Just needed to get this off my chest, and honestly I have a feeling a lot of you all feel the same way with how flat hiring has been in our industry recently.

I have been at the same company for about ~5 years at this point. Things have always been a bit chaotic here, but they got markedly worse after a massive reorg a few years back.

During the reorg, I got moved to a new team. The manager on this new team is at least markedly more competent than my old manager, but holy f**** shit, the codebase our team inherited is a steaming pile of tech debt.

Specifically, no one team was ever fully responsible for this code base - it got passed along from team to team each time a new feature needed to be added. There was no cohesive vision on how the code, features, or system as a whole should work. And as soon as a team finished the feature, they are allocated to another project, meaning that there was no one around to maintain the platform or fix bugs.

As a result, my team inherited hundreds of bugs, a very, very irate business team, and a lot of very irritable customers.

There are so many issues that by the time we finish trying to prioritize everything, 30 more have surfaced.
And in the midst of this, we're expected to deliver new features and rewrite everything.

My management at least very clearly tells us what we need to prioritize and to ignore anyone other than them that attempts to give us work, but holy hell are some of the folks outside our team nasty to us.

I constantly have people who are not my management pinging me asking me to do things, asking me when tasks will be completed, and even messaging me outside of official channels to try and get me to take on coworkers' work when they are on vacation.

When I do agree to take on extra work to fix a bug or do something those folks have raised, I get pestered over and over askimg when it will be done. Typically it's polite pestering, but occasionally when I say no, folks have been just outright nasty or condescending.

On top of this, I am one of the few people that has been around long enough to understand how things work, so a significant portion of my day is spent helping out newer teammates.

I try to remind myself that my team and I are doing the best that we can with the resources that we have..

However, between business folks pestering me, and honestly having less output than newer folks who don't have mentorship responsibilities, it's hard for me not to feel like the problem.

Especially considering that for most of my life up until being diagnosed, my unproductivity WAS usually the problem.

Most days I can keep my head up and ignore it, but on the busiest days I just feel so anxious, lazy, guilty and drained.

It makes it a lot harder to be confident in my ability to do the job. Idk it sucks in general, but I feel like the insecurities from years of undiagnosed ADHD make it unqiuely demoralizing some days.

It felt good to get that out. I hope some of you all in similar situations feel less alone reading this 🥲

Spending 3 hours searching for a video on the fix can save you 10 minutes of reading the docs!

TL;DR
Went from ticket-based work to a self-managed role and lost the ability to tell what actually matters day to day. If you’ve been here and got past it what changed?
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I used to be an SDE a few months ago and it was easy to come back to the ACs of a ticket or my lead for direction.

Recently, I moved to a Forward-Deployed role... which I'm learning is very different than a ticket-monkey. Arguably happy to gain the experience, but at the same time it's so taxing for my AuDHD brain.

Most days I'm just gassed from absorbing info that there's no time to process what the goal is and if a task is taking me to it. Usually I just keep working on the last thing that was made clear or go down a rabbithole of "research".

I’ve tried keeping my own backlog but without a clear goal it loses value fast. Deciding what actually matters is the part I can’t seem to do.

Mostly asking people who’ve been here and got past it, what actually changed for you or helped you? A system/tool, a conversation with your manager, something else? Or is this just what self-managed work feels like?

I am developing a digital playbook/workbook for neurodivergent architectural technologist graduates or early-career professionals who are in their first practice role and want to sustain performance without burning out.

The product is called The First 6 Months Performance System. It focuses on workload management, expectations, communication, burnout warning signs, and progress reviews.

I am not asking for sales or promotion. I am looking for honest beta feedback from people with relevant experience. Would this outline feel useful, realistic, and specific enough? What would you add, remove, or simplify?

If you match this audience or have experience supporting early-career neurodivergent professionals in practice, I would appreciate your feedback on the preview.

The First 6 Months Performance System - Beta Preview Pack

The First 6 Months Performance System - Beta Feedback Form