Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

86 pointsburnoutgal122 comments

When I first started my career everything was great - I did some internships at small local companies and got terrific feedback. I loved computers and would identify problems and dive into solving them enthusiastically. In hindsight a lot of the stuff I did was basically prototyping that never made it into production, but it felt great and my bosses loved it.

After a couple years I hit the big time and got a job at a tech startup that was blowing up. There was one really successful project I worked on, and otherwise I didn't really accomplish much - the whole organization I was in was very dysfunctional and we churned through management and new projects really quickly, but nothing really landed. During this time our stock price went crazy, and I sold all my stock to make a down payment on a house and max out my retirement savings. Eventually the mismanagement got to me - every project seemed doomed to fail, and I was paralyzed with indecision daily. They promoted me to the level where I was supposed to propose and run projects, and I hated it.

To try and get back to building things, I joined a small startup around the time the pandemic started. Everyone there gave me great feedback, but there was no product focus, very little management, and ultimately it still felt like the things I was working on didn't matter or lead to anything. The product itself was hard to use and had so many problems that I couldn't imagine trying to untangle them all, so I left after a year.

At this point I was terrified that I just couldn't work in tech anymore. I had developed medical problems from stress, and took months of time off to try and recover. There was nothing else I wanted to do for work, but the thought of sitting down and building anything was terrible.

Fast-forward to today - I applied for and got my dream job, working at another very successful startup that has a lot of high-performing people. They get things done, and the product is great. It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing. Not a single PR merged. I came in with all the momentum from my unemployment, all the enthusiasm and energy I could muster, and proposed a bunch of projects. Nothing landed. My manager left a few weeks after I started, my onboarding buddy has been absent, and the fear has started creeping in again that I'm alone and can't hack it in this high performing team. If I can't work in the tech industry it would completely upend my entire life.

Does anyone have any advice from a similar situation? I think I need more support and guidance but my experience has been that tech companies don't really offer that, and also that everyone seems happy and successful regardless.

View on HN

Possibly unpopular advice on HN, but stop joining startups. Idiosyncratic-Culture Risk is off the charts for startups. Join more stable firms with a more "boring" but predictable culture where things get delivered every Sprint, everyone gets paid well, there is no Mountain Dew being guzzled at 8 pm in the office to meet some deadline, weekends are truly off, and your mental health actually recovers. Your dream jobs are leading to your nightmares.

I'm going to get downvoted to minus infinity but let me say this: consider also less techy firms. Or, companies that do have technology but aren't tech. I have some friends having a blast working with agriculture, there's lots of technology involved, but it's as far away from the stereotypical startup culture as you can get.

I think we overestimate the unpopularity of opinions auch as yours and the person you are responding to. Tons of HN users work for BigBoringCo after experiencing the typical startup and realizing they can't and shouldn't handle thr volatility anymore, and tons of developers work for non-techy firms because that's more problems can be solved.

Most of my best times as a software engineer was when I worked at non-techy firms. When I worked at a local NPR affiliate station, I was able to both solve new problems and improve existing things without a lot of the buffoonery seen at a lot of hip tech firms. As a mid level developer at the time, I had lots of room to try things and could afford to fail, yet my seniors actually had time to help.

A lot of people not happpy with their careers should consider non-tech over hip startups, Silicon Valley, and fintech. You will still encounter headaches, but you may also avoid a lot of the mental agony from the big tech world.

In my experience on HN, people here actually really love hearing/learning about businesses outside of tech, particularly those that are introducing tech... agritech, etc.

I run an ecommerce business, which is at best tech-adjacent (honestly I would say a farm using fairly advanced technology for their industry is more of a tech company than me using Shopify to sell dog treats online), and people love hearing about it.

Honestly, part of why I left enterprise software was because I found a lot of the SMB customers I worked with really inspiring. They were doing something... real/physical/tangible, and of course the ones who were looking at our software were the smart, tech-savvy types who I could relate to.

While I have very little desire to go back into enterprise software, sometimes I do get pings from recruiters hiring for companies that do stuff like agtech, and I think that working on something like that (as opposed to making software for call centers, which I have done) might be worth getting back into the working world for.

> honestly I would say a farm using fairly advanced technology for their industry is more of a tech company than me using Shopify to sell dog treats online

LOL! Quote of the day. And it’s true. Farmers got techy before most other industries. I remember seeing farmers around 1990 getting weather and crop reports online daily, when most families hadn’t yet bought their first PC, let alone connected to a BBS.

My favorite tech job was when I intered for a fire department doing fire mitigation inspections and ended up building them and appointment scheduling system in my spare time, as well as put together a geomapped report of the programs mitigation efforts to present to the county.

How does the compensation compare? Aside from finance, does any other industry pay as well as SV and startups?

It may vary a lot of course but I'd say it's generally worse... And the difference gets brutal if the startup gets successful and you get to exercise stock options. However, money isn't everything... Mental stability is priceless.

I have to say, as someone working in a stable non-tech company, it isn't all roses and unicorns. The code base is absolutely awful, mainly because a lot of non-technical people have hacked it together. And there is never time or money to attempt some kind of cleanup.

It gets exhausting having to repeatedly say "we are going over budget due to unforseen complications as a direct result of low quality code".

It gets exhausting having to constantly rework solutions to fit the boneheaded design decisions made with zero forward thinking.

None of this changes when you work for a tech company except technical people hacked together the absolutely awful code base.

Another opportunity - there are so many small businesses who need a tech person, but have no idea what to look for or haven’t admitted their needs yet.

If you show up saying you can develop apps and also manage servers, handle complaints, etc., they will often hand you a lot of responsibility to do things yourself.

Not great for advancing as an engineer unless you actively challenge yourself, but I’m just suggesting that it’s a field out there.

I did this for an education company. Been employed over a year, developed a few web apps for them, basically been handed keys to the kingdom, and they love my work.

I think this was the solution for me. I'm working mostly as a solo dev at the moment, on the codebase that automates the production systems of a manufacturing company. I'm totally comfortable with everything here, except for lower than normal pay. Work is actually something to semi look forward to.

My previous job was Generic Startup 7,923™ with a company-provided snack table, and company-provided lunches once every week. The other devs there were decent people. My boss certainly expected too much though. Now I know what not to look for in a job.

>Or, companies that do have technology but aren't tech.

This is how I make money. I create products that serve real needs of real businesses / people. Bit of warning - I am not a direct employee for those businesses, I have my own company that does product design / development and contract as such. Still I get much satisfaction looking at my products doing something real

> stop joining startups. Idiosyncratic-Culture Risk is off the charts for startups

I think that's true when joining a young startup (e.g. company less than 2-3 years old).

But there are plenty of 15-40 person "startups" that have been around for 5+ years and are profitable - I would say these types of companies are good to join (if they've had a stable and consistent management team) since after 5 years, the company would have worked out most culture / HR kinks.

PS - things like "are you profitable" and "tell me about the management team/culture" are very acceptable questions to ask during an interview.

Edit: "how many employees were there 1 year ago" is also a good barometer for how hastily the company is scaling. If they're 100 today but were 50 a year ago, I'd steer clear. As another commenter mentioned, go for slow and steady growth startups rather than high/fast growth.

Is a company that's been in business for five years with a staff really a start-up?

People were calling Uber a startup as late as their IPO.

I think the distinction has more to do with the culture / vision of the company than just company age.

It feels like the term startup has become synonymous with "large growth potential" and not "young company".

There's two popular terms: 1. A fast growth company 2. An organization looking for a repeatable and scalable busines model

Neither really have much to do with age. An agency can be doing contract work for 10 years looking for a business model, and it could technically be a startup.

One hundred percent. I spent five years at a thrashing startup and then crashed and burned at a well-known cloud workflow company. It crushed my spirit. But I remembered a very friendly recruiter who had an opportunity for a tech lead on a marketing team. I set aside my ego and pride and he put me in touch of with a team of humble, hard-working folks who love web development. No one is out to be the most brilliant. We work as a team and we all actually like one another.

Honestly never understood why joining startups is meant to be so amazing unless 1) They are working on exactly the niche that YOU personally want to work in and 2) The startup's company culture is exactly your kind of weird/niche culture too. IMO unless it's a perfect match, you're going to have a bad time as there is less stability and diversity of ideas/experience in small startups.

I love large orgs because there are tons of characters, experienced professionals and frameworks designed to support and enable me. I can always move projects when I get bored or something isn't right.

I would join a startup however if there is something very very specific I want to build and I want to circumvent all the corporate barriers/rules to move fast and ship something. But so far, I've not felt that yet.

> I can always move projects when I get bored or something isn't right.

This comment is so underrated. In most big companies, if your manager is an asshole or the project is boring, you can always move to a different role.

As far as official protocol goes, at most places I've worked that means you can change teams after a year. They placed you on a team, so they want you there.

People who switch faster either have very accommodating leads or they feel secure enough to give an ultimatum.

My current job has > 1000 employees, it seemed from the outside like it would be sufficiently stable. It's not actually the culture you describe, it's pretty mature, good work-life balance. They don't have a great planning process but it seems insane that it is just impossible for me to onboard successfully as a result.

The number of employees does not correlate to positive management function. In fact, it's usually the inverse. The faster and larger the company grows, the more dysfunctional it becomes by hiring into the organization culture mismatch, internal promotion of incompetent managers. The sheer number of decision makers causes indecision (ironic). The lack of direction comes from going too many directions at the same time.

Meanwhile, investors reward the company for "traction" and regardless investors both private and in the public markets reward growth at whatever expense and first-mover / big-mover advantages.

The sweet spot are those financially stable, slowth growth companies with enough employees so that people aren't worn too thin but not too many that the wheels are coming off. Often that's around 100-300 or so, could be less a bit more.

I onboarded at a > 1000 employee company before the pandemic. Even then I found it frustrating that it took months to have even a small a project and get a PR reviewed and merged. Coming from a small startup co culture made that a shock and wondered if I'd made a mistake. Your journey seems similar but far more challenging in having to onboard remotely. Make the most of communication channels you have, not specifically your manager or onboarding buddy, but any team or project Slack channels, etc. Take time to browse the codebase without worrying about shipping PRs. The company hired you hopefully as a long term investment that will pay off once you've onboarded so do that well, even if it doesn't have any visible artifacts. Merely asking specific questions will show that you are getting up to speed. My #1 suggestion to fix most of these things is to pair program on tasks. There's so much miscellaneous information that is useful and isn't otherwise documented. It also provides some human feedback from peers indicating that there's no problem where you imagine one to be.

How many employees were there a year ago? If the answer isn't ~1000, it doesn't meet the definition of stable

It's more nuanced than this. I have worked at large companies with terrible culture, and startups with great culture. Unfortunately it's very hard to get an accurate read on the important things before actually working the job.

Yeah, I realized my aspirations to be a founder / work at early stage startups were kind of idiotic after a while. But more importantly, I realized I just liked making more money and only dealing with my own problems.

It sort of sucks, but idk - in my late twenties I'd like to think I have a much better understanding of what makes me happy now.

I'm actually trying to pass FAANG interviews and it sucks, but at the same time I've realized just optimizing for TC over the next few years is something I actually prefer.

The polar opposite of startups is large-government.

I happen to be close to some people who work at the CDC tabulating death statistics. You know what one of their greatest success stories over the past few years was?

Updating their death-reporting from once-per-year to once-per-month (albeit preliminary / unreliable statistics, but monthly reports nonetheless). They still revise the numbers up to a year out but it turns out that having this project done _BEFORE_ COVID19 hit helped a lot, since decision makers at the White House (and other parts of the country) got the statistics they needed faster.

And before you say its easy: the 50 states have 50 different death certificates. The information is standardized but the data-entry and reporting methodologies are non-standard. Plus territories (ex: Wash DC, Puerto Rico, Guam also have their own death certificates). Pushing for more standardization (ex: the rules for how to report COVID19 deaths and on what line) and pushing that training out to doctors also results in partisan bickering, as you might expect.

----------

Doing these kinds of things is a massive undertaking in general. If computers were easy, everyone would do it. A lot of it is just growing up and realizing that the Iron Man movies you watched 10 years ago are unrealistic crap, and that the daily grind to make small bits of progress are hugely important.

Other bits are to truly celebrate these accomplishments, even in the face of widespread disdain. There's a ton of people giving crap about the CDC's death statistics with regards to COVID19 (some legitimate criticisms due to the accelerated release schedule they've got behind monthly statistics). But a lot of the criticism is just partisan bickering that no one really takes seriously. Everyone basically agrees that monthly-reporting (though less accurate) is better than waiting a whole year.

Still, its hard to argue against progress or the usefulness of this "monthly death statistic reporting" project. Originally created in response to Hurricane Maria (where US Newspapers reported a different death number than the CDC), the whole project was launched just in time for COVID19 (and was online for part of the opioid epidemic as well).

EDIT: That goes to show what a "real success" is like. Its like lighting in a movie: if you do it perfectly, no one notices. If you make the slightest mistake, a ton of people online make a big stink about it. High risk, low / non-existent reward. But its hard to deny the importance of the project. This is the prototypical "easy job but not really" scenario, everyone just expect it to get done, people don't really realize how hard it is to do (50+ states with 50+ different formats. In the case of the Opioid Epidemic, there was new language being used on Death Certificates that didn't exist before, words like Fentanyl, and people just expected the CDC system to automagically detect these words, new-misspellings and collate results together despite no one actually asking for that feature, etc. etc.)

> ... It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing. Not a single PR merged. ...

There's a lot to be said for getting into a rhythm of picking an issue, solving it, and merging it. Doing it a few times can be a real confidence booster.

What's the reason behind having no PRs merged? Did you create them, only to have them rejected? Have you not completed the work for any? Is there nobody to review them?

Also, just how big are the issues in your tracker?

I'm going to assume that everything is in place to get a PR merged. Given that, try to find a way to shave off an issue from a larger issue. Go for the smallest possible unit of work that might be useful. Then focus on getting that one PR merged. Rinse and repeat.

I've teed up maybe 6 PRs, but it is hard to find who's actually responsible to review things and get sign-off one way or the other. The iteration speed is also very slow and deploys are pretty high risk, so it's hard to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

High-risk deploys and slow iterations is not on you but on engineering management.

Not knowing who's responsible for reviewing your code is also not on you but on your manager, bad onboarding, bad documentation and general communication. Still you can check in the repo who's been working recently on adjacent work and reach out to them on slack/whatever and ask them.

I suggest to try and get small wins (like merging those PRs) as soon as possible and then pause and reconsider if this startup is for you. BTW, I don't see the "constant failure" you mention in the title anywhere, more like not being lucky with startups, which is normal since often they are shitshows.

I think the "constant failure" comes from comparing myself to all my peers who have been successful, gotten rich, been promoted, written books, etc.

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

Don't compare yourself to (selected, "successful") other people, compare yourself with the other possible selfs in different multiverses, how many of those for ex didn't take any risks and are in a worse position?

Also, this is more for maybe a professional therapist that for me but it looks to me that your definition of "failure" is unhealthy or too hard on yourself? sorry for the assumption but you are probably working on the area you want and like (technology) and being paid well for it. That puts you in the top 90% or whatever of people in <insert 1st world country> and 99.99% in the world (I know it's not consolation for feelings).

I have a therapist, but sometimes it can be difficult to talk through these things with someone who doesn't know the field or the ground truth.

My big stressor is that I have hit the jackpot, and where do I go from here? So many people I know have settled into a comfortable groove, but work is by far the biggest stressor in my life, it's ruining my health, and I don't really have a path out. Continually churning applying for new jobs or dropping out of tech altogether don't seem very appealing.

Similar to another comment - it sounds like you’ve made good money, you’ve landed tech jobs several times, and you’ve got good feedback from your peers - that is successful, you should take some time to take pride in what you have achieved so far.

I think there’s 2 things for you to think about. Firstly, comparing yourself to everyone else you will always find people who have done better in some area than you, that’s no failure on your part, that is the reality that every person exists in. It’s hard sometimes to appreciate yourself, I certainly have bouts of this.

Secondly, when you’re working in an organisation, you’re not solely responsible for making some project succeed, shipping some feature or whatever it is. If there are processes making progress very difficult, that’s not your fault. It’s easy to internally create all this pressure on yourself to meet your own standards, but sometimes you’re thrown into a situation where external factors out of your control prevent you from meeting what you yourself deem acceptable performance - that’s not on you. You can raise the issues that are blocking you, you can suggest ideas for improvements, but in a company, most of the time you cannot fix these things alone. I have found that my stress increases when I don’t understand what it is that is preventing me from performing, and when I put it all on myself to fix. Identifying the issues and absolving myself of the responsibility to fix all of them have been the best things I’ve done for my work stress levels.

“Don’t blame yourself for the dysfunction of your organization” - good advice which I have trouble following myself.

Are they happy or are their parents happy at their “success”. Go watch some Frasier, it’s good for some perspective on success and happiness across career, family, personal baggage.

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter For always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself”

― Desiderata

If you're feeling this pain your colleagues are as well. Small improvements in this area are yeoman's work that's often appreciated by peers, if not management. When I've been in a rut making baby steps in tooling has helped get me moving again.

If you can't find someone to review your stuff, is there someone you can raise this with who might be able to help? It sounds like a management/communication issue.

Very, very few things survive long-term. Experiments fail, projects fail, market leaders change. I know talented people who have worked long careers & never seen a product ship.

Clayton Christensen made an academic career at Harvard researching market leaders getting replaced.

The Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration reports about half of businesses fail after 5 years, https://advocacy.sba.gov/2011/10/19/what-is-the-survival-rat...

Skill plays a role in these outcomes, but so do other factors including luck & imperfect information. The top engineer at Blackberry was a rising star, until suddenly the iPhone showed up.

After a couple of decades in the field I have concluded that the hardest part in this job is not the technical one, but the dealing with yourself. Yet, through the process you get to develop virtues that eventually make you a better person. Don't give up :)

- Deferring to others for strategic startup/career/tech advice

- More immediately, however, from the way you wrote it sounded to me like you're really, really down on yourself & have this constant churning sense of fear (above/beyond the typical "background radiation" of our insanely distressing life right now)

- I hope I didn't misread, but it sounds like generally you've got your $$$ locked down for foreseeable and are getting paid to work with high-caliber people

- Just going based on what you wrote, all the stuff going at this new gig (omg manager left, less-than-flawless onboarding, new person with lots of ideas learns they might need to come up with different business-valuable ideas, it's unclear how to get stuff merged, etc etc) are not that unusual. Your career trajectory as you describe sounds like somebody who actually gaf about engineering

However, that underlying fear or whatever the gnawing feeling you describe that threads through everything, might be worthy of further examination. Like figure out why is that monkey on your back?

If you're not already, hang out with kind people who don't work in tech

Also this group is like the khan academy of mental health-- check out the mirror exercise: https://wiki.healthygamer.gg/en/Insecurity

Don't know you but rooting for you

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I definitely think part of it is above-average background stress - queer woman, sole breadwinner for my household, grew up poor, we've had a lot of emergency expenses and unexpected health problems the last few years. Our finances aren't terrible, but the past year has eaten away a lot of the cushion I had built up from my last successful role.

Objectively the rest of my life outside work has been extremely stressful, and I'm scared of losing my job.

I'm sorry to hear that. I feel for you because I hear echos of burn out that I have struggled with in what you wrote. The good news is that recovery is possible. After burning out hard many years ago, I took a long break but found that code called me back. I was doing Open Source work just because I enjoyed it.

The thing is, you have a lot of stress to deal with and you've been joining some seriously stressful job situations. I've found that burnout happens not because of working (most of us are lucky and enjoy this work), but because of a outside factors, often because of a lack of control. Burnout can happen because the work feels meaningless. I know if I am stressing out over something I don't believe in or endless projects that fail to move the needle, I will lose interest in the work.

To compound things, you have a completely unrealistic expectation of success. Retiring at 30 is hitting the lotto--and that even already happened to you. Though you said you wished you had held on to the stock, you got your big exit already. You bought a house. Congrats! That is far more successful than most of us. I've been working for 20 years and never had this. I pump out a ton of code, it's not about being good, exits like that are about being at the right place and getting lucky. You are expecting to get hit by lightening again and that's not reasonable.

If you're open to it, working out expectations like this is where a CBT therapist is good. They will hear those "should" statements about yourself and help set realistic expectations of yourself. They are like mind debuggers and I think you might thrive with the right thinking because you have already been super successful. You have done great things, you just aren't seeing them.

I would also recommend that startups are not the place for you until your life is less stressful. Big companies might be out, too, because you control so little of the output and there can be a ton of competition, they can be crazy stressful, too. Find a medium sized company with happy employees and punch that clock for a while. You've got enough to deal with.

Good luck to you! My email is in my profile if you'd like to talk.

Got it-- new info, of course

Also sounds like you're an earner, survivor, tough-as-nails individual too

I have the same problem as you right now. Long break from work during the pandemic, joined a new company, and have only managed to merge one tiny PR in my first month. It feels terrible.

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.

I tried this - I taught myself Rust and Scala, built several prototypes, it was all kind of satisfying for a while until I came back to the fact that none of it translates to job security. I can sit in a corner by myself and build things nobody uses, but it's not going to keep me employed.

That’s interesting. Sounds like you’re a solid developer, but that your company doesn’t put much effort into making its employees feel secure.

This suggestion might be a bit out of left field, but reading The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts has helped me a lot with this problem.

Even trying to be a hotshot, something i often do naturally, I believe comes from anxiety of joining a new group; a way to justify, ensure my place in it.

At the last place I joined, I just wrote out tests for the code. It got me easy quick prs, a context of the codebase, and appreciation from about every stakeholder.

It sounds like you're a holistic or big picture type. I struggle with this too. I don't have all the answers but my advice would be to try and focus on a smaller thing and get a win with that. Don't propose several projects, propose one and give it enough attention and proof that it's hard to refuse. Are your proposals measurable? Are they valuable? Are they framed in business context?

If more is thrown at you, push back using phrases like "adding this initiative may put effort #1 at risk. I think we should concentrate on effort #1 a bit longer while #2 takes more shape"

Why are your PRs not being approved? Do you need more time pair programming so what you submit is more aligned with reviewer expectations? Have you asked for that pairing time?

Overall I hear two disconnects, one at a business/product level and one at the engineering level. Your expectations sound out of alignment with your peers. You might try and work on relationships, build trust, find the fun puzzle and try and enjoy any little bits you can.

I'm definitely struggling with finding the one big thing I should focus on. My team has a few objectives for the coming year, but it's unclear who actually owns them or how to get involved. We have a new manager coming in to replace the one who left, but the timing is not great given how long I've already been treading water.

PR approval is mostly down to not being able to get any person to actually +1 - our deploys are pretty slow and high-risk right now, and if your project isn't important it just kind of seems to hit a wall. The code itself is fine, but nobody cares about the result (even though I've talked to them about the benefits and they agree).

> our deploys are pretty slow and high-risk right now

This could be a potential focus? Everyone loves continuous integration. What would it look like for every team and every project to deploy confidently? If you could be instrumental in getting that going, every single dev and manager would be thankful

Oh jeez, that sounds oddly familiar!

Right before the pandemic I joined a large company you've heard of. My boss was mostly absent - I talked to her maybe four times during my entire stay. We were actively hiring for an intermediate lead to take the load off her.

My teammates had no idea what to have me do. We operated a confusing distributed workflow that touched many teams. Changes and deploys were seen as risky, but failure was also constant, and my teammates spent a lot of time shepherding various parts of the workflow manually. The whole thing had lots of dependencies that were owned by different teams, and none of them felt the need to take on the risk of approving each other's changes.

I ended up leaving after a couple of months. Satisfyingly, the company went on to lay off 20% of its engineering staff right after, including the intermediate lead we had just brought on. I managed to fall back onto another offer I had received earlier in my job hunt (and then left that position about a year later for similar reasons).

What I took from the experience is that not only do a lot of software teams treat hiring as a mystical ritual full of supernatural risk to their very existence, but they also don't have a clue about what to do with a new hire. That's also a mystical ritual, in which they want you to somehow "get absorbed" into the team without any explicit planning or guidance on their part.

Some teams (some) have wish lists of project ideas and tasks that they wish they had the bandwidth to work on. Other teams at least have bug queues that range from bugs appropriate for new hires to much more general issues that take planning and triage.

But a surprising number of teams hire as a means of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Maybe the lead is frustrated with the pace of work. Maybe the team has an unfilled FTE role and they don't want to lose it. So they end up hiring someone because (a) you must always be hiring, duh, and (b) not filling that FTE vacancy means your team loses the zero-sum competition for prominence with other teams.

In my experience, I would have probably unearthed some red flags, had I dug in more. There are usually red flags in the hiring manager's description of what they want a new hire to accomplish. I now know what to look for, I think (basically, comments suggesting that your job, as an IC, is to "transform" things or even "blow them up!").

What would I have done if I had to stay? Well, sometimes dysfunction works well for all parties involved, and that would have been mind-numbing. But I would have gambled on the possibility that painful, risky deploys and unclear success criteria were a pain point for everyone. That means work on metrics, tests, and the tooling for them. It means building reliable rollback and faster deploy. It means building parallel testing pipelines. Overall, when there is chaos and lack of buy-in, one possible solution is to build stuff that demonstrates usefulness without a need for buy-in. I wasn't eager to build any of those things. I had another opportunity, so I took it and left.

My guess is that your experiences are only partially connected to who you are as an engineer. A lot of teams are just disappointingly unprepared to use a new hire. Some people do thrive in such environments, either thanks to past experience or a quirk of personality. Given the opportunity of unformed chaos, they build projects that they know can't fail and then deliver on them. You might not have that confidence or experience. If you want to get more resilient to this kind of situation, either keep rolling the dice with new teams (they can't all suck at onboarding!), or find ways to use dysfunction as an opportunity to show off your initiative and experience.

> ...would have gambled on the possibility that painful, risky deploys and unclear success criteria were a pain point for everyone. That means work on metrics, tests, and the tooling for them. It means building reliable rollback and faster deploy. It means building parallel testing pipelines. Overall, when there is chaos and lack of buy-in, one possible solution is to build stuff that demonstrates usefulness without a need for buy-in.

Absolutely excellent advice.

I would start by getting consensus on process. Hit up the main engineering chat channel and describe the issue you want better. "Deployment is painful and bug prone. In order to get code to production, first we have to..." Of course use neutral, non-judgmental language - this is the process that has emerged, no one's fault. This is an engineering problem to be solved. Next, ask for thoughts and opinions. You could suggest your own if you think it will help, but it's about building consensus. Just starting these conversations can be enough sometimes. But you can take it to the next step and actually build the tools that are suggested.

I've commented elsewhere, but this is a >1000 person company where deployments are owned by a dedicated team. There's a lot of technical debt involved, but my team is pretty far removed from it, and there is also necessary complexity. Dropping in and proposing a new process isn't really feasible.

I'll just come out and ask: is this literally Palantir?

It is not. As many people have pointed out, this seems to be a ubiquitous pattern in high growth companies that I assumed was unique to my last big startup

Stop going for that PR. I don't even know what a PR is, but my guts tell me that you should stop pursuing that. Start making yourself useful. Do small stuff, support other people. The guidance you miss - start giving other people guidance. Ask for advice. Don't think you know it all.

The new very successful startup, the many high-performing people. Is that the truth or is that appearance? Fake it until you make it. That may apply to people, but also to companies.

Find a hobby, something outside your workfield that gives meaning to your life. If I hear you, you are successful, but you choose the wrong companies. If they pay you and don't complain, then you are a success in my book, much more successful than I ever was.

PR = Pull Request

It's how you introduce new code to many projects. OP was saying he was unable to contribute any new code.

PR = personal record, like when you lift a lot of weights in a gym. I think it's a very high bar to set for your first month, so it's not clear why OP is beating herself up over it.

Most companies are dysfunctional. If you find a company that is able to take full advantage of you excitement, passion, enthusiasm and drive... you're lucky. Don't take this as a reflection on yourself, don't feel any obligation to suffer at a job you don't love, just keep looking for the right company. You might get lucky and find it quickly, you might get unlucky and spend years, but each time you get a job you'll hopefully learn more about what you need to look to avoid. A great privilege of technology is that job hopping isn't punished because technologists are in such high demand.

There's a lot in here!

Having read some of the comments, it seems really important to me to center the information that you're queer, supporting a disabled partner. I worked in tech from 2013-2020, and from 2015-2020 my Dad's health was very fragile, and he had made no financial plans. I became his guardian, paying for homes, doing the paperwork, managing the care, and I think this is a huge piece of any situation like this.

There's a lot of curiosity in the comments about what the right environment and role is. I share those questions, but I also think it's important to just feel into the situation more before moving to action.

Queerness I also know for me, in tech, reminded me of the idea - everyone has to learn the dominant paradigm, and then there's ours. Meaning, I do think I experience the world differently through queerness, and it was a navigation to own that and lean into its gifts, rather than just feel a sense of otherness. I don't know if that's part of your experience or not, but it felt worth sharing.

I have started offering coaching - if you'd like to just connect for an hour (no charge or anything, just connection) my email is in my profile. My instinct is it would just be good to drop into what you're saying and really feel through the layers of life situation, the creeping in fear, the aloneness, the stuckness, and see where forward might be in all of it...

In my experience, you are in learn more or earn mode, but usually not both, when working a startup job. The early stage startups offer great learning opportunities: you get to implement the first cut of the system and learn from your (inevitable) mistakes. The focus is on building. But there is no guarantee of earnings apart from the cash paycheck that is deposited into your account every pay cycle. In such a setup, you may run into bad personalities who can hamper your learning goals, in which case it's best to leave. Note that early-stage startups have a lot of risk and you may end up not learning anything while incurring the opportunity cost.

On the other hand, if you join a very mature startup or established public company, then there will be established HR processes and the likelihood of wacko personalities goes down. There will be better management and almost certainly better pay. The cost is that you will have a mediocre set of colleagues, far fewer learning opportunities and less relevant skills to pick up on the job (relevant, in the sense of landing your next opportunity).

Too much of one or the other will lead to what feels like constant failure. It may be best to alternate between these, accepting the reality that your skills need updating every now and then, and it's best to do that in an environment where that can happen quickly, and money is important and must come at the cost of work satisfaction and learning sometimes. Striking a balance between the two is the challenging part of career management.

EDIT: Reading your post again a few times, I also see another problem. It looks like you have trouble finishing up projects, i.e., converting prototypes into functional product and keeping it running. This is the boring part, and why people get paid the big bucks, and you need to learn the skill of finishing up and keeping the lights on. If you want to learn this specific skill, join a mid-size company that's growing nicely but has an established product or two in a big market. This type of company is where you will have opportunities to learn this type of skill.

I think the problem for me with finishing projects is that they need to actually get used. I like iterating on prototypes and getting feedback from users, and if people are using the product I'm happy to maintain it. I've maintained a small open source project for 5 years, and I regularly respond to people's requests and add new features.

When nobody is excited about the project, I tend to cut ties. My ideal manager would be the sales/hype person who sells the project outside of the team - I've had a few of these and those projects were very successful.

Where is this “constant failure” you talk about? I’m seeing a normal engineer who keeps joining startups, and is living the startup life. In fact it sounds like you’ve even cashed out. I don’t see constant failure at all.

Startups are naturally chaotic. Most fail. Until they mature it’s complete chaos.

If you don’t like this life and it’s causing you stress, you should join a bigger, more mature company. It’s hard to tell from what you wrote if you like the fast pace of a startup or if you hate it. If you hate it and the uncertainty, then join a bigger company with more stable processes.

If you think that’s too boring and too slow, then keep joining startups but embrace uncertainty and chaos. There’s nothing wrong with either, but understand the nature of the company you’re joining and don’t have unrealistic expectations.

I've done ok financially, but in retrospect if I had held on to my stock instead of selling when it vested I could be set for life. A lot of my old coworkers only ever worked in one job for 5 years, got rich and retired on their stock at 30.

When I was searching for my new job I knew I didn't wan small start-up chaos - my current role and the other big startup both have > 1000 engineers. "Startup" is kind of a loose term, but that seems big to me? I guess the alternative is like an actual enterprise company?

> in retrospect if I had held on to my stock instead of selling when it vested I could be set for life.

Or maybe not: the stock could have tanked for a zillion reasons. But hindsight is 20/20. If I had held to the BTC I mined back when it was still a toy I'd be bathing in money. Let it go.

> "Startup" is kind of a loose term

Lots of big co aren't strictly startups anymore but have some startup mentality, either carried over from their past or downright imported. The most nefarious ones do it purposely, pressing all the juice out of employees as if they were lemons, managing to entice them to do so voluntarily, and gaslighting them when they start to fail to produce the expected volume of lemonade.

But not all are like that, and in fact I did not really find a correlation with size.

Find and define both what you want and what you find unacceptable, and watch for red flags during interviews. Don't dismiss the red flags because something else looks rosy.

> A lot of my old coworkers only ever worked in one job for 5 years, got rich and retired on their stock at 30.

Is this normal? It doesn't seem so normal to me.

It's not normal. I think maybe OP's perspective has been affected by seeing a lot of people experience exceptional success, and feeling comparatively like a failure, but that doesn't reflect the reality for the vast majority of people in the industry or otherwise.

Retiring on startup stock at 30 is as about as far from normal as possible.

> How do I get over constant failure?

Constant failure? You are highly compensated and have a mortgage for a house, presumably in a very high cost of living area. It seems like you are an insecure overachiever and need to reframe things.

> My manager left a few weeks after I started, my onboarding buddy has been absent, and the fear has started creeping in again that I'm alone and can't hack it in this high performing team.

That doesn't sound like a high performing team. Stop putting dysfunctional startups on a pedestal and denigrating yourself.

Having a mortgage isn't an accomplishment, it's a liability. It would be expensive and stressful to downsize our biggest expense, and unexpected repairs blew a huge hole in our household budget. I'm well-compensated for now, but how long can I realistically keep it up?

The team hasn't done a great job supporting me, but they deliver on their commitments and the individual team members are extremely competent.

> unexpected repairs blew a huge hole in our household budget.

Yeah that's unfortunate, and maintenance & repairs can cancel out some of the price appreciation as well. But in general it sounds like you are doing extremely well personally and professionally and are going out of your way to tell yourself stories about how things are going wrong.

> The team hasn't done a great job supporting me, but they deliver on their commitments and the individual team members are extremely competent.

Your lack of onboarding reflects extremely poorly on them & their process, not yourself. They made let's say at this point an 100k investment in you with what sounds like zero visibility & process.

> I'm well-compensated for now, but how long can I realistically keep it up?

I would probably just start looking for another job, "dream jobs" aren't always what they are cut out to be and there is no reason to tie yourself to this one. They will not be so sentimental.

This seems a normal, even successful career to me. You were just burned out and maybe had a mesiah complex. I never had these kind of problems because from the beginning I always had a very mentally checked out a la office space perspective on everything. You pay me for 8 hours of best efforts to untangle your ball of problems but nothing is ultimately my fault and at the same time I see very little of the overall success in the company so why should I care beyond not getting fired?

Two steps to success:

1. Set up a local development environment. (what I call "setting up shop")

2. Read the source. Understand all of it. Debug it. Take it to dinner. Read it at bedtime, coffee time, sexy time. Don't wait for "buddy" to come teach you.

If you are too tired/unmotivated/unable to do those things, just rethink your career. If you do those things, congrats you are a hacker so what exactly is the problem?

Love the code, be the code, test the code, and you will become the master of the code. But seriously you don’t have to make it your life, just start writing tests for different modules during your work day and you’ll be embedded in no time.

It sounds like you've been able to consistently land dev jobs, produce working software (it's not your responsibility to ensure the thing you've been asked to build is commercially viable), and build a good reputation (you mention good feedback and promotions), plus you've made a ton of money (most people make way less money than software engineers, and the average software engineer has not gotten a lucrative stock windfall). I think you've been very successful :)

> It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing.

At my first software job it was said that a new hire typically wouldn't be a net positive for the team until they'd been there a year. You wouldn't necessarily have even been given a real task in the first two months, let alone gotten it shipped. Big companies have bureaucracy and gatekeeping (for good and bad reasons) and operate on timescales of months or years. By design, a new person can't unilaterally be productive. It's possible that investing the time to empower you to be productive just doesn't seem urgent to them right now - dealing with the fallout of a manager leaving may be much higher priority. You're on the payroll, they know you'll be around for them to utilize when they need you...

> If I can't work in the tech industry it would completely upend my entire life.

Based on what you've said, this fear sounds very unlikely to come about. Even if this company is dysfunctional and you need to move on, you have a history of being able to get tech jobs, and it sounds like you've made a positive impression on many coworkers in the past, so I imagine they'd vouch for you. And there's a ton of demand for developers right now, and a wide variety of companies to choose from!

Maybe move into sales if that is possible, very few people in sales are technical enough and let companies down, you however sound like might know enough to answer those board room sale pitches which require technical details. You can also then find out more about what the customer wants and then use that feedback to drive the technical direction of the product. By being able to code, you can randomly QA the product by getting customer feedback when you drop in on a customer and talk to their users (if that is possible), and you can then pass this feedback back to the dev team. Whilst off the shelf software is mass market, it doesnt always lead to lock ins, custom built software does lead to lock ins and that protects income streams for all.

Also write a bucket list and see how you can change your job to achieve your bucket list. Remote working means more office based employees like coders can now work whilst travelling the world.

Maybe quit it with calling sales non-technical? There are many technical people working in technical sales and post-sales roles: customer advocates, sales engineers, evangelists, solutions architects, and probably lots more. So enough with your dusty cliches about sales.

I've yet to meet any sales person who is technical enough to explain their product and you can be sure I ask lots of questions! So its not a cliche.

I've done field engineering and customer success in the past and enjoyed it. Going full sales is not very appealing to me.

that doesn’t really sound like constant failure to me, it just sounds like you changed jobs a few times. startups are inherently turbulent, a job at a bigger company might be less stressful.

A few of my jobs have been at companies with >1000 engineers, which feels like they should be mature, but sometimes they just feel stagnant. They make lots of money but it's harder and harder to make progress and they still don't have good structure.

The only person responsible for your health and happiness is you.

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.

You could take a risk, and tell the truth to a coworker, ideally someone who sees themselves as a potential mentor. It's an act of trust, being vulnerable like that. But it doesn't sound like you have much to lose, and it's a risk that could actually put you in a much better position, personally and professionally. 2 months without a PR merge isn't the worst thing in the world, but yeah, it's time to do something.

Someone else gave some good practical advice, about getting into a rhythm of merging smaller PRs. That can be a good confidence booster. However, that's not without its risks either, as coworkers are sometimes not terribly fond of trivial PRs.

I've tried opening up to a couple peers, there's definitely a culture gap where they're successful bay area dev guys who aren't used to hearing about people failing (like really failing, not "my startup ran out of money so I joined a FAANG") or being vulnerable.

Agree about merging smaller PRs, I did recently find a backlog of stuff I can crank out to keep myself sane.

It doesn’t seem like your use of the word “failing” is helpful.

You should be going to senior devs and telling them that you are finding it surprisingly difficult to get traction, and that you could really use some guidance and mentoring to make the team as effective as possible. And you should bring them a specific plan that they can critique and provide you feedback on. Pick one PR, write out a plan to get it merged, and ask them to review your plan.

Maybe they will tell you that you picked a bad area to focus on, because Bob is really particular about that code and he only approves changes by senior engineers - then ask the mentor what a better area to focus on is.

Maybe they will say the area is good, but your plan is all wrong. Then ask them how you can improve the plan.

Maybe they will say you are crazy if you expect to be be touching the code base in your first year. Then ask what you should focus on to best contribute.

Then schedule regular follow ups to review how your plan is working out. Come prepared to discuss what you accomplished, and what you haven’t been able to accomplish.

Make it easy for people to help you.

I can speak from experience. I did join once to a team, that was really some levels above me. BUT basically the only thing that helps is to actually work on something. Just ask the team for work.

Of course the best would be for you to do something together with a senior. If there is someone who likes to help, this is your guy.

In my case I think they thought, that this would only slow them down and there wasn't a "nice helper" guy there. So I did my best. It wasn't really good, BUT it was something that could be worked on. After that a lot of help came from the team, because it was kind of useful and later a central component.

You sound like stress/self doubts are your biggest issue. There's plenty of people working in tech who are objectively not very good, but they get along winging it and pretending. Obviously, that shouldn't be your goal, but remember it as your safety net.

The secret of your high-performing people might simply be that they put in the work and spent 100+ hours reading the current codebase and, thus, they now know exactly where to change what. But they didn't start that way. They started out being unproductive and reading the source code base.

First: take it easy, a couple of months is nothing, and your boss left, so you’re kind of in limbo, that happens.

Second: talk to people. There is nothing wrong telling your coworkers / senior people how you feel. Just pull someone who seems senior and nice apart and tell them straight up: “hey Can I talk to you too ne sec. - I am a bit at a loss here, since my boss left I am not exactly sure what I am supposed to do, who do you think I should talk to to sort this out?”

I don't have advice for you, but you're not alone. Been coding for nearly 30 years, full-time professionally for 10, in startups and bigcos. On every team I've been on, I've been the sole expert in several technologies. Yet the most productive I've ever felt professionally was as an intern; it's all been downhill from there. Haven't merged a commit now in probably 8 months. And I have very little code that's running in production anywhere.

My career sounds similar but all at a large company. High performer initially. They wouldn't promote me, wouldn't give a modest raise, and then screwed me over a few times. It's been a downward spiral. I just don't care - even if I perform well I would probably get screwed like in the past.

My advice is to not care. If you get fired for work in tech for a non-tech larger company. It will be boring, but you'll get paid.

You just have to accept you can actually flip 10 heads in a roll when betting tails. I’d keep rolling given the chance if you don’t have another game to play

What I got from all this is that you are telling yourself that you want to do work that continuously causes you a great deal of distress. Why is that?

Partially because it's very well compensated, and my partner has a disability so I'm the sole income for our household. Taking a pay cut to do something else would be a big life change.

More importantly, I can't imagine doing anything else. The first 5 years I was in the industry I loved it and was very successful. I got to travel and learn and felt like I was on top of the world.

I think there are jobs in the industry that are both well-compensated and not a major source of stress. Google is widely known for both high comp and a relaxed work environment, for example. I think maybe you just haven't found a job that has the right balance for you yet. I would say to follow others' advice on how to adapt to your new job but also don't be too hard on yourself if you can't make it work because sometimes it's just not the right fit.

The suggestion of going to Google seems so laughable - I really wanted this role and ground out a bunch of leetcode problems to pass their screening, and barely made it. I'm not really into memorizing algorithms and data structures, I don't think I would do well at a FAANG. Ironically, almost all of my coworkers are from FAANGs

Not suggesting Google per se. Obviously it's not easy to get in. I'm just holding that up as an example of a place that has high comp and low stress and I don't think it's the only such place out there that meets those requirements. I would imagine there are a lot of lower prestige companies that fit that description as well.

So you expect to be on top of the world all of the time? You seem to have a lot problems but your career isn’t one. You’re in an extreme privileged position. Treat your therapy seriously because no job will make you happy if you don’t get a grip.

Thanks for asking, I'm in a similar situation and it's very useful to have more data about this :)

It should even be a page on big websites.

You say that you have been with a number of startups, and each time it seems like your expectation of what the work at a startup _should_ be like clashes with reality. I have a feeling that this clash plays a big part in your frustration.

It can be helpful to make hidden expectations explicit, and thus allow for a reality check.

So, in your opinion, what is the ideal startup like?

In my mind the ideal role is on a team that clearly owns codebase, has users giving them feedback, and works with product and management to set a roadmap and then deliver on it. Being able to work with new and interesting technologies would be a bonus, but even just working on medium-sized features with a couple other engineers would be great.

If you haven't done any pr for so long, what do you do?

Do you don't work in a Team?

Or aren't you building up a team or org?

Either it's your position to see issues and solve them for the org or it's your job to execute.

If you can't come up with things to do, but it's your job, you should search for a team or product and not for a company.

When I joined my manager had a few onboarding tasks, I did all of those, and started protoyping my first PR. It was actually a pretty meaty open-ended project and in retrospect it was sort of high-effort, low-reward. I iterated on that several times, wrote proposals, solicited feedback, but ultimately nobody really gives a shit about it, so it hasn't gotten shut down or moved forward.

At this point I've kind of accepted the project is dead but my manager is gone. I've put together a few small PRs but they're similarly just in review hell.

Sounds to me that you need to find your team then?

1. You have imposter syndrome (the “fear” you describe). The good news is, this is totally normal, most people have it and it never goes away. You just have to ignore it and eventually you will get good at ignoring it.

The proof of this is that you describe being worried that you can’t work in tech, yet clearly have managed to get several tech jobs and so far (as far as you described) have not been fired or even laid off. So you objectively can work in tech and should just stop listing to the internal voice that says you can’t.

2. Consider that “tech” is not a monolithic culture, and it’s entirely possible (especially at earlier stage startups, but even at FANG) to have several unlucky experiences in a row.

3. You current job situation is unfortunate, but once you relax and ignore the fear of failure, it’s still a pretty good situation. You have a job at a company you’re excited about working with people you respect. So far you haven’t been fired or put on a performance plan. If the company is unhappy with your output it is up to them to tell you, and you shouldn’t decide you are a failure before they do so.

You didn’t say anything about your new manager, but you should ask them what is a priority for you to work on, and focus on shipping something (anything) aligned with that priority. One project at a time. Don’t spread yourself too thin, or give up on the project because you can’t find someone to approve the PR. Have a singular focus and keep knocking down doors until you finish it.

4. You need to learn to live with setbacks in life and your career. The best way to do this is to get a hobby (outside of work/tech) that is easy to succeed at, such as exercise. E.g. to succeed at running or cycling you just have to put one foot in front of the other, and leave the house a few times per week. This can do wonders to take your mind off professional setbacks.

5. (Edit after reading some of your other comments in the thread) Stop comparing yourself to others (and possibly take a break from social media, especially LinkedIn, if that is the source of your comparisons). There are always going to be people massively more successful in life. Even if you get promoted and write a book and found a startup there are still going to be people way more successful than you and you will still feel like a failure if you constantly compare yourself to them. Also, lots of those people who present themselves as super successful and happy on social media are actually deeply unhappy. That is not your goal.

PS. Happy to DM or chat about specifics if you want to reach out (email in profile).

Honestly there is not enough details about the companies that you could get valid feedback on this. An internet forum is not the right place for this. You need to chat with someone in confidence and tell all the details.

I dont under stand how you can be there for months and not have a single PR. Are they not approving them or you haven't been assigned any work? What's your day to day like?

Whenever I get in this kind of funk, I notice that the more energy I put into it... the more it grows. What always gets me out of it is to stop focusing on my feelings and start focusing on what others need from me.

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! ;)

Sounds like you hit the lottery with that one startup and got promoted to a level far above your competence. Common problem. Truly senior people and true startup people do not struggle to find projects and contribute PRs. Find a job at an appropriately junior level at a real company. (FAANG will downlevel you appropriately.) Learn some real skills then try the startup thing again in a few years if you want.

I wasn't a director or anything, I've hovered around senior/staff engineer depending on the company. Still an IC role where I expected some help onboarding and picking a first project.

Yea senior/staff engineers don’t have trouble with that.

Maybe move beyond startups to more stable organizations doing meaningful product development.

"Real privilege lies in knowing that you are enough." - Nipun Mehta

Unfortunately under capitalism I also need to buy food and shelter and not just survive on vibes

Normally CTO coach but if you drop me a line we could chat.

You have some self-imposed stench of failure. You’re failing because you expect to fail. Change your perspective. You can do this.

OP is failing because OP put themselves in a job that's draining their life-force, not because of some vague "perspective" issue.

Unless by "change perspective" you mean "change jobs", because that's what OP needs to do.

no one can deny or take your personal projects away from you. it's a good defense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com