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Comment by RhysU | Hacker News Reader

> 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 support to fix 2 more things. Etc.

You may want to walk into the right person's office with a list of 5 things to address and ask their input on selecting the right 2.

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If there is a lot of mess, in most cases, the organisation is dysfunctional. It may have histories of some futile attempts by proactive senior engineers to improve the situation in past. They were either ignored or faced resistance, and eventually they gave up and moved.

On the other hand, it is a good chance for a new senior engineer to show their leadership abilities, if an organisation recognises the mess and is serious about dealing with it. You will definitely learn about it in the interview and see the management encouraging relevant activities.

A few things to point out:

It's easier to fix a mess when the person who made the mess is no longer there. (Or management recognizes that the person who made the mess was in over their head.)

But, if the person who made the mess is still there, has been there for a long time, and has a lot of political capitol, this can be prohibitively difficult. (I know this from experience.)

Furthermore, if the "right person" doesn't recognize the mess, or refuses to recognize the mess, then it's time to leave.

> Someone hired you as a senior employee. Senior folks are expected to fix messes like what you describe.

Most of the time, yes! (Thankfully that describes my current job.)

Other times senior devs are hired as a possession, like buying a fancy car or a fancy piece of jewelry. Even worse, poor management might not know how to handle a senior dev, or not be willing to recognize the problems that the senior dev needs to handle.

Not disagreeing with you, but OP specifically mentions being burned out, and I think for this specific situation it may be better to cut losses and go elsewhere.

If you have the energy and enthusiasm for fixing broken things, this is great advice, ideally before the point of burnout / before six months (but after at least a month or so). But not every senior role has to involve cleaning up messes and picking political fights. You're allowed to look for a company that isn't a mess if you want.

Burning out is likely due to a lack of focus on concrete, actionable, blessed endeavors. Fixing everything at once is impossible.

> Burning out is likely due to a lack of focus

Folks do get burnout because of personal habits, but just as often it is due to the environment that they work in.

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.

The forces behind burnout don't decrease just by operating as a senior.

My point is that seniority implies a certain level of professionalism. If you're getting burned out you're not at that level.

I infer that you mean that a senior professional is more adept at mitigating the effects of burnout. While that may often correlate, I don't think it follows that someone is less professional or at an insufficient level if they are suffering from burnout. Many times the factors at play exist within an organization regardless of how one member performs.

The extension of your worldview is that a General in the military can't get PTSD because they're so professional.

I think if a general had bad enough PTSD that it was negatively impacting their day-to-day job performance they would be demoted from being a general.

I don't think that burnout is a function of seniority or lack thereof.

Many things contribute to burnout, including poor team fit. Sometimes circumstances mean that a professional needs to take a chance on a job; other times circumstances evolve beyond what a job appeared to be.

Perhaps consider that a "Senior" Product Manager at a mid-size company doesn't have the same perspectives of actual engineers at much larger companies.

THIS advice is Spot-on!

I might add as a prospective new employer— what did you learn from this experience?

Essentially, I’m looking for leadership acumen and decision quality.

> what did you learn from this experience?

Basically, you need to be able to recognize your pain points and accept that you will need to periodically pay down technical debt.

Specifically, you need to pay down technical debt that has negative productivity.

For example: When I joined my current job, there were 1000s of compiler warnings, and the code was spread among 4 git repos. It is a C# product, and it had ~200 projects.

During my first project, one of the founders micromanaged me until I realized he was in over his head in the design. So I redid the design, and then said that my next project was cleaning up the warnings, and merging all the repos and many of the C# projects.

It saves HOURS each day; but it only worked because the founder recognized that he had to let go of some control to me. (Refer back to my point about paying down technical debt that has negative productivity.)

(I didn't tell him at the time, but if I wasn't able to clean everything up, I was going to walk away. I didn't want to spend every day juggling changes across repos.)

Why bother? If you are a senior, you have the choice of working at places that don't have these problems.

Can you explain the part about ‘ask for political capital’?

Essentially a promise to back you up in meetings and emails if/when someone else complains that OP is stepping on toes in their efforts to fix problems.

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