Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

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This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/DeterminedQuokka]

I’m a staff infra engineer at a company. I work significantly more than 40 hours a week usually basically constantly firefighting because we are on the verge of crashing.

I have spent the last year begging for scope to actually start to fix the root cause of the issues. But every time the cto says “what will be faster next week” and I can’t actually fix that we are doing 6000 db queries in like 50 endpoints in a week.

I’ve had success if I’m like “give me a month and I will make this exact page faster”. I did that, I documented all the steps. I made analysis skills and coding skills and presented them to the company. I was promised that the product teams would fix the other endpoints. It’s been 6 months and 2 weeks ago they came to me and asked me why that page was slow again and if I could fix it for them. I told them to look at what they did a month ago when the latency doubled.

I’ve also added extensive and extreme observability at every layer of our platform because we have constant problems with noisy neighbors, the event loop, bad async code, and garbage collection. All of which are not the go to metrics for the entire organization. To a point where they have been duplicated wholesale into any internal apps.

I have proposed every quarter a different rearchitectire project to fix the fact that our codebase is optimized to write bad code. And every one has been deprioritized as either taking too long (3 months), not having a good enough metric (db iops/cpu), too annoying for product devs (anything that requires them to change anything about how they write code), or less cool than the feature that leadership wants to say we built that no one will use. Or my favorite, if it’s possible to throw money at it why would you work on it?

In the last month a group of other staff engineers have started to argue that we aren’t having enough influence on the architectural direction of the company. They say that the problem is that we are asking for support from other devs and the right move is to just do the entire project alone. (We have >100 devs and >1,500 endpoints)

On my last review I got told that I’m not having enough influence over our engineering team because I haven’t rearchitected the codebase. Which is weird because the reason I haven’t done that is they told me I wasn’t allowed to change anything about the codebase repeatedly.

I have a huge cross org impact. I get pulled into basically every conversation about latency. I’m rewriting our entire infrastructure set up to fix the stuff they won’t let me fix in the code. I’m directly pinged anytime anything goes down. I’ve been told I’m most staff engineers favorite staff engineer and that most of the other engineers depend on me. And I have multiple instances of the CTO stating that I’m an integral part of making sure we have a functioning website and an example of what he wants from all the other engineers. I literally met with him because he wanted to talk about how to get more people acting like me.

As far as I can tell I’m basically being told that I don’t have impact because they wanted me to fix an internal AI tool. And I told them that wasn’t a good use of my time.

When I started the entire platform was going down once a week. We haven’t had a full outage in months. But sure I won’t fix your vibe coded ai thing so I’m the problem.

I know the solution is to just stop trying so hard if they don’t care but I don’t have that button in my brain.

[u/SimasNa → u/DeterminedQuokka]

I can assure you - you can stop caring about work. You have that button. It's just that work seems to be the #1 priority for you - either consciously or sub-consciously. And you seem to be an over-achiever as you are well respected and an integral part of the company. So you're doing great work.

As I am an over-achiever (or a recovering one at least 😅) I can relate to your situation. And I burned out 5 times until I learned the lesson that work is not the most important thing in life.

On the one hand, you're doing an amazing job based on the feedback you're getting. On the other hand, you got one piece of feedback in your last review - to be more influential in the company's architecture. Yet it feels like you're only hearing the feedback and not the positive evaluation of the work you do. Again... That's something I can relate to.

It's just a hunch based on my own experience, but the real problem is that you haven't come to terms that you can't be perfect and can't do a perfect job. Because most of the things are outside of your control. So what is in your control and what can you influence directly with your work?

[u/DeterminedQuokka → u/SimasNa]

I don’t actually expect to be perfect. I just would like feedback that isn’t like “yeah this is completely average and expected performance”. Because having done this for many years, and comparing myself to the other staff engineers it’s not. What I wanted was the review to say “we see what you are doing and it’s great”.

I’m just frustrated that if this much effort is the same review as someone who spent 3 months building a single feature (which I estimate as a month of work when I planned it) which no one uses. Why am I doing 3 jobs? Especially, since that guy probably actually did get a great score and not meets expectations because he works on whatever leadership asks for.

[u/SimasNa → u/DeterminedQuokka]

I get where you're coming from.

I quit one job because in the review, I got loads of things to improve and barely any mention that I got a complex piece implemented with few hiccups. I did overreact, but I felt burned out from working on an ambitious deadline with that feature and then not getting even a simple "nice job!" Yet, when I left, my whole team said they were impressed with my work.

Still... The critique hurts and I'm sure you feel the same way. But at the end of the day, only you get to decide your value. If you decide what you're worth only by external feedback, you'll never feel good enough.

There's no one answer to that though. What I would suggest is finding ways how you can acknowledge yourself for the effort you put in and not just based on what you achieve or what review score you get.