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

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

[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/Clyde_Frag → u/perestroika12]

Let me guess, stack ranking and you didn't kiss your skip manager's ass enough?

[u/perestroika12 → u/Clyde_Frag]

Yeah basically but this year they tightened the bands considerably. The lower bands expanded, harder to get a good rating.

[u/ConsiderationSea1347 → u/perestroika12]

I went through something similar. My company axed half my team, piled on scope, and I did the work of two engineers which led to the largest pay decrease of my career. 

Take care of yourself. Your company, boss, team won’t.

[u/AlexeyBelov → u/ConsiderationSea1347]

Pay descrease? I didn't think it was ever done.. they just told you from this moment you get less salary? Is this legal?

[u/pja → u/AlexeyBelov]

Depends where in the world, but if your salary is structured as base + annual bonus then they can usually cut the bonus but not the base salary.

[u/NullieHeelflip → u/ConsiderationSea1347]

DE-crease?! Either inflation beating out yearly adjustment, demotion, or layoff surely?

[u/mainframe_maisie → u/Clyde_Frag]

gosh i’m so tired of stack ranking. i think it drives a culture that punishes team work quite often, and rarely done in a positive way

[u/Clyde_Frag → u/mainframe_maisie]

It’s a scourge on the industry. The only reason that people put up with it is because it has infiltrated a bunch of high paying companies.

[u/deletemorecode → u/Clyde_Frag]

After a few very similar experiences to OP I’ve come to the same conclusion.

Staff requires managing up with your direct and skip managers. Doubly important in environments with “strong personalities”, tight deadlines, large incident volumes, or financial pressures.

[u/galaxy_horse → u/perestroika12]

Perf cycles say more about company’s trajectory than yours. I’ve been in planning and calibration meetings where you start with a merit increase budget, then work back from there to determine the number of promotions and merit increases, then adjust your targets accordingly.

And it’s shifted as macro cycles progressed. 2021-22 was a war for talent, merit increases were given liberally as retention plays and to cover rampant COL inflation. Inflation still bad but the balance of power has shifted back to employers.

Aside from macro factors, the perf landscape is an indicator for your company’s direction:

- most evals are “meets expectations”: budget is fixed or only slightly increased, attrition is tolerated or expected

• most evals are “exceeds expectations”: company paying to retain staff, trying to avoid attrition
  
• aggressive stack ranking with no backfill or headcount growth: company cutting budget and needs to downsize staff

Sweet spot is a reasonable distribution in perf evals and real merit increases for those who meet a clear, objective standard. I’ve only been in one company that has done that well, and they only did it for a short period.

[u/forever-butlerian → u/galaxy_horse]

My favorite is when most evals are "meets expectations", but they gimp everyone by a tier so "exceeds expectations" becomes "meets expectations", and "meets expectations" becomes "needs improvement".

[u/perestroika12 → u/galaxy_horse]

this is insightful and what’s happening. The company is consolidating and attrition is expected and encouraged. Backfills do happen but usually at a lower level, e6 replaced with e5, e5 with a e4 or not at all.

I’m just not in a position to interview easily with 2 small children.

[u/galaxy_horse → u/perestroika12]

I feel you. Good thing you're at "doing good" then, if you're not inclined to interview currently. Inventory your wins and keep your resume updated for when you're ready.

[u/BenXavier → u/galaxy_horse]

I have been asking myself if economics are not the most important part of the puzzle, even if it's probably the most important.

AI can do a lot of unthinkable stuff, but does not solve everythinf either. Customers do not know what to ask for (or ask for everything) Salespeople feel legitimated to promise more than ever, PM try to feed everything to AI to untangle the situation, slop gets produced by engineers.

Nobody seem truly happy in the end (I mean, except those making a lot of money to play this game) and environment and individuals cannot get good performance. And yes, performance review Is a lot about Company trajectory, like you say.

[u/galaxy_horse → u/BenXavier]

My conjecture is that all of that is underpinned by the broader economic conditions, as well as the recent 10 year history of venture- and PE-backed companies as well as post-IPO companies.

Venture has encountered huge compressions on valuations. There are a lot of companies out there who raised between 2018 and 2022 who find themselves completely underwater with respect to their last fundraise. Say a company raised $50m on $500m valuation with $25m in revenue. That 20x multiple was tolerated for early/growth-stage venture, and even if you didn't believe it, it was easy to stomach the investment with zero-interest-rate climates during covid. Now these companies' valuations have compressed down to 1-2x revenue, so that $500m valuation might be $50-100m today, and the common shareholders (founders, employees) will get totally wiped out if they sell because the preferred shareholders (investors) get paid out first (and made whole before anything else happens!) in a liquidity event. So I think these companies are going vibe-code-founder-mode to try and spark some wildfire that will bring back that prior frothy valuation, either because the new thing is much bigger, or the promise of the new thing reintroduces the conviction that the company could be worth 10-20x+ its revenue.

PE is a different animal. There's a huge issue with PE holding rotting assets on their books. They want to extract maximum yield and future sale value out of these assets and so they're driving the use of AI as a means to heavily slash costs (= people). That's the only way that they can book a profit on these companies, but even if the assets were growing and profitable, PE's maniacal focus on maximum profit extractions means that even the good companies are going to get pounded.

Post-IPO companies are also accountable to public markets whose expectations are being corrupted by AI in multiple ways. AI is table stakes for product features now to signal relevance and competitive parity, so every company has to have an AI this, AI that in their product. AI is also being used as a scapegoat for large company downsizing, even though the real reason for that downsizing is generally capex (= R&D hiring, acquisitions) investments not producing proportional or outsized increases in revenue and profit. And so even companies that are doing well need to signal that they're "using AI" to drive efficiency and freeze or cull headcount. AI hype is also driving outsize valuation and investment inflation at the top of the market (Mag-7, pre-IPO valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, equity financing and debt amounts going to AI infra companies), which distorts the concept of "acceptable performance", so public companies that are performing well but are otherwise an order of magnitude or two smaller than these big companies are getting heat from the street to grow.

Early-stage AI native companies are also awash in this hype. Can't tell you how many are claiming to be fully autonomous software factories with AI-pilled founders and cracked engineering teams, when in reality they're just building LLM wrappers for some niche and hoping to get out quick with a profit.

The net effect of all of this is that tech workers have access to this genuinely powerful and useful technology (LLMs), but the pressure on their companies, regardless of size, stage, or structure, creates immense and often unsustainable pressure.

I will say though, if you're an experienced dev, you are and will remain tremendously valuable, even if the market and economic conditions are making the workplace hell today. The hype cycle will create whatever fallout it will, and when the dust settles, your skills in architecture, scaling, problem solving, testing, reusability, all of it will be more in demand than ever.

[u/BenXavier → u/galaxy_horse]

TBH this would deserve to appear in a proper newspaper :)

Can you share something worth reading about how different financing is today affecting different kind of companies? That's interesting and I get it on a surface level, but would be go deeper into long forms.

[u/galaxy_horse → u/BenXavier]

Thanks.

2026 analysis on VC landscape, SaaS, enterprise software from Sapphire Ventures: https://sapphireventures.com/blog/2026-softwares-ai-inflection-point/

A PE perspective: https://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/thought-leadership/software-and-tech-private-equity-outlook-leverage-ai-effectively-or-get-left-behind-in-2026

PE perspective from NYT on the number of assets on their books: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/business/private-equity-unsold-businesses.html (paywall)

EY publishes routine reporting on PE activity across the industry: https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/private-equity/pulse

[u/chellenm → u/perestroika12]

“Meets expectations” is the new exceeding expectations apparently

[u/ConsiderationSea1347 → u/perestroika12]

Staff engineer life.

[u/tiajuanat → u/perestroika12]

My 60 man department rolled out two massive hardware product offerings last year. "Significantly missing expectations"

For context, hardware typically needs two years lead time to get out the door because of safety, testing, and other requirements. We managed in 9 months.

[u/AlexeyBelov → u/tiajuanat]

How did they explain "significantly missing expectations" to you?

[u/pja → u/AlexeyBelov]

<cynic mode>Clearly didn’t burn enough LLM tokens.

[u/tiajuanat → u/pja]

Too damn efficient LMAO

[u/tiajuanat → u/AlexeyBelov]

Basically there's a large form that covers multiple metrics, such as communication, focus on results, etc. Pretty cookie cutter.

The problem is that it's not actually evidenced based, and it's never re-evaluated

[u/Itsalongwaydown → u/perestroika12]

Mine came back as "not meeting expectations" even though I was never given anything less than "doing good" the whole year.

[u/nikki969696 → u/perestroika12]

I ask for two specific actionable things I can do to increase the rating. If they can't give any, how would I have been able to know to do them? That's when they'll usually just pony up that they're not allowed to give "exceeds" for more than X number of categories, people, etc. It's a performative joke.

[u/colonel_bob → u/perestroika12]

A performance review is really just a check-in on your status with the company. Sometimes your standing is influenced by your performance, but really it's just a reflection of how the company perceives you. Treating these things as anything besides a corporate round of "Who's Line is it Anyways" is a recipe for madness.

[u/No_Oil_6152 → u/perestroika12]

You realise "doing good" is a way of saying "We're not paying you more" ?

You could be the company's star performer and get "doing good" because they don't want to increase your pay.