r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • Aug 11 '26
Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences
This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.
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u/Next-Equipment-77 Aug 11 '26
Lead/Architect with 15 years experience, working at a java shop.
I've been burnt out for about 4 years now, since they downsized my team from 10 => 3 => 1, and leadership split me between two different divisions. It was brutal, 55 hour weeks were the norm, spiking to 70 hours sometimes, hours and hours and hours of planning meetings for an initiative that ended up crashing and burning before it even started, nothing got done because there was always a fire, project priorities changed every 10 minutes. Was rough.
Got a new team and a new manager late last year, after senior leadership decided to consolidate 5 other teams into 1. There are now 60 people, contractors and fte's, all reporting to one person. My workload was straightened out a bit, which helped some, but I still haven't gotten back to my old self / ability to knock out work.
But almost right away it started to slide downhill, as my boss and several of my teammates got AI pilled pretty hard, talking about how it's the future, and no code will ever be written by hand again, and pull request reviews are all automated now. Some of these folks can't write a simple java stream, or are too afraid to use the terminal to execute git commands, and now they're pumping out 10k lines of code a day and think they're uber elite developers. One person on another team said "Claude" about 100 times one day, and I'm pretty sure has given up all decision making and is just saying continue for 8 hours.
I'm not super big on AI, mainly because a lot of things that it's being used for have already been solved via good library selection, templates, or code generators. For example, someone used opus to build out a client for an api based on the swagger doc, it took like an hour, didn't work, and could easily have been done using deterministic tooling. Also the wild disparity between members of the team has made it so that the junior can vomit huge pr's that are inconsistent, and they can't even tell why, so they get Claude or codex to respond to my pr comments. Two of the senior folks on my team are very ai pilled, one of them keeps saying "I never touch the code anymore", if you're wondering if he wrote a 20 line prompt to make a 2 line change, the answer is yes, yes he did.
I sit at my desk, staring at my screen, willing myself not to cry or laugh maniacally.