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[Vent] Burned out at good job (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/chat@hexbear.net
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Title. It's super frustrating - I have what most reasonable people would call a "good job", including myself, and I do not care for it.

Context: I'm a programmer ("software engineer" i guess), work entirely remote from home, have decently flexible hours, paid well, and, most importantly, the company I work for doesn't directly hurt anyone (we make software for sales teams). I was able to move shortly after joining the company and overall the gig has been fine. the co. treats itself as a startup and has the baggage to go along with it, but its not nearly as bad as a true startup imo, other than leadership saying a couple of times a year things will be further intensifying and people need to be on the bandwagon or should find other jobs.

The pace of work has always been somewhat stressful, but truthfully the stress is probably more self imposed than anything because i'm the primary income provider in my house. However, since the company went "all in" on AI development last year my ability to keep up and my output has continuously gotten worse imo (and based on some feedback I've received). i don't think our AI development style suits my ADHD well - my tasks become wallpaper as the plans and files take "turns" of refinement, and by the time I hand it off the work is basically background noise to me. Between the actual mission of the company and our current dev style I'm just so alienated from the work it practically repels me from my desk. I'm constantly scrambling to try to catch up to deadlines (which I'm typically missing), but when I take a step back and think about my job through a liberal lens it's like "wtf is even the problem."

I know part of it is that the work just doesn't matter. Other parts are because I have other things that are higher priorities in my mind (family stuff, organizing, etc), and would much rather spend time on those things. in lieu of finding more interesting work (I can't seem to find any), I'm trying to encourage myself to almost consider work my part time gig compared to my higher priorities, but that is mostly only helpful for dealing with prioritization and not stress. Instead i'm taking my anti-anxiety meds and now frequently taking xanax too.

It's just really frustrating because it's not a "real" or "material" problem, its all in my head. I can do better work, i'm just struggling to engage. I don't want to spend all my energy on my day job when other matters are just straight up more important.

idk just needed to vent. obviously this is some real first world problem bs but wasn't sure where else to vent tbh.

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[–] 24 points 2 weeks ago* (2 children)

Yeah largely the same problem I’ve had for the last 3 years. The expectation now is we deliver every quarter without fail or we get interrogated and whatever answer is given the response is “but AI makes you go faster”

We’re currently sitting on years of the most egregious tech debt that nobody wants to acknowledge exists while we have offshore staff manually tweaking production infrastructure with admin perms to keep the lights on with no oversight.

The only thing thats happened is we’re going slower as 9/10 colleagues appear to have lost all cognitive faculties to copilot down to them talking to me or asking questions written by copilot which is sending me into the silly dimension. All work is now making sprawling design docs down to the granular atomic implementation detail and when something happens that means such a design doesnt work which is all the time because you cant fucking spend months designing a system without testing ONE SINGLE ASPECT OF IT and somehow expect it all to line up with your copiloted hallucinations, then everyone just stares blankly into space.

I shouldnt complain its an easy job and all i have to do is pretend to be stoic, tell everyone i use ai when i dont and use GitHub copilot to keep the teams spyware from saying im away from my computer so i can play MMOs all day. But it does actually hurt that the career i really enjoyed for over a decade is basically ruined.

Programming or bug fixing used to be the reward at the end of the long boring requirements discussions and endless planning talks. Now all my life is meetings and im literally not allowed to code anymore

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 2 weeks ago

    Yes, exactly! i've been in this career path for just over 10 years and now and the current state is just dreadful.

    for a few (2 or 3?) months I was able to use claude & cursor to do just enough of my work that I could focus more of my energy on local organizing tasks, which I actually really appreciated. With the intensification of labor though now we (mostly me tbh, i think most of my colleagues are fairing better at least outwardly) are constantly scrambling, nothing is ever fully aligned with expectations or requirements, and the "flywheel" has to keep turning. the design doc thing is especially egregious - converting requirements to instructions the llm can understand is one step, then lots of refinement (at this point in the process I really wished I just sat down and wrote the sprawling thing myself, but my typing speed is a limiting factor on this part of the work (which shouldnt matter, but here we are)), then converting it to a format that is github friendly, then updating that so its human friendly (which, apparently, I'm not spending enough time on. which, admittedly, is probably true at this point), then wading through design comments while also expecting our tools to implement the un-approved plan, so inevitably the implementation does have to change at least a bit.

    The whole thing is just silly because the bottleneck has always been code reviews, manual testing, then CI. We didn't change any of that, there's just a whole lot more of it! we did add llms to automatically review code, but literally the whole thing now is the "implementer" is supposed to spot check the llm output and say it def matches the plan and is quality code, and the rest of the team just signs off on the plan and does some basic testing.

    And that's just for a single ticket, so there's like 3-6 of these per person per day + meetings. It's just asinine.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago*

    All work is now making sprawling design docs down to the granular atomic implementation detail and when something happens that means such a design doesnt work which is all the time because you cant fucking spend months designing a system without testing ONE SINGLE ASPECT OF IT and somehow expect it all to line up with your copiloted hallucinations, then everyone just stares blankly into space.

    lol.

    I can picture the blank stares so vividly.

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