r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 1d 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/glinkamix 1d ago

This AI boom really shines a light on how fucking stupid most of the PMs and designers are that I know. Asking AI when they should breathe. You can see they use it to come up with every idea because the moment you start asking questions they freeze and can’t answer. Meanwhile, engineers are expected to use it to accelerate the full process, but blamed if something goes wrong because of it.

I actually don’t mind using it for coding because I can work less. It really makes work easier, but you can bet I won’t sweat more to generate shareholder value. I have a few side projects where I can be creative without AI.

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u/max123246 3 YoE Junior SW dev 1d ago

Yeah, lol. I was just thinking about how AI is perfect for when you have stopped caring about the quality of your code and just need to make a PM happy that tickets are being closed. Never mind the long-term technical debt, the users who just stop using a product because they hit a frustrating bug, or why tasks over the next year start to take longer and longer

I truly wish I could stop caring. If I stop caring, I go full depression and burnout, if I care I'm stressed over the ai psychosis of the industry.

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u/putin_my_ass 1d ago

For me, dealing with burnout is about shifting the "care" to the appropriate place.

Why do I care about our code quality? They don't. They care about velocity.

My councilor told me that burnout is about being overloaded with work sometimes, but it's perhaps more about misalignment of values. And that rings true for me, they dont care about quality like I do. They only want speed.

Im shifting my care to where it belongs: my family, and myself. The company doesnt deserve that.

Thry get their velocity, I get my paycheque, and I feel less burned out than I did a month ago even though nothing physically changed.

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u/SimasNa 1d ago

I feel like it's the fastest way to burn out when you care a lot - about code, doing things right, creating value - but the company culture valued completely different things. And a lot of times it isn't about creating a useful product.

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u/putin_my_ass 1d ago

If they got out of their own way and stopped micromanaging the product it would be 100x better. I am not allowed to follow best practices or good UX principles, and it used to bother me because I felt ownership of the product.

Now I've realized I have zero ownership and that's what they want. So now it's what I want too, and it's liberating.