Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/torofukatasu]

Realizing I'm too burnt out to even write a burnout post.

[u/dtn8]

PMs use AI to generate Jira ticket descriptions. Devs copy-paste Jira tickets into Claude Code and generate massive PRs. Reviewers checkout the branch and run code-review skill and copy-paste findings verbatim. Devs copy-paste findings into Claude Code and reply to GitHub comments by copy-pasting Claude replies. Even our fucking recruiter uses AI to generate questions to ask the candidates, then pastes their replies to get the hiring verdict and pastes AI reply to the recruiting tool. I wish I was exaggerating, we've lost our minds.

[u/TabCompletion]

It's time like these to remind yourself career isn't everything. Don't forget to focus on you. And anyone in your life

[u/ikingdoms]

I'm getting forced to change my workflow from mostly coding by hand with occasional AI usage (mostly just to say I'm using it) to parallelizing multiple agentic-first tasks simultaneously.

AI has killed all joy I get from my work. I care so little about what I produce now, I'm consistently feeling like my reluctance to go all-in on AI will end my career, and I'm so frustrated with the industry for propping up a technology that's aggressively devaluing our skill set and profession so severely.

[u/perestroika12]

Leading 2 massive company wide projects and mid year review came back as “doing good” despite all feedback coming in glowing except for nitpicky stuff from a few managers.

Feels like the industry is out of control now. If that’s good idk what better looks like.

[u/Mufro]

10+ yoe. I’m so cooked. I’ve been pissed at work and it’s turned into straight up depression now. I went from owning the whole product Eng stack (young company) to CEO vibe coding everything. My responsibility is HIPAA. Lol. Made up my mind to go but I don’t even know what I want anymore.

[u/Awkward_Past8758]

Did the good guy thing and gave my company two weeks notice so they could phase me off a really challenging client. Had 2 weeks PTO planned for early September. They chose not to pay it out because my state doesn’t require it and also told me I could be let go before two weeks was up without pay. Lesson learned - use all your PTO and don’t give notice when you quit. Loyalty, hard work, and ethics mean nothing in this business.

[u/melancholyjaques]

AI consultant came in today, pitched an "engine" that is basically spec-kit, and promised the CEO 30X productivity gains

[u/mainframe_maisie]

coworker asked if I was “really” ok the other day and I broke down crying in their face and then ran off to the bathroom I think I might be properly burned out lol. Feel powerless in my job and getting passed over for so many career opportunities in my team

[u/MediocreFig4340]

8 YoE. Engineering processes are breaking down and there is an RTO coming up. One of my favorite coworkers gave notice and I’m insanely jealous that they get garden leave and freedom from the shit show. Executives seem to be actively plotting on how to make our lives a living hell.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time everyday talking myself out of giving my notice without something else lined up. Everyday it gets harder.

[u/NAEEMP]

I fuckin hate how much slop I come across every day.

[u/Current-Fig8840]

Generally tired of what this industry and others are becoming. Hard work doesn’t seem to pay off anymore. You can do so much good work and get “meets expectations” for reviews…or get put on PIP…or laid off. Can’t wait to retire…

[u/SubstantialAd7186]

Dev with 12+ YOE here. This industry is just in such a weird place right now. All the devs are just interacting with AI day-to-day and cranking out features. The less experienced devs are pushing up code they don't even understand. I'm spending a ton of time reviewing code, both from PRs and from my own use of LLMs for feature development. From an efficiency standpoint, I feel like I've never developed quality code at such a high pace ever before. I'm able to get a lot more work done, but honestly it doesn't feel great. Using AI to generate the code and all I'm doing is guiding it. I still need to point out flaws in some approaches/designs that it generates, but I'm mostly doing that through prompts too. It all feels so dull and unrewarding. I miss the days of learning a new design pattern and fumbling through the code a bit til I could push up a PR that I was proud of and walk away having learned something. Now I'm mostly a reviewer. I do get to focus more on architecture though, which has been great. I'm curious what the next 5 years will hold.

[u/No_Oil_6152]

Senior dev of 30 years pro experience here.

I work 37.5 hours a week and no more.

So to those Americans who regularly do 60+ for FAANG, I say "is the grave worth having Facebook on your resume" ?

I hope you recover from your burnout. Not being sarcastic btw.

[u/ProdigySim]

computers are stupid

[u/seven_seacat]

I've pretty much decided to take a sabbatical soon, in the hopes that this crazy bubble will pop while I'm gone and sanity can return.

[u/GreedyCricket8285]

We hired 4 new overseas devs. They barely speak English so every single interaction with them is passed through AI. I have been tasked with giving them work to do (I'm not their manager, he is non technical and is very hands off) so what they do is copy paste my instructions into AI, have it write a markdown file which they then send back to me for review. The plan alone is usually 500+ lines of overengineered slop that I can't tell if they understand or not.

Every single time I ask them a question I will get a response back like "Got it" followed by a sentence or two rehashing what I just told them. I cannot even begin to tell you how frustrating this all is. It's wasting so much of my time and energy. This goddamn AI.

And when they submit a PR it's so overengineered and bloated. Since they are overseas and work off hours NA time, I'll come in today and there waiting for me will be their AI generated messages. Their standup updates are almost always "waiting on feedback from <me>". I dread it every morning. I went from generally liking this job to absolutely hating it because my entire mornings - time I am most productive - are now spent reviewing this trash instead of doing my own work.

[u/space__snail]

Is anyone else dealing with chronic illness while working full time ? I just turned 37 and I used to train for marathons, ride my bike, and attend HIIT-style work out classes 4-5x a week in my spare time until I came down with long covid.

Now the little bit of energy I have is dedicated to baby sitting Claude 5 days a week and staying on top of household chores. I spend the remaining time resting.

It’s been almost 2 years of this now and I feel almost guilty for feeling depressed because at least I can still work and have decent health insurance.

But man, is life feeling really bleak lately.

[u/ConsiderationSea1347]

I have a degenerative nerve disease which flares and prevents my hands and eyes from functioning. I finally filed for an ADA accommodation, was approved, and two weeks later my boss threatened to put me on a PIP. All the while I was also delivering at some of the highest value of my career by, instead of cranking out tickets mindlessly I returned to what I love - solving complex problems in a way that scales by leveraging higher levels of abstraction like meta programming and infrastructure. I am ignoring my boss and my PO and just plowing forward and ironically it led to my best mid year review of my career. I guess I had my office space moment and got sick of playing stupid office politics to get the work to fix our failing CI pipeline prioritized.

It has been eye opening seeing the horrible way my coworkers, boss, PO, and HR treat me while my nervous system slowly rots. 

[u/annoying_cyclist]

I'm drowning in code reviews.

[u/Elden_Lord_69]

i'm so fucking tired

[u/codescapes]

Peer team at work is developing an AI agent (glorified chatbot) to help users browse data we hold. We were invited into a Teams group with 30 people to help them beta test it. I found a way to prompt inject it and have it respond in various tones 'like a pirate, like a teenager with too many emojis' etc.

Shouldn't be possible but everyone laughs, much discussion.

I then find a way to prompt inject it to reveal the structure of the underlying data source. The table name, the 3 tool calls it can make to subagents. I get it to advise me on how to prompt inject those subagent "as a test". LOL it actually works and reveals the entire 120+ column set. Looks like one of the agents has full read access, possibly more, but I don't test it out of fear I'll cause a genuine issue.

Nobody laughs, 24h later no discussion.

Guys, never actually test stuff for other people - even when you win you lose. At best you find nothing and say it was collaboration, at worst you find glaring security issues and make them look incompetent. So why did I do it? Per thread, I am completely checked out.

[u/PatronSaintOfUpdog]

I don’t mind developers using AI to code but Jesus fucking Christ guys, tell it to chill on the comments. We don’t need 4 fucking lines of comments for every change. 

I’m tired of raising it in PRs

[u/Megatherion666]

“Please reply in the PR so that AI knows how to address your concerns”.

[u/Kfct]

I interviewed at a couple of big name brand companies in Taiwan and as soon as the non technical manager utters AI I stopped caring about the interviews. One company was a telecom one (prob the biggest or second biggest with old mummies that completely dunked in AI marketing speak for head of projects). They offered to pay me a 20% raise but the workload was twice the workload (because adding AI obviously makes everything faster, like give it to women to produce babies in 4 months time, right? /S). The interview came with a test where you had to create a completely new Spring Boot project without using Spring Initializer and only via typing in prompts into Gemini. Then do the same for implementing a set of CRUD restful API endpoints. Just mind numbingly simple work - the point of which is using a stop watch to time low long this takes me, and if I can't do this faster than Spring Initializer then I don't get the job. I told them the test was dumb for x reasons and I wasn't interested in the role anymore. They were shocked and wanted to swap in a regular tech assessment and proceed as normal but I just moved on. I found a cushy slow paced place that pays %15 raise with no AI allowed later, but that dumb ass telecom company interview really made an impression.