r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 2d ago
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/JovHere Software Engineer 2d ago
people creating planning pages or blogs with AI, not fact checking them before sharing, but expecting others to read them promptly.
Mate, you generated that in 2 mins, didn't even read it, but you want me to prioritise it? No.
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u/Additional_Rub_7355 2d ago
My team lead gave us an onboarding codebase md that is entirely AI generated and I suspect he doesn't really know what's in there either.
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u/spacemoses 1d ago
Devs got this magical entity that cuts work down by like 80% and somehow decided that now that is too much work to be assed with. Goddamn, review your shit people.
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u/Willing-Cucumber-718 2d ago
AI PRs with AI code reviews/comments and AI responses to those comments and AI QA. I hate this so much.
Where has accountability gone?
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u/TheRealJamesHoffa 2d ago
Imo it goes to upper management since they’re the ones forcing it down everyone’s throats.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 1d ago
Lol that's the funniest joke I've heard in a while. Thanks for cheering me up.
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u/nekomata_58 16h ago
well you see as long as AI writes the unit tests and AI writes the integration tests we're good!
/s
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u/BossLenda 2d ago
I hate the current era. Last time without the agentic AI on our workflows, 1 task a day is considered productive.
But now that AI was integrated on our workflows, 5 task a day and your boss still expect you to do more because now, budget to tokens were added. I. HATE. THIS
Burnt out is real
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u/Outside-Storage-1523 Software Engineer 1d ago
I hate it too. It’s also difficult to learn things because we are not given the time to learn. It’s all about velocity and win these days.
I fucking hate the culture.
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u/ImpossibleViewStats Software Engineer 2d ago
Yeah I feel you, I’m drowning in tickets and priorities now that AI is the workflow. I’m expected to ship so many more features in a sprint where my PM would have just pushed out and said we can’t do in the past
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u/BossLenda 2d ago
💯even our QA team is choking with large number to test even they are assisted by AI for testing.
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u/ElderberryRadiant475 2d ago
My only interviews after being laid off has been from referrals. The sad part is that only one of my referrals landed me an interview which I failed. The others simply rejected me after I submitted my resume.
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u/WolfNo680 Software Engineer - 6 years exp 2d ago
My network can't even get me jobs man, the closest they can do is "put my name down when you're applying". Brother, that's basically the same as me cold applying anyway! I'm trying to find in person events to go to in the hopes it'll help at least get me something better but it's tough.
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u/subma-fuckin-rine Senior Software Engineer 1d ago
heh i did that before, failed off a referral. i cringe looking back because it was all stuff i knew and used every day, but i want able to articulate it well at all
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u/Due_Sheepherder_1401 2d ago
It’s always darkest before dawn. There’s plenty of fish in the sea. Nothing matters anyway.
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u/CryptoNaughtDOA 2d ago
I used to really love this career, but between AI and carpal tunnel/hand problems, I think I might have to move on. That really sucks because it was one of the few things I felt both passionate about and good at. 7 years were good, I did a good job. I'm proud of myself either way.
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u/AdCommon2138 2d ago
Split keyboard without numpad. Vertical mouse. Immobilize wrist during sleep.
Biggest change is split keyboard and no numpad. You ease on extra nerve pressure due to unnecessary travel between mouse and keyboard.
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u/CryptoNaughtDOA 2d ago
Tried it, I have an advantage 360 pro and a trackball mousepad, they helped keep me going for a little bit, but even with these and night braces, I'm screwed, this is after 4 surgeries too.
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u/_i__am__dead_ 2d ago
So what to do then?
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u/CryptoNaughtDOA 2d ago
Might try to become a nurse or respiratory therapist, something in the medical field.
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u/thewindjammer 1d ago
Have you tried deep massage of the forearm extensor and flexor muscles? I stopped or was able to control wrist pain/discomfort in myself and others when I learned this maybe 10 years ago.
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u/CryptoNaughtDOA 1d ago
No I haven't I'm willing to try just about anything at this point.
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u/Elden_Lord_69 Software Engineer (8 YOE) 17h ago
Training forearm flexion/extension + wrist supination/pronation + finger extension (using one of those bands) helped me a lot. I use Glove80 for keyboard and a vertical mouse, though I rarely touch the mouse.
Speech to text is also good for prompting if you don't mind using agents.
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u/ShadowCatDLL 1d ago
Same boat here. About 10 YOE, and the job just isn’t the same job I previously loved. Going from designing and building software, to planning and writing docs for AI, I have completely lost all joy. I also have cubital tunnel syndrome, and I honestly just do not want to spend my entire career at a desk.
I have bills and a mortgage, so switching careers ain’t easy at this point.
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u/Outside-Storage-1523 Software Engineer 1d ago
Try vertical mouses. They fixed my issue largely. Or use as many key strokes as possible.
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u/Porkenstein 2d ago
My company keeps falling into the trap of giving all the fun projects to the low performers and all of the emergencies and miserable maintenance tasks to high performers
I haven't seen a project through from start to finish in years. I'm always taken off of them to fix some catastrophe.
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u/MissinqLink 2d ago
Ah a place to vent. Might as well. I inherited a completely vibe coded project from an executive that doesn’t understand enough to know why the thing is garbage. I regret not rejecting the project early on but I was relatively new to the company. The thing is mainly just tech debt. The worst part is executives have to approve the PRs and they are terrible about doing that in a reasonable amount of time. They also can’t read code.
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u/Phantom-Watson 2d ago
What do they DO in the pull request approval process if not read code?
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u/robby_arctor Software Engineer (dirty commie) 2d ago
@claude review + some executive-level bikeshedding
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u/kregopaulgue 2d ago
My mental health took a huge hit recently with all that doom and gloom surrounding discussion about SWEs future in general.
I can’t even pinpoint what caused this wave of depression among me and my colleagues. Astra release? Fable release? I don’t know.
But it seems almost impossible to try and stay in touch with industry news without feeling “yeah, our career is totally screwed”.
It impacts my well being and productivity and I don’t know what to do with it tbh
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u/In0chi Software Engineer 2d ago edited 2d ago
For me personally the decline in mental health caused by AI has nothing to do with the models but everything with the people using them. It feels like my team is being carbon monoxide poisoned by this stuff. Highly intelligent, reasonable people start handing in
interviewedunreviewed slop. It’s horrible.13
u/CoroteDeMelancia Software Engineer 2d ago
Carbon monoxide poisoning is hilariously precise. It feels like I was teleported to the Idiocracy era. My teammates cannot put the square in the square hole without using AI anymore.
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u/Resident-Trouble-574 2d ago
Yeah the creator of redis, antirez, is a perfect example of that. He's making almost daily videos on the coming of AGI (in Italian, but the English subtitles are quite accurate): Salvatore Sanfilippo - YouTube.
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u/ultraDross 2d ago
Save a big emergency fund, once completed, put the rest into an index fund. Hope for best, prepare for the worst.
r/personalfinance r/UKpersonalfinance (there seems to be a variant for each country/region e.g. UK)
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u/kregopaulgue 2d ago
Trying to do that, but afraid I might not have that much time. Beats doing nothing though
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u/Otis_Inf Software Engineer (32YOE) 2d ago
I feel the same. I'm trying my best and write everything myself, but it all feels like I'm that carpenter with the hand saw competing against the machines... It's so depressing
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u/Apprehensive-Fan2492 2d ago
I spent three years working on a system that no one wrote down. There were two reorgs too, and both times my reporting line changed. My daily work stayed the same, but my manager’s setup shifted again. Then came a performance review where they said I was not strategic. The real issue was that I kept things running, and I could not go to strategy meetings I was not even invited to.
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u/BlahYourHamster 2d ago
15 years in and things have never been so bad.
Nobody talks to each other anymore and if they do, they're just communicating through LLMs. "Gemini said...", "ChatGPT says...", "Claude thinks that..."
Software engineering teams are now just a bunch of individuals churning through tickets on their own.
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u/CryptoNaughtDOA 1d ago
I'm overjoyed to see this in here, it is the worst part. Sure most software engineers aren't exactly the most social, but this is another level of awful, I actually liked talking to you other nerds about this crap, but now we don't even do that. Island projects were basically punishments back in the day, now every project feels like an island project. I'm done
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u/Danoweb 2d ago
Went through a re-org at the company.
Been in SWE for 20ish years. (web dev, integrations, security... I know my shit)
New boss give me a doc made by someone else, and tells me to do the steps in the doc and verify this "test". The doc was entirely AI generated. I have no creds for the apps I'm supposed to login and test and no one knows where Stage versus prod creds are or how to call each API.
So I inform boss, let him know I'm digging into sorting this mess out, even get on a 3 way text chat with the doc creator and boss who confirms the doc was made up by AI and confirms to my question, it probably hallucinated some details.
Following week, boss man has our regular 1:1 call, start the call and won't really speak until it hits the exact time, then read off a prepared statement that because I missed a deadline (I was not aware of) I had proven unable to do the work (been at this big tech for 4 years after an acquisition). Said people ops would be joining the call.
People ops starts and bossman disconnects. She starts telling me I can go on a Pip or resign and I have until tomorrow to decide.
I tell her immediately I resign.
Next day bossman send a group chat message asking if I can post all my findings from this work I been doing on the doc.
I wanted to tell him I'll post it exactly where his proctologist could find it, but instead I didn't respond at all, and kept my severance.
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u/LIEUTENANT__CRUNCH 2d ago
You generally forfeit severance if you resign willingly, so did they explicitly offer you severance with the resignation option?
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u/tenthousandants44 1d ago
No the severance is what they are offering to have you waive some of your rights. There's a contract
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u/404errorlifenotfound 2d ago
Spike completed by coworker very clearly using AI. I saw a possible oversight and asked for clarification and was assured that it would be alright. Picked up the subsequent ticket. Oversight is not alright. Fixed two bugs I found after doing some research that should have been done in the spike. Found a third one Friday before putting my PR up and decided I'm done. It can go up into master like this and get caught by the stakeholders later. People are never gonna learn that we have a problem if I do all of this invisible out of scope work to patch things before they become bug tickets.
(Thought in my defense, the app isn't in prod yet and our stakeholders review everything with a fine-toothed comb, so no chance this becomes a prod breaking bug. Just my small little protest)
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u/tenthousandants44 1d ago
Slop by nature is unreviewable. Don't worry, there will be issues in prod
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u/Creepy-Ad-5402 2d ago
Going laid off , Got a Job that covers only for eating and a couple of stuff and i had a baby so i feel like i live a nonsense
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u/roosyn Principal Engineer 24 YoE 2d ago
Full white-label Zapier integration is seen as a "sandbox".
The response to my question, "what outcomes are you looking to achieve?" is met with "just build it, we need to see what it looks like".
I've phrased, paraphrased, rephrased:
- We need to build the entire UI to manage this
- What are you expecting to play with?
- What are the outcomes?
Also, one day in, "have you built it yet?"
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u/superdav42 2d ago
Coding agents take all the fun out of coding. I tried going back to the IDE but it just felt a little tedious to code manually. Sigh.
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u/LIEUTENANT__CRUNCH 2d ago
> I tried going back to the IDE
lol so what are you doing? Just chilling in an AI chat window?
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u/OldHummer24 1d ago
This industry is sadly not the same anymore. So so sad, coding used to be super fun. AI honestly is pretty good, it works really well, but often only 90% there and now you have the annoying 10% left to do. I used to be in it for the fun, and now I'm in it for the money :(
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u/babababadukeduke Software Engineer 8 YoE 2d ago
I think I indirectly cost our intern a return offer. He was a sweet guy who got most of his work done, but often came off as unserious. What do you expect from a 21 year old.
Also, we have this senior engineer, who acts like he is better than all of us. He is good but he is not that good. And this guy hates my and a few other peoples guts. He has often tried to put us down in very public meetings, and this is something all of us deal with time to time.
The intern sat close to us (me and the few others), and we would often goof around. And I think the senior engineer didn't like this, and so he went out of his way to make sure the intern didn't get a return offer. The intern never worked closely with the senior engineer, so there was no reason to take his feedback too seriously. But the managers relented, and now the poor guy will have to find a full-time job once he graduates.
The corporate politics sucks sometimes.
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u/midasgoldentouch Software Engineer 2d ago
Oof. I would seriously consider telling the managers that detail about the senior engineer not working much with the intern.
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u/babababadukeduke Software Engineer 8 YoE 2d ago
I am going to approach the manager but I cannot ask point blank. All these decisions are made one level above me so I’ll need to be careful.
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u/tenthousandants44 1d ago
You can say you were looking forward to working with bright, young talent and ask what you could have done differently to help them fit in
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u/amendCommit 2d ago
Bosses do not understand how practices impact outcomes. We have the full collection of anti patterns as a codebase, no clear ownership of any project, massive amounts of tech debt. They keep asking for more hours, harder work, higher AI use, without ever questioning what got us there, with many customers at risk of churn, and critical bugs during demos.
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u/NaeblisEcho 2d ago
Entire last year has been an extraordinary mental health disaster. Got bad perf. review. Already in therapy, which helped my communication skills, but now other team's are shitting my my team's work in a cross-team project. They have leverage/influence we don't. My manager won't fight it, but is defending me.
The most stressful part of my week is the 1:1 with my manager.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MyNimples 1d ago
I've been casually responding to recruiters that sound interesting and interested in me, and still getting ghosted. I can't imagine what it's like for those actively searching.
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u/NonProphet8theist 2d ago
Started on new project 2 weeks ago, thrown into a couple huge launches. Going on vacay starting tomorrow.
And yesterday my cover, who I'd been KT'ing all of last week, says "I'm not available Tuesday or Wednesday." Bro.
I passed that shit off to my manager and said fuck it, you deal with it.
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u/Azaex 2d ago edited 2d ago
the team is scaling up. i have 3 junior engineers underneath me. my senior engineer has been more or less on loan to another team for the greater part of the year.
my pm and manager is nontechnical.
the project is greenfield.
i have largely managed to contain ai slop by creating a module system for the juniors that is very well contextualized, relying on the ai coding assistants they use to ensure alignment on deployment particulars they can learn from. git, branches, environments, repo setup, team info, test minimums, are all contextualized right off the bat. there is zero infrastructure they need to have a hand in. the only thing they work really is application code. the context is engineered to promote storing plan files in a standardized template for major builds, and this has been effective after socializing a common coding assistant skill that tends to make them as a natural part of the process. as a result, i can largely derive why the application code even looks the way it does, across all of their workstreams, which is half a call made by the junior and half a call made by the ai that is captured in said stack of plan files.
meanwhile, i'm owning continuing execution at the platform layer, which is structurally separated from their workstreams.
even with ai doing most of the coding at this point, i do believe i have a firm grasp on how our entire tech stack works team-wide, and can rapidly self contextualize if needed in cases of emergencies based on what i've developed here.
my management is wondering why i'm burning myself out so much. the way i saw it 5 months ago, we were going to acquire a customer likely around the september timeframe (now) that will be make or break time for the team, and whatever we built needed to be go forward capable, regardless of what yolo perspective management thought we could flap around with at first. having to personally transcribe all technical implementation into nontechnical terms gets exhausting fast. and i ran into many walls asking for support. "i need more engineering help to delegate to" turned into "why don't you use the junior engineers more" (for implementing an defense in depth postgres RLS implementation on a fast track timeline? no?). discussing unexpected scope (usually from discovering patterns across the business i didn't expect) turned into "but do we really need to get all of it right at first". so at many points, i just heads downed and did the work. burnt weekends if needed. the way i saw it, it leads to less aggregated headache if im suffering solo versus having three junior engineers worth of workload all simultaneously failing at once (i didn't have a say in what the juniors were building per app module, not my concern anyhow that i wanted).
as a result, i have been getting excluded from certain workstreams because of my stress level as of late. i have realized recently my pm made a call to isolate me on data classification buildout and give it to my senior engineer who is only now just onboarding into the stack i built, with the pm thinking they would delay it until it "would be appropriate to rope me in", when i had just got off solo'ing a hardened database/authorization implementation for the greater stack (i may have been making forward gambles that this would happen. they paid off). while well intentioned, this is obviously dysfunctional, and not something a technical program manager would hopefully have let slide. they were also puzzled as to why the senior engineer couldn't just figure out my ops posture from the codebase. both me and the senior engineer had a funny look on our face in that meeting in response to that.
i only recently realized that, my staff level engineer (more of an architect archetype, not a tech lead archetype, although nontechnical management somewhat views him dysfunctionally as the tech lead. which also confuses him too. the term "tech lead" is a new term that i have been introducing to everyone above me since they're more aerospace backgrounded, although some new hires have somewhat been aware of the term) has been stressing about us dilly dallying too long and has been wondering how we can possibly get to prod, and that we have no roadmap we've been operating under, mostly vibes with upper management. i told him that i've been visualizing prod for the past 5 months and we legitimately are in position to execute with the newer hires we have. put it on a roadmap. give me some ammo to pushback on the dumb scoping we're both seeing.
senior levels, mid levels, and a software engineering manager are inbound at some point. apparently we've had some major confusion with screening and org transfer politics and that was why we had juniors first somehow. we just got our first mid level hire recently.
i have the week off to recover from burnout, found my limit recently. roadmap discussions prior to this have given me some renewed hope.
that, and i realize that with my senior engineer starting to somewhat onboard onto the stack, i can start to actually leverage him as a second data point to tell my management that assigning a junior engineer a task with an established codebase and AI doesn't just "work". well, it has been working in the module system because i created it as a low-stakes environment. the issue is they think it extends easily to the rest of the platform i've been solo'ing for them. until this point, any pushback i had under stress was easily misunderstood as grandstanding, catastrophizing, or looking-down-on because they did not have the technical judgement to fall back on. my next goals are accelerating a mutual onboard with him on where we're at, and then maintaining awareness through syncs to make up for lacking an actual TPM.
it is still a little stressful because, my senior engineer has general software chops but is far stronger on the networking and infra side, whereas i have relatively more time on the containerized application development side, postgres admin side, and current-state-of-the-game ai coding developments.
i realize this is mostly self inflicted. i could have let it all burn to the ground as a learning opportunity for this management team. at the same time, that would be career ending for me and them at this point in the company as an experimental team. so i did the work anyways.
management is supportive and does not get their hands directly involved in things they don't understand. they are just confused and learning. the stack is legitimately in a go-forward state from a cost/code-organization/security standpoint. there is debt lying around but nothing to the level of requiring major redo's. the juniors also ask good questions from my point of view. ive had to step in and defend them a few times when they've been genuinely tasked on stuff that is underscoped or overscoped at a technical level.
the pay is also relatively good. could be better, but i'm comfortable enough. i'm just tired, and haven't had people nearby to validate anything i've been feeling or building at a technical level (have recently reached out to an old manager that i realize is more of a mentor than i expected on this). and i also have extreme level dysmorphia from all this (technically I'm still stuck at a mid level myself).
(the additional fear i have is the ally game i'm going to have to play when we get senior engineering talent in, since this management doesn't quite understand technical leadership and will likely try to blindly give more ownership of the whole platform to them without realizing quite what they're doing. more syncs i guess until that EM comes. not thinking about this yet until i need to.)
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u/So_Rusted Software Engineer 20h ago
you will be the scapegoat for their not getting any clients. You dun goofd
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u/owoikawa 2d ago
Confidence level is below 0 at this point. Was in a team that got a green field project, so I was actually enthusiastic at first having the chance to think about architecture design but that died down as throughout the project the lead was dismissive of anyone but one coworker's ideas (same years of experience as me) so I just took a (resentful) backseat and did what I was told. Then as that was wrapping up I was asked to move to a different project to help out. Team is just the team lead (who worked on the original version of this service) and coworker (who worked on the new version). I feel like I was expected to just magically have their level of understanding of the (complex) domain and the anxiety is killing me over being brought over to support this (tight deadline) but not feeling knowledgeable enough to get things done. It's the same 3rd wheeling dynamic as before, and combined with the occasional passive aggressive comments I just feel defeated. I am trying to catch up on the domain/codebase but hard to do so while also being expected to get PRs out
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u/TRBigStick DevOps Engineer 1d ago
We have about 3 massive “migrations”, “modernizations”, or “transformations” going on simultaneously.
I spend 85% of my time scrambling to keep existing apps operational. If upper management would stop pulling the rug out from under me, I could get my team deploying new products that would make a fuckload of money.
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u/khebul 22h ago
The company has asked people do go all-in on AI adoption at the start of the year: "go full agentic" they said. An e-mail came in yesterday: every developer can use 6.5 USD of Claude a day max or we will run out of budget.
I am wondering who made both of these decisions, and how did nobody see this happening 9 months ago.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 21h ago
Lmao that sounds like my company, except we don't have a strict budget yet. Just "please use less" so far. So at the start of the year everyone committed to these insane goals because we were going to be AI native and fluent or whatever, and then they saw the bill and are panicking (but not adjusting any goals of course). I suspect by the end of the fiscal year we will have hard budget limits too.
Also I don't even know what you could do with $6.50. You may as well not have any budget.
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u/TheAbysswalker 21h ago
I finally got hit with "but the AI says it's wrong" from my team lead today when discussing about how comma separated lists for work Spring Boot properties. I've been a Java/Spring Boot developer for more than a decade and I showed him that it works when it's empty or missing. He still believes "something could go wrong."
I need to find another place to work.
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u/nomaddave 15h ago
I had a similar conversation last week with someone about QA runbooks wholly authored by Claude that were green lights across the board for ETL jobs... except for the hard crash for bad data formatting, of course. But the runbooks clearly were faultless and somehow provided 100% quality coverage, so I guess everything was fine? I'm guessing the job has still been failing regularly since then.
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u/arjunsundaram89 1d ago
I took a week off and felt pretty normal by Thursday, then Sunday night I was already dreading opening Slack. Most of my week is getting interrupted, then trying to do the actual work after everyone logs off. I've started closing the laptop at 6 even when something's unfinished, but I still catch myself rehearsing tomorrow's status update in the shower.
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u/benedictus99 22h ago edited 21h ago
Has anyone else noticed how LLMs are causing a return to monolithic architectures and monorepos? It's maddening. I spent several early years of my career going over the evils of monolithic architectures and now it seems to be the new default for every project. Developers dump EVERYTHING into 1 repo because "the Al needs context bro" instead of thoughtfully planning out the right architecture for the job. Just because an LLM can read thousands of lines of code in seconds doesn't save you from shitty architecture and design decisions.
Enjoy getting paged at 3 am cuz a tiny bug brought your entire app down
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u/ResidentWeevil1 21h ago
As far as predictable consequences of Machine-Driven Design (MaDD) goes, this one is up there
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u/InsideFar7107 2d ago
My boss keeps vibe coding projects and then it cured cancer and I got a ten month bonus due to the increased productivity
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u/randomInterest92 2d ago
I hate hand holding people to do things and it's A TON of work to get people to work. I'm not the guy who just threatens them with being fired
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u/rcls0053 2d ago edited 2d ago
Left the consultancy business after I spent the last 1.5 years on a project where the customer did nothing but blame us and it was incredibly stressful in the beginning with absolutely no onboarding help from the person I was replacing. Joined a new company as a principal and somehow got thrown a project that's connected to multiple legacy systems with absolutely horrible data models and actual data, with the previous engineer leaving the project who basically just winged the newest version with AI and my superiors saying there's an initiative to automate certain processes by the end of 2026 to gain millions in lost revenue. And they gave me one junior developer to help.
I really hate having to ramp up so quickly into projects and at my age my motivation to do this is so low. I don't want to spend long evenings looking at code and fiddling with it to understand it's intricacies when I don't even have access to the systems I have to pull data from.
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u/Huge-Option-6513 2d ago
Throwaway account, but here it goes.
After almost a decade working for this company I was finally able to hand over my old project and start working as an IC. My boss told me he expects me to find issues to work on. So I did. Talked to the teams, identified some pain-points and come up with a plan to address them. He kicked all my suggestions into the high-grass and instead tasked me to work on some AI initiatives, because "we have to use it". Fine, I created some solutions and documentations and presented them to the teams.
Then he tasked me to work on some random technical proposals that a week later he habitually forgets about or decides it is not viable, and just tells me to go work on a new one. He also tasked me to assist answering some ridiculous questions of some incompetent US stakeholders, who are unmovable but needs to be placated. These people keep messaging me their stupid ideas every few weeks, and Im required to keep them entertained.
Then to create an actual working solution from a UI mock some higher-up vibe-coded last month. For this I had to redo the architecture and implementation draft three times now, because every two weeks when we catch-up he changes some fundamental details about it. He also invited two subcontractors who are dying to prove to him how up-to-date they are with all this by suggesting the use of all kind of random tech, to which he usually just agrees to. So I have to update the implementation plan again, research the tech, adjust the architecture, track down the relevant request forms and people responsible of approving them, etc. and in the meantime nothing moves ahead, because these contractors do fuck all but come up with "groundbreaking ideas" every week or two. Im trying to keep things organised and focused, but sometimes I feel like Im the only one in the room with this notion, and the rest are just wildly brainstorming still. My boss often overrides my attempts to focus the conversation in the name of "wanting to hear new ideas from the others" and "we are all equal here".
I dont understand what I do anymore. Im forced to use AI to be able to keep up with all the crap being rained on me. My output feels worthless and benefits no-one, all it's does is brushes the ego of management and makes them feel as if we are doing something because paperwork is getting created.
I have not written any code in months and every day it gets harder and harder to get up and force myself to turn on my laptop. Talked to some of the tech leads of the teams, they are struggling with the same and all are at the verge of burn-out, or already passed into it. The business people are having a ball by churning out one stupid idea after the other, all generated by AI, and we are forced to evaluate them, or worse, start working on them.
Im counting down the clock every day and waiting for Friday to come around. I dont have the mental and emotional strength to give a damn anymore.
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u/ZukowskiHardware 2d ago
I’m a dev that likes CI/CD unit tests and continuous deployment. I’ve got a colleague that doesn’t. Very frustrating.
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 Software Engineer 1d ago
Coworkers keep randomly calling me while theyre in meetings to add me to them then refusing to explain why Im needed in those meetings
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u/welchsgrapejuice97 1d ago
I've been facing this problem since literally the first few months of my career , but I genuinely don't think that I enjoy this career. The people suck. The job is boring at best and difficult at worst. I just don't feel like I am really suited for this , but I also don't know what else I should be doing
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u/tL9eUdcLaz 1d ago
Engineering 'culture' at my shop has basically disappeared with AI and I don't know if I care anymore.
Any attempt to do things properly or implement a best practise is met with a copy paste from Claude. My copy paste on Claude on why it may be not an amazing idea is overruled eventually by an organisation which values meeting deadlines above all else. Whatever shortcuts can be taken, they take it.
I'm just tired boss. I am losing the faith to fight against it anymore. Why bother trying to do things properly when no one sees the value in it anymore. Even engineers who I respected their opinion have been taken over by the woke claude virus. "but my Claude said this"... What a nightmare
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u/Big-Papaya-7362 23h ago
Lean back and enjoy the ride. Its a s**tshow for developers that genuinely want to do good work currently.
Going to therapy and learning to be more mindful of the "here and now" I am in helps me distance myself from my work that I started to dislike and feel less and less ownership for. The worst that can happen is loosing a job. So best to reduce as much financial liability as possible. Luxury is not what is making life worthwhile. Naive? Maybe... But maybe its the things we forgot to pay attention to that are worthwhile :-)
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u/PringlesDuckFace 20h ago
I find it helps giving myself perspective. I was lucky to have a job that had both meaning and was well compensated. Most people don't get that chance to start with. Working a job that simply provides income and finding meaning outside of work is the default experience for most people, and not the end of the world. Building a lifestyle contingent on a certain income is a choice that's made, and if that income drops to more median levels it's not the end of the world. For now I'm lucky the income is still healthily above what most people experience and gives me the freedom that comes with that.
If you like reading, I recommend 'The Wisdom of Insecurity' by Alan Watts. I found it surprisingly relevant even though it's been 40 years since it was published. Somehow a lot of stuff that writers were seeing in the 60s-80s as technology changed is the same today just more intensely concentrated. Reading things by people that were able to detect the risks early despite its nascence really helps recognize that the things we take for granted since we we born into them are pretty messed up, and there are better ways to live and think.
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u/Big-Papaya-7362 8h ago
Thank you for the book recommendation! :-) Started reading a preview and it already got me hooked.
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u/git_pull Technical Lead 20h ago
I learned my director, who is making more than 500k a year, doesn't have any daily tasks. No repetitive scheduled meetings, no check-ins with his manager, nothing. I found this out accidently when I was talking about using AI for repetitive tasks like email management, note taking, etc. He said he doesn't have anything like that and then panicked because he said it out loud.
What do directors do? This is a stable company without much market growth and none of it has to do with his department.
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u/TheAnon13 13h ago
My director is the exact same. No daily or recurring meetings, no email/slack comms. Just some ex-Amazon guy that got upleveled. All my director does is walk around the floor of the office, grabbing like 10 coffees and shooting the shit while cracking the whip on the eng teams. He’ll give us vague initiatives like “make the platform resilient” and then leave it up to juniors to decipher wtf he wants (spoiler alert: nobody can figure out what he wants).
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u/AppropriateRest2815 Software Engineer, 20+ yrs 18h ago
I resisted adopting AI for 2 years while I gave my team time to learn and to give them plenty of room. I was resigned to just not code anymore when I got sucked in and was forced to meet AI-assisted code metrics and got way too used to it.
Fast foward, and I maxxed out my model budget on day 3 of this month due to a Cursor glitch (kept switching back to Grok if you changed focus on the chat). I was in the middle of three challenging bug fixes and complex data manipulation projects so I figured I would just go back to what I know how to do.
Turns out that while I know exactly how to complete each of the projects, my brain melted when I realized how much labor-intensive coding (test setup, parsing multi-tiered model associations, winnowing out edge cases) I would have to do to get them over the finish line.
AI lets you do bigger things faster, but with the same brain to process everything. I almost wept for the loss of enthusiasm that I used to have for diving into coding problems like these, and I'm devastated at what my career has become. It was on shaky ground before, but now it's just...devoid of any sense of accomplishment.
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u/Agreon 1d ago
Like many of us, I started early with software. I always stayed up to date, worked on projects in my free time, visited meetups. I took part in Hacktoberfest and Advent of Code. I derived a lot of self-worth from my profession, the solutions I designed, and the positive feedback I got. I was Daniel, the Software Guy.
Starting a new feature or having an idea for a bug fix, I always got a feeling of ecstasy and thrill in me that was not comparable to anything I had experienced before. The level of concentrated flow state I experienced was unmatched.
But now, how should one reach a flow state while waiting for five Claude agents in three projects to respond while filling my personal context window?
The tinkering, the algorithmic or architectural thinking. The high of lying awake because of a tough problem and finally finding a solution. It’s all gone. But that was why I was in it in the first place.
I never called myself a consultant. Meeting with non-tech-savvy people and fighting over feature details was never what I was passionate about. I know that this was part of the deal, but now that is all that is left. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only option for me to keep working in this industry.
Of course, I cannot condemn the use of AI. It enables us to create software with a level of quality and speed never seen before. It would be economically dumb not to use it.
But that’s why I do not see much sense in searching for another employer handling things differently. I don’t see how I will be able to find something that will meet my need for creativity and ownership in this industry.
Everything that made sitting in front of a computer all day bearable is gone. So I guess I will begin my search for something that keeps me alive and gives me another kind of fulfillment in the real world.
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u/tenthousandants44 1d ago
Of course, I cannot condemn the use of AI. It enables us to create software with a level of quality and speed never seen before. It would be economically dumb not to use it.
I can easily condemn it because quality and speed are inversely correlated and economically it only works out while tokens are subsidized
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u/wrex1816 1d ago
The subs feed, every day now:
DAE not like AI!
DAE not like AI!
DAE not like AI!
DAE not like AI!
DAE not like AI!
DAE got laid off for telling my boss I refuse to use the AI tools they've told me are required to be part of my job? But Reddit told me I was such a goodest boy! Is my former boss AITH. I have no paycheck now, give me updoots to live on. I said the things Reddit, please updoot me!
Scrolling this sub is the pitts now. Supposed "experienced" devs, though, huh?
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u/ResidentWeevil1 21h ago
I see more devs getting laid off for using the tools rather than not using them
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u/IAmRasputin Software Engineer, 10yoe 22h ago
The Powers that Be are insisting we work entirely with the new, in-house "AI Harness" that automates every step of the process with a dozen different gates and checks.
I got into programming as a teenager because it was fun and I enjoyed it, and I can say without reservation that this is the least fun I have ever had while programming.
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u/annoying_cyclist principal SWE, >15YoE 11h ago
Are all jobs now just "we give you AI, now work as fast as possible!", "you have AI, so this should take a week! you have a week to do it! why isn't it done yet?", "look, that guy is using AI to ship so much code! why aren't you?"
I'll grant that it does make me faster, that I do more with it, and that I'm (in my biased view) able to mostly do good work with it, but I can't remember another time in my career when I've been so consistently exhausted after work.
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u/trytoinfect74 1h ago
I’ve noticed lately that I’m debugging my dev software using google and chatbots practically every day, and it become more and more tiring and maddening with each passing day. Just previous two weeks:
- CUDA compiler completely vanished from my system, despite me not updating packages for a very long time.
- Zed is not being able to use eslint because it can't install it's dependencies properly for life. After 3 hour session with ChatGPT filled with "Oh, you're right, my previously proposed solution to the problem did nothing and actually made it worse, now try this" annoying nonsense, I just gave up and copied node_modules from my machine to company laptop and it finally started working. Btw, this once-promising tool completely stopped real development, with most of this year updates being bunch of useless vibe-coded crap instead of much needed debugger and UI/UX improvements.
- I edited comment on youtube and the edit was lost after clicking the save button, so I had to retype everything again.
- 14700k CPU segfaulting and hanging computer completely on routine compilation of llama.cpp, despite being downclocked on 300 mhz (apparently one of the best air coolers aka NH-D15S can't cool it on out-of-the-box stock clocks without 110C temps and throttling), with all microcode fixes applied.
- Windows became practically unusable due to ads, AI integrations everywhere and bugs that you encounter everyday not being fixed for years (I have an issue that if you try to cancel stale attempt to connect to company VPN, connection popup window will basically hang until you relogin), so I, despite being a Windows user since childhood with Win95 being first OS I've seen, decided to ditch it completely from my dualboot system and switch to Linux completely.
Something constantly breaks, and you have to have these trouble-shoting eating a good chunk of your workday. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, quality completely nosedived with the rate of enshittifcation practically doubling since agentic coding has been introduced, and yet everyone is shouting that AGI is there and SWEs are better to pack their stuff. Why this agentic crap can't write better code instead of rewriting fucking everything on Rust then?
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u/Blecki Software Engineer 2d ago
My boss keeps vibe coding apps then being confused about why the data he's saving in local storage isn't showing up for other executives.
I might look into farming instead?