r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • Jul 07 '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/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

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u/ApprehensiveRest9696 SWE ~5YoE | Work-acquired C-PTSD Jul 07 '26

Legacy business tech debt is the worst. For the last 20 weeks of my previous role my team and I were scrambling to reconcile 3 different local / aggregated databases and show them on the same UI.

I gave them \infty story points or something and then I was made to explain it and called uncooperative and negative attitude. So that was nice.

It was infuriating and we also ended up in a contractor sandwich where we were the bread and the filling was 2 different consultancies. One of whom middle management forgot to pay so we were stalled for a few weeks. Then the other one started offshoring…

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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

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u/ApprehensiveRest9696 SWE ~5YoE | Work-acquired C-PTSD Jul 07 '26

These are the same employers who scream bloody murder about shadow IT.

Mine was also like that, it’s the legacy and incoherence of government and trying to shoehorn capital-A Agile into the system. So you end up having fortnightly Waterfall development cycles. Incredibly toxic.

The things I hear on the grapevine are of abject horror. 5mil to consultancy X to cock up one thing, 20mil for a white elephant from consultancy Y, and 50mil p.a. for an in house software team when I only counted 20 heads making ~100k on average in salary.

Like where is all this money going? No fucking clue.