could have likely stretched my savings to two years or so, but the panic got to me after half a year).
I, quite frankly and totally honestly, don't see any way out at this point. I live life in an aimless fog, with no drive towards anything any more (which also makes it very difficult to do things like study for whiteboard-hazing).
Think about talking to a professional about this.
I know it's irrational, and I know I need to do it, but that doesn't make it any easier :(
I wasn't quite clear if the problem was the work or the company? It's something that needs to be dived into and had a good look at because there could be imbalance in your life leading to depression. So you need to look at things like diet, sleep, exercise, relationship etc. It's possible you need to rebalance - it's possible you need a new career. A career break should never be a hindrance to a new job, and should often be a selling point, as long as you've used that time sensibly.
So in short, talk to a career coach or counsellor. Try and get some more face to face help. You say you work for a big company - they often have help lines for employees run by third parties - use it!
I honestly don't have a complete answer for this. I mean, I know the work is a major problem, but it's not the only factor by far. It's definitely the one front and center, however.
As for other "life" things, I believe I do well there. I get 8 hours of sleep, I exercise 4 days a week, eat healthy, etc. No relationships but I'm antisocial to a tremendous degree so there's not much helping me there.
I appreciate the comments. Thank you!
That may be partly the issue. Studies into "happiness at work" often show it's not the work itself that necessarily determines happiness, but the quality of the relationships you have at work. For example, some work that may seem tedious and dull can become quite interesting if you are working on it together with someone you like and respect - and it's even better if you can have a blast with them. On my last gig for example I was doing dreadfully tedious work, but it was made better because several people I worked with were just awesomely nice people and we tried to have some fun too. Perhaps there's someone at work that you can buddy up with, and your manager might be able to help you there.
Having a relationship can be an important factor too - apart from anything it helps you get out of your own head and relax. Do you do any social activities on the weekend? It might be worth joining a cycling club, a running club or even a Crossfit box - you say you like exercise, something where there are other people to talk to. Just being around other people and talking to them will help - I know this is like hell on Earth if you are basically shy, so this is something you are going to have to ease into gently and get support if you need it - it will get easier.
Having said all that this is a difficult thing to diagnose and remedy via HN! As mentioned before you might find it worth talking to a career coach or perhaps even a counsellor. Feel free to email me if you want.
Since career break didn't work out for you, I really strongly suggest talking to a professional. I would start with company's HR and counsellor (they often have them in "big 5") and ask for some time off for medical reasons. Personal well-being is the most important thing. Being on autopilot and feeling miserable might lead to even worse things, so please step back and talk to someone in person.
It's not the job's fault. Good atmosphere, coworkers, and immediate management. I just want to be doing my own thing.
We have had a lot of turnover, though. Perhaps it's not as good for others.
Edit: I think the job deserves 8 or 9/10, it's my own attitude affecting how I answer the question as-posed.
Don't get me wrong, I perform! And they've let me make a lot of changes that fix many of the problems they've had.
But my mind's always on my side jobs and how fast I can grow them into a business that can support us full-time. The inefficiencies at a mature business just bug me so much.
I love it. I'm excited about the company, there's a lot of room for me to grow, and it's small enough that I can have a lasting impact as we solidify our engineering culture. I report directly to the CTO, though I believe we'll be getting a director soon that will sit between us. It's still better than the 7+ layers of management at Giant Bank.
Advantage: More control over what tools I use. Always something interesting happening, and knowing that the growth of the company is directly influenced by your work.
I am also terrified that being able to impact the company/culture means that I will lead us down the wrong path.
12 years and counting at this position...
I’ve taken this as a compliment to the environment and culture I’ve fostered. My “secret”: treat everyone the way I’d like to be treated and work the way I’d like others to work.
I’m always surprised when others are surprised at our retention. To me this seems like an easy accomplishment. Maybe this is only possible at a smaller company who’s doing interesting work?
Essentially you can turn your team into small company with it's own culture within the corporation, threat the rest as customers, etc...
It was very interesting, and I shipped another game. I was in a fairly new position and fought a bit with impostor syndrome at first, but got to learn a lot and contributed quite a bit back to the engine. Just as I was feeling pretty competent and settled into the role I was moved to a position with more responsibilities, so now I have to adjust all over again. I guess it is good not to be entirely comfortable and keep pushing yourself, it just means a little more stress to deal with. I think it'll be fine though; I am used to working on things that feel challenging and push me to learn and develop more.
In the middle, it came with some interesting career changes and challenges. It was a good personal experience, but ultimately it didnt work for the company.
In the end, we changed management and it -might- be good for the company depending on what the new owner wants with it. But people are fired en masse, and people are quitting en masse. Project management sucks, we didnt have things to do for months and around both christmas AND new years, we got 2 supposedly CRITICAL issues that HAVE to be done. Except not really.
Looking forward to 2018. Mostly because I'll be looking at new opportunities.
Improved my code quality by becoming more aware of code style and becoming more nuanced in the approaches I take when solving problems. Enjoyed getting back into Python work, but async programming in python is still somewhat awkward.
I'm alarmingly bittersweet about living in the Bay Area and not living closer to home. On one hand, I miss seeing my large and wonderfully close family and friends at home; on the other, the Bay Area weather is wonderfully mild and always sunny, and of course, salaries are better here. So I've wrestled with re-calculating the costs of where to live.
The perpetually mild weather has done wonders for my mental health, I hate the cold, dark winters in Vancouver BC. I keep telling myself it's only a 2 hour flight away, but I never seem to go back enough.
I haven't found many challenges other than taxes and stuff like that. Many countries I find are not ready to welcome people that move around a lot.
As for the job itself I keep a pretty strict regime on myself so I still try to do all office hours and keep in touch as much as I can. It is true tho that you do get "cut out" a bit and it's probably not the best for people that want to climb the ladder. For me it really helped the fact that I worked for a full year in the office with the same people so I knew them pretty well.
There are two big advantages:
1) You don't have to commute (unless you want to - you can work at a co-working space)
2) You can travel around and still have a salary. I've worked from places like an apartment in Bangkok, a beach hut on an island in Malaysia, as well as a cottage in the heart of the English countryside.
But that's about it. It's still work. You still put in your eight hours plus a day. You still have to put up with shit. You still have to work on those things you'd rather not.
If you don't really enjoy the work, then remote working won't make up for that.
I would say give it a go though - it's the sort of thing that you need to try to see how it works out for you.
Work as a contractor for one of the largest govt defense contractors in the aerospace and land vehicle field. Lots of opportunity here to work on pretty much whatever you'd like. You can jump on any project ranging from low level embedded devices to application code to virtual reality. Coworkers are pleasant, albeit their skills can be a bit atrophied due to them being in maintenance/bug fixing mode for the past 10+ years of being here working on their own little section of code. Managers are great and leave you alone. My actual team lead only holds meetings once every few weeks, as we mostly use SMS for any instant or urgent information (nothing I work on is classified, and my core team consists of about three other people who do actual coding). I got a cube, and if I need more alone time, I can head to six or more different silo areas where specific hardware is kept for testing, and I can ssh to any machine and just pick up where I left off. They're usually not busy until a release is coming up, which is only a couple times a year.
Downsides include the location of the company (lower income state compared to others), weather, and an aversion to change - which I guess kinda comes with a fortune 100 govt contracting company. Computer hardware given to us is atrocious, getting competent new people in is almost impossible due to what we work on and location, and devs don't even need to show they can code. Nepotism is very real, as is having to "know people" in order to advance here. If you are a direct employee, promotions are rare and usually only occur once every 5 to 10 years. IT infrastructure is some of the absolute worst I have ever seen, and it prevents you from getting real work done (imagine having to wait four months to get your favorite free IDE installed or six months to update Cygwin packages, for example. In fact, our IT group still can't figure out how to upgrade a Cygwin install on a shared folder).
Pay is decent. As a contractor, you get straight time for every 40 hours worked, and you get 1.5x pay for every six minutes after that. Overtime is basically never mandated or requested, but you are free to work as much OT as you'd like without anyone saying anything. I have personally worked 70+ hour work weeks just for the extra cash, assisting everything from a new GUI, adding new objects to a VR demo, and implementing new functionality to Linux kernel drivers. Even got a pay raise (13% increase!) for all the extra hard work I did on top of all that extra pay, so that was cool.
All in all, it's a decent place (especially if you like living in the Midwest) with long term stability. However, you won't really be challenged with truly hard problems if you work here, and growth is stagnant. You'll really need to make the most out of it yourself by pushing management to allow you to implement new stuff, which isn't terribly hard, thankfully. They're willing to listen and implement new stuff, especially if it is a newer product. Harder if it's a legacy project, obviously, but it is still possible.
Its hard to describe without spilling the beans on who I work for. I was hired to do embedded programming work but I do nothing of the sort and just fix/cleanup code in C. My team is being broken up and I have a chance to work with someone who has a project that actually needs embedded work.
He is abrasive as hell and corrects me all the time. I have tried to engage with him as much as possible over the last week. I am afraid even though his behavior is exactly what I envisioned as my best fit (I have worked with such a man before and I grew alot). I am also afraid because the CEO is moving to our building and the project is directly linked to whether or not the business is viable after the next 3 years. I know I can do the work as I have literally done the same kind of project before with a different standard (Project is a proof of concept), and I want to do this work as opposed to playing Barney's cleanup game with half assed projects. I liked doing Barneys cleanup song with that at my old job, but that was new frontier for me (CUDA).
I have done all I can to make sure this man understands exactly what I am capable of doing on my own, what I will need to bug him about, and things I have no experience in. Trying to cover all my bases to make sure I am a good fit for him. Yet I cannot shake this feeling of whether it is a good fit for me. Its like trying to sleep before the first round of engineering exams but constant.
In the end I decided to join his team because he used to subscribe to "embedded system design" magazine which is a resource I used to prepare for interviews. (Can someone point me to a company that will actually test me on embedded principles in a interview for an embedded position? Literally every interview asks things I learned in first year or a thought puzzle.)
Maybe I feel to paranoid about all this because I went from producing 50x more at a startup to here where a simple change can get deadlocked for a week. Believe me I work frantically. I spend 80% of my time researching and taking notes since all the domain experts have quit (terrible benefits) and nobody seems to want and be able to assist me in a proper training rampup period (y'know instead of having me work a fucking call center).
Everyone seems to barely know the part of the code they live in and honestly as I walk around productivity/attention is literally the lowest I have ever seen in my life. To this I try and convince myself its just the change of employer type and that other people are literally watching movies at work so I should not fret so much.
Sorry for the wall of text, but the first thing I learned is that at corporate you have to cover your own ass. So it is cathartic to be able to express myself here. Any input would be greatly appreciated. I have no idea what I am doing.
Your situation sounds quite like any other big corporate. Lots of people not doing anything or working very little and manages that can be really picky and hard to get along. I am not sure what I would do, getting into that team seams like a way to go, but working with that manager sounds very difficult. Maybe give it a go for few months to see if you get along with him? If not, start looking for a new job, while you are still at your present one maybe.
It really depends on your character, I might not give the best advice cos I am tired of working for ineffective managers.
I made wrong moves applying for part of the year most likely a full quarter, but by middle of the summer I was applying to around a dozen a day with researched applications and taking phone screens every other day. I was taught as a EE so for entry level jobs I think I was being beat out by objectively better investments. I also spent half the year trying to land a hardware design job and then moved to embedded software since all the offers I had for the former would have literally made me homeless or foodless in California.
It pains me not to use much of what I was taught. Honestly I just want to be in a job where I actually work in the embedded space. Every place I went it seemed like it was going to be a job of fighting legacy code, reserved and silent experts, and high turnover of said experts.
I hate interviews but I was planning on taking at least one every 6 months to keep ready.