alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
I started a new job a little less than a year ago as a product owner/manager for a legacy enterprise system. Unfortunately the job has not at all been what I expected and what was sold to me in the interview process for a number of reasons.
I don't want to get too much into it, but the main reason is that my job was supposed to be leading a modernization project to expand our legacy enterprise system with modern API-based integrations, but our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult. Things I was used to taking a week or two max at other companies take many months to ship and aren't really built with the quality I would expect. This makes it really awkward for me when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...
I could go on and on, but honestly I just strongly dislike this job. I'm trying my best to find another role, but the market is really competitive right now where I live (Sweden). I would say I have a quite decent CV, with a masters from an excellent university and around a decade of work experience in tech, but Sweden currently has the third highest unemployment rate in the EU so there is a huge amount of competition for each role. But of course, all I can do is do my best.
My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick. I have started to have really concerning mental health symptoms, specifically severe anxiety, due to this job. I've also had some really dark thoughts which has scared me a lot. My doctor started me on some antidepressants and I am receiving therapy, but it's too early to say if it has helped or not.
I don't know how much more I can take before I end up on some kind of sick leave. But I'm trying to take it day by day and I am trying to stay positive. Hopefully I can find another job soon, but until then I am stuck in this job.
For those of you who have been stuck in jobs you strongly dislike, how did you manage to separate your work from your life so that you could survive the situation? Did you find something that worked for you to ease the situation until you could find another job?
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I really appreciate any feedback or advice.
Comments
What support do you have in your job - are you in a team of product managers/owners.
Is there a tech/team lead on the project - what’s their opinion of the progress the team is making?
It sounds like you are taking all the delivery responsibility on your own shoulders.
Is this project really top priority with your management? It sounds like it might not be.
You don't survive a thing that's making you sick. You quit.
No job is worth your health.
If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation.
In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be.
From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated.
So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job.
But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to:
1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing.
1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving.
1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead.
2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals.
3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure. Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related to the project's technologies.
The team may need some rearranging too, but try to keep this at minimum so that they can be confident that all of this is strictly related to a technology and skill update, and will not imply any sort of job insecurity or competition.
You may have noticed that all of this is mostly people management. If this is not something you'd like to do, then the only option is leaving. The job you're in right now is clearly one of people managing and not so much a technological one -though is still requires knowing and choosing the technological goals to seek, obviously-.
If you do follow, then who knows what will happen. But if things go well, you might expect to see some results in around 6 months or so, depending on how large/small the team and project are.
After I read the first paragraph, I could guess the rest. It is typical for the legacy enterprise system space.
My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba.
Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production.
... and keep sending out resumes, etc.
No job is worth jeopardising your mental health.
Make less your life about your work. It's so hard for some people, myself included to do that. But you need to do that!
Some people don't even want to work at all or work in a successful product or whatever. We created all those silly expectations for ourselves, often they aren't even our expectations but the expectations of others.
Those expectations, our desires often make us very miserable.
For instance, 90%+ of the people in the world would dream of living in Sweden, despite your bad outlook of the job market. It's all about perspective.
Of course, if you can afford, pay a psychologist. They may help you better to deal with your emotions and help you find out what you need.
Maybe try building something... if you want, hit me up, see my profile. But maybe first try to chill down and enjoy life a bit.
As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control.
I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.
Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.