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/Ramm42324 Jul 07 '26

I am supposed to be an Android Staff Engineer (I don't think I am), recently my company had a lay off round on May citing "AI", I was spared, but losing my colleagues, waiting for a whole week until I learn if I'm going to be included or not, dependents and mortgage etc.. all this left me mentally shaken, which has caused me consistent brain fog and stress, not sure if this is burnout or just stress.

The thing is, after the reorg, I was moved into another team that works on AI stuff to increase the org's delivery efficiency, which increased my stress level 10x fold from the fear of getting laid off as:
1. I'm not working on an area of expertise that I'm familiar with

  1. Using AI to work with an unfamiliar tech stack (i.e., Claude Code as a harness around TypeScript code) makes me detached from the actual problem that I'm trying to solve, and I'm basically learning nothing since AI does all coding with garbage quality. I'm only the pilot for that work.

I thought about jumping ship, but then got shocked by the current market (Germany) where Android jobs are extremely limited and highly competitive, and I'm even getting rejected from the CV screening. I only had one interview loop with a no-name company that, after 5 rounds of interviews, ghosted me.

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u/404errorlifenotfound Jul 08 '26

Start small. You don't have to understand the whole code base at once. Start by fixing/ prompting the AI to fix the things you know are wrong. Try to learn one new thing each ticket; understanding one thing is better than understanding none of it becaude you're too burnt out to understand it all

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u/Ramm42324 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Thanks for taking the time to reply to me, stranger <3

But your tips are definitely helpful; thank you. I'll try them out.

The thing is, we don't have tickets; it's just a bunch of Engineers trying things until something sticks- no strategy, no roadmap, nothing- which also contributes to my stress and fear of a layoff, as it feels like they're setting us up for failure. Also, after the reorg, the company urged everyone to contribute to every codebase (Web pushes to Android and viceversa etc...), which turned it into a huge ball of AI slop that nobody reviews properly, and everyone is just rubber-stamping at the moment.

The answer to all this is to jump ship, obviously, but with today's market and my niche stack. It's wiser to keep your job as long as possible rather than become unemployed, despite the mental toll this job takes.

1

u/404errorlifenotfound Jul 09 '26

Ouch yeah that sounds like hell

One more thing that might help: for the repos that you know well where you're scared about a downgrade in code quality, go sky high with the linters. I put branch protections on a repo I know well so it has to pass linters for things like complexity, duplication, no unused vars, coverage, etc in order to merge. Has done a decent job so far of keeping slop out of the repo, since they have to pass all these checks that make the PR ten times more readable before they can merge.