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Burnout.
VThornheart
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, for the past month nothing productive has happened over at my work, mainly because I've spent all of my time doing tech support for one of our customers instead of continuing development on new features for our website like they assigned me to (before they decided appeasing the customer was more important... and I can't blame them, because we only have so many customers =( ).
Anyways, it all came to a head last night when I pulled a 16 hour shift to solve a problem that ended up being them having a faulty networking cable running between the system running their SQL server and their switch. The last five hours or so of that were spent on the phone with the owner of their company, trying to convince him that such was the problem and answering his angered and frustrated responses as he refused to accept that it was a problem with anything on their end.
So today, I'm staring at code, back to looking at the website improvements which have been delayed for a month now from all of this. I've been staring at it for hours... all day. Really simple code. And I'm feeling horrible, because I'm looking at it, and it's something that a 12 year old should be able to do... and I can't seem to pull the motivation up from within me to type a single keystroke. But I can type this just fine, and browse the forums just fine.
I feel more burnt out than I've ever felt in my life.
Fellow programmers out there... what do you do to pull yourself out of such a rut?
(And yes, this is the same job I was complaining about before... now I'm in New Hampshire, so I'm where I want to be... but I'm still working with them, and the recession seems to have made it so that there's not many opportunities available at the moment. They still won't give me health care, which is adding to my unwillingness to DO anything (we're coming up on year 4 since they initially promised healthcare with nothing to show for it... but as I noted in the prior thread about this job, it's basically due to them having 0 money). But I feel guilty and stupid for staring at the screen when what I'm doing ought to be extremely, utterly easy.)
Anyways, it all came to a head last night when I pulled a 16 hour shift to solve a problem that ended up being them having a faulty networking cable running between the system running their SQL server and their switch. The last five hours or so of that were spent on the phone with the owner of their company, trying to convince him that such was the problem and answering his angered and frustrated responses as he refused to accept that it was a problem with anything on their end.
So today, I'm staring at code, back to looking at the website improvements which have been delayed for a month now from all of this. I've been staring at it for hours... all day. Really simple code. And I'm feeling horrible, because I'm looking at it, and it's something that a 12 year old should be able to do... and I can't seem to pull the motivation up from within me to type a single keystroke. But I can type this just fine, and browse the forums just fine.
I feel more burnt out than I've ever felt in my life.
Fellow programmers out there... what do you do to pull yourself out of such a rut?
(And yes, this is the same job I was complaining about before... now I'm in New Hampshire, so I'm where I want to be... but I'm still working with them, and the recession seems to have made it so that there's not many opportunities available at the moment. They still won't give me health care, which is adding to my unwillingness to DO anything (we're coming up on year 4 since they initially promised healthcare with nothing to show for it... but as I noted in the prior thread about this job, it's basically due to them having 0 money). But I feel guilty and stupid for staring at the screen when what I'm doing ought to be extremely, utterly easy.)
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Take a long weekend if you can.
I think I just needed to know that I'm not being unreasonable or crazy.
if that cant motivate you then i dont know what can.
but seriously take a weekend off blow off some steam, shoot a gun or something.
Yeah, to be honest this is a responsible time to take a sick day even if you don't feel 'sick'.
I went through something similar a couple of years ago and I actually did end up physically sick from the stress (basically all the senior employees took a holiday at the same time leaving a bunch of work in my lap I had no idea about and no clue what to do with) and subsequently resigned to avoid ever going through it again.
Better to take time now to recover from yesterday than to build up more stress and have a full-on breakdown next week.
I just realized that taking a sick day might be more difficult for me, as I'm not telecommuting... so I'm working where I live (which was also how I was able to pull off that 16 hour shift in the first place I suppose
Another possibility is to spend some time doing research/learning/training work. So you could take some time to read a book about web usability instead of staring at your code, or spend time at the library looking at designs/art designs to recharge your batteries. Or maybe attend a seminar or schedule to go train on something that relates to your job but that would get you away from things for a bit.
It might just be me, but sometimes I feel like taking a day off doesn't help as much as I'd like, because then I just have to come back to the same stuff and I end up spending half the time dreading coming back.
That's kind of up to you, but some solid gaming, good food and alcohol do it for me. Or a barbcue and some football or what ever it is you are into. Just make sure its something stress free, and relaxing.
I know a lot of times I get a day off and end up doing more work type stuff than I do at work (computer related stuff) then I get back to work and don't want to work.
Work
Aye, it's especially frustrating because I'm the only developer. We have a lot of projects on the table, so in theory I *could* switch to another one... but as I'm the only one doing programming, if I don't work on what's deemed to be the "most important project", no progress gets made on it. =( (Not that I've made any progress in the last month anyways, after having been turned into glorified tech support for this customer
We had one other guy doing programming for a while, but he left when he realized that he could make twice as much as he was getting paid somewhere else. Basically he got married and moved to where his wife was living (in S.F.) and started working remotely... and found that all his friends in the city were making at least 60 or 70k, and he was making probably less than half of that. I get the strong feeling sometimes that I should leave, but it's always been beaten back by the feeling that if I leave, the company is going to crumble into nothingness, and the other people working there will basically fall flat on their faces. I feel like I inadvertently stumbled into a great deal more responsibility for the well being of other people than I wanted to have at this time in my life.
I'll see if I can convince them to give me Friday off, and I think I'll step away from the computer a bit. Maybe I'll drive down to Boston with my wife and go do something fun. I'll let you know how it goes.
I've gotten burned out three times. The only cure is time spent doing something else. Switching gears might help, I went from AD/exchange to LAN/WAN/VOIP and it was better, but if you do user support thats not so much an option cause you'll keep getting pulled back in.
I understand the dilemma, but IMO it's a bad reason to keep a job you don't seem to like. If you really want to help people, you could work a far easier job and donate to charity.
I've been there for going on six years now, and it's hard to envision abandoning them to bankruptcy and failure through my leaving. I know that's codependant of me, but they've become almost like family in a way. In a stressful way, but still.
At one point earlier this year (as I posted here) I was sure that the company was going to collapse on its own within a short period of time. In a way, it felt like a relief. But it hasn't happened, he keeps pulling money out of... somewhere. I guess my boss' wife's family has a lot of money in investments overseas or something from what I was told when I asked. But every attempt they've made at getting even an SBA-backed loan (even after qualifying for SBA backing officially) has failed completely, so they've never been able to properly pay anyone, give health insurance, etc... but according to them, I'm the highest paid person in the company right now: and I make about the wage that one would expect of someone who came fresh out of college (48k/year without benefits as their Software Engineer/QA/DBA/Web Developer/Toolset Developer, and now Tech Support). So they've been suffering at least as long as I have.
Maybe it's selfish, but I just want this business to either get to the point where they can get enough money to hire more people (in which case they don't need me anymore), or where it completely collapses (so that I'm not responsible for that collapse). It's that latter scenario that I feel a bit guilty about, but after so many years with them in this business that's obviously not succeeding, I would hate to be the one to finally flush it, and send all these people that I've known for so long scrambling for new jobs or sources of income.
That said, it seems you stay and a job where you are over worked & underpaid to benefit the semi-competent owner and the other semi-competent employees that wouldn't be able to find other gainful employment.
From the POV of a dispassionate 3rd party, I'm just saying that seems to be a choice you're not entirely happy with.
Finding a better job wouldn't make you a bad person.
If they're not giving you health insurance, fuck 'em. You can do better; the market is sending a clear signal that this company shouldn't survive. You're essentially subsdiziding them by underpaying yourself. If you can get a better job, grab it.
I gave them until the end of the year to give me health insurance and a raise. If they cannot find the means to do it (or don't desire to), I'm going to start looking for a new job.
I agree that it sounds like they aren't treating you fairly. I know it's hard, but I'd advise just telling them that there is too much work for you alone to handle, and tell them that they really need to hire another programmer, or pay you (or give you benefits) more to compensate for the huge amount of time you need to invest in your job.
They might say no, in which case leave. You owe them nothing. (They would lay you off in a second if they felt they had to.)
Omg... I just have no words to express how I feel right now :^:
I have also been telling them, every time they talk to me, that I feel like there's more than one person can do. At one point they started to suggest outsourcing, and though I don't think they meant in replacement of me (they specified that these people would be under my management if the got them), it did make me nervous when they brought it up. And said outsourcing hasn't even happened, so who knows?
But yeah, ultimatum is up and active. I hate to put it to them like that, but I need it. And I need to not be the shoulders upon which the entire tech structure of the company is rested. I neither have the qualifications nor the good health to endure that for long... something that I've also told them. No one should have to fill as many roles as I fill, let alone someone who joined up fresh out of college like I did almost six years ago. I've let them know that every chance I get, so that they understand the situation we're in.
EDIT: Also indeed Stawk, that link was epic.
In my experience it's incredibly cheap, but INCREDIBLY annoying for the person who has to manage it. The work tends to be slow and error prone, especially so because you can't communicate face to face. Ugh.
It's horrible. Even with a decent onsite liaison. It represents 33.3% of the reason I quit my last job.
I was hoping that at least with outsourcing it might offload some of the dozen or so projects they've thrown on me.
My last place I was a QA lead and I had to design and implement tools just to more easily keep tabs on the work that was being done. When it came to anything other than PASS or FAIL I had to do the work myself. I did not see much value and it would have been more efficient to setup automation for regression than deal with off shore resources. At my current job, they had just prior dumped the off shore resources and thrown away 80% percent of the code written as useless.
I might be in the minority on this one but I am not a fan.
Apparently it is not going too well.
But there's a reason North American workers are something like 10 times more efficient than Indian workers. Their education system sucks balls. It is based almost completely on rote (even in college) and doesn't instill the creativity necessary for software development.
EDIT: I can't cite that. I just looked it up and couldn't find anything about comparative productivity levels.
That guy that used to work with me? He didn't have the money to pay him more than 9 dollars per hour. The kid was a genius. Yes, he only JUST graduated from college, but he got his BS in Computer Science, and he was driven and motivated. If anything, I think he was a better developer than I was. But he was paying him a comparable salary to what a McDonald's worker makes. When he moved to San Francisco, he finally realized this and dropped us like a bad habit, and I can't blame him one bit for doing so.
So instead of paying good salary for guys like him, he wants overseas help which he thinks will speed it up, but what he's actually looking at (and he's said this) is that he can hire a whole "team" for the price of one person in the states.
It sounds like that isn't a helpful way to look at it.
His idea right now is to outsource the development of the next version of our software overseas apparently. Our document management suite is a legacy system that I brought up from VB3 (yuck) so that it would work in the Win32 environment. But it's old, and outdated, doesn't work in Vista, and still contains a lot of legacy code from the original software that was written HORRIBLY (and was not worth completely scrapping and rewriting at the time, or so I was told).
So he thinks that we can, with outsourcing, get a .NET version of the software in a beta state in 6 to 8 months. The problem is that the code base and features that have to be supported are huge, and the migration to the .NET platform will mean a complete rewrite from scratch. I don't think even a year is a good estimate (as it has all the major features of a multiuser document management system AND a service bureau business management system... and just the business management part took me 8 months to make... granted, that was on my own though). Then again, I've never worked on a team before, so I don't know for sure. But I don't think 6 to 8 months is reasonable, and that was on the assumption that an offshore team would be modestly productive.
It seems like the management made the bed for themselves, and you have to take care of yourself as noone else will do that for you.
EDIT: Also, I've been going through almost 6 years of this... which probably is a testament to my codependent nature.
EDIT 2: I *just* realized I'd been counting wrong. I joined up in September 2004, so it's actually going on 5 years as opposed to going on 6 years.
If it helps, think of it as working 110% for your <as yet unspecified> new company and how much they'll appreciate it!
I am in such a rut for more or less the same reasons right now. I'm a sr developer at my company. A damned good one and the only one in the US for my company doing what used to be done by a team of 7. I am the lead (and in some cases only) dev on multiple critical projects. I am paid about $50k/yr. Currently I spend 90% of my time doing stupid shit for customers which involves no code writing and should be done by someone with a fraction of my experience. This was fine temporarily. After months of hearing about how great the company is doing, though, and seeing actual revenue reports and knowing what our costs are and yet not getting the people hired to do the job, even when I do get the chance to do what should be interesting work now, I just don't care. I've only stuck it out this far because my leaving will likely cause the collapse of the US division of our company and cause serious pain and possible collapse of our EU division and most of the people negatively affected by that don't deserve it.
My solution has been to get over the screwing over my fellow overworked, underpaid employees and look for work. They can see the writing on the wall, too, most are probably also looking, and if they aren't then they should be. Bad job market, don't want to get caught, blah blah. You hate it there, get out. Go work somewhere that you'll be appreciated it. I've had one interview that I'm about 95% certain is going to result in a job offer on Jan 2-3 with a $15-$20k/yr raise over what I get now. I will be interviewing next week for another position that it sounds like I've basically got as long as I don't show up in my underwear. If I don't get either of these, I should have a couple more lined up in january and one of the guys I used to work with has already informed me the place he works will likely be hiring in a month or two for a position. If you know where to look and are good at what you do then the jobs are out there. Go get a new one.
I will now leave you with this quote.
Aye, I'm definitely feeling the "looking for new work" thing. I did put down the ultimatum, and they know the time is near if they can't give it to me... so the ball will be in their court while I start browsing.
A 15-20k raise would be AMAZING, I could get rid of the pile of debt I've accrued from being underpaid for the amount of student loan debt that I have for so long. (People WARNED me that taking out too many loans for college would be bad, but did I listen? =( I wouldn't mind 48k a year so much if so much of that check didn't go to cover loans instead of food and other stuff.
Oh, and UPDATE: God himself granted me a day off today.
I woke up, and the power was out. Massive ice storm hit my area. Power wasn't on by the time the work day started, so I called my boss and told him I have no ability to work today because of it. Didn't get power back until about an hour after work would've ended... but I used the day to hang out with my wife, drive around a bit (though the people driving were like MANIACS... aren't you supposed to stop at stop lights and treat them as stop signs when they're out? Jeez... yikes), read, and generally relax a bit.
Like I said before, I'm sitting at about $50k for pay. The mean pay for developers in my city is $87k/yr, which means what the average developer is making is probably in the 65k-75k/yr range. The primary person who's job I have taken over was making $95k/yr. I asked for a raise in August and was told wait until December. I was pissed and halfheartedly looked for work. Dec 1 rolled around and I asked again. I've been denied the raise. I'm getting out. No ultimatum, though. One of the previously mentioned jobs will most likely work out and then my bosses just get a "Alright, I'm out in 2 weeks. Good luck with that $100k/month account that only didn't leave in March because they knew me and were told I was getting back involved. Have fun delivering royalty reports to the major record labels which I am the only person in the company who knows the report schedules, requirements, formats, and generation application for!"
I really recommend getting out. I've tried waiting for things to get better with an abusive employer who used to be awesome and it just doesn't seem to happen. They would get rid of you as soon as it was a benefit to them to do so, do the same for yourself, man. I don't know about where you are, but in my area it sounds like things are going to blow up after january - some as yet unnamed place (headhunters frequently don't tell until you really apply) hiring 50+ IT people, t-mobile is preparing to open an Android dev shop in town, plus it always picks up at the start of the year. Now is a great time to start looking if my area is anything to judge by.
Unfortunately, admittedly this isn't the best place for tech jobs. But I have seen a few, and I sent my resume to them to see if they might be interested. We'll see what they say.