This is a post for me. What I mean is that this post is to try to clarify my ideas about my situation. Sometimes writing about something is equivalent to discuss with someone, in the sense that it helps clarifying ideas. Like the rubber duck “technique”.
So, what is this about? It is about being stuck in life. It is not the first time I am not sure where I want to go, what to do next or if there is any “next” at all. My impression is that this is a first world problem: having a good remote job, with good economic compensation and not having any big problem in any front. And that’s maybe the problem.
It may be my mentality or maybe it is something related with this sector: once the big problems or unknowns are solved, things get boring, uninspiring. So after a few years working in the same project, I don’t feel motivated with it. It feels boring and the main hurdles I find are related to deployment processes and boundaries between systems because they keep changing due to other teams’ needs, and the communication of those changes are… scarce or non-existent. And how came that I lost track of those changes?
Pandemic workload
Surprise or not, during pandemic I had no problems with the job, in terms of security. The company fired some people, but not for the pandemic situation alone. The thing is that management had probably a lot of work and coordination, but in terms of development, things got confusing. Some new project were starting and we would join it eventually. So in that time, we just had to study a bit the new tech stack, but not much. That’s a dream, right? Being paid for studying and not having any task for a couple of months in a row, then we would have some small tasks, do them, and repeat.
Well, in a normal situation I would say yes. You could do your duties during a few hours a day and then do whatever else you felt like. But during the quarantine, that was bad. Nothing to do apart from studying things without a clear idea what to to do with those technologies. If I were in another situation, I would have started some toy projects or play with some of the code base, but that mentality shifted fast after a few weeks. Losing focus was likely common during those times.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of things changed during those terrible times and I got behind them. I don’t mean I was behind in my tasks or in my knowledge of the codebase, but in everything else in my focus, passion, interest…
So, what happened once I started getting tasks? What happened is that it was a nightmare to complete them. Frustration grew fast, as every task and workflow was the same… but different. That means the “challenge” was not much of a challenge but a burden. And eventually, I got burnt out. Hard.
And then, to top it all, I started feeling stuck. Not wanting to do the same, but without energy to do something else. Programming was unappealing to me, even for personal projects.
What to do once you are fuc… burnt-out
That was the question I tried to answer. Finding no motivation in the work I had, I needed to decide what to do about it. Some holidays would be nice, disconnecting from it for a couple of weeks and pursuing other activities and projects would help. Also being open to other jobs, not necessarily to move on, but to convince myself that other options were available would help with the feeling of being stuck.
And how well did it work?
Well, holidays failed. I was involved in a development process that was a bit nightmarish. There were a lot of reasons for that, and part of it was my fault, due to a lack of focus as I mentioned above. So when the time for holidays came, the task was in the middle of a QA test before releasing. I don’t know what other people do, but for me, leaving at such a critical moment is a sin and really unfair to my teammates that may receive the burden of continuing it, without the context of the full development process that came before (that as I said, was long and troublesome).
The result was that I didn’t work full time but I didn’t have holidays per se either. Resulting in no disconnection and no efficiency at the job. I don’t recommend this.
And what about other job openings? Well, after almost a year of pandemic without big workload, my coding skills were rusty. Any time I had some coding challenge, it was difficult to accomplish and that made me feel even worse. I figured, maybe I need to do some coding exercises to fine tune my skills… good idea and easy to put into practice.
However this is the key discovery: my burnt out is related to coding itself. Anything related to my job, which is something I always enjoyed so much that I ended up in the industry, makes my energy and focus go to 0.
The Consequence
The first and foremost consequence is that I don’t know what to do. The problem is not my company or my present duties, so jumping ship to another company will solve nothing and probably makes things worse. Actually, I don’t feel like changing jobs.
I want to improve my skills, learning more about other programing languages, increasing my skills in the ones I already use and know, writing code for small utilities or to play around with it. But I struggle to find the focus and the energy.
Time gave me some answers
This is a teaser. Because when I wrote this text, that I left sit for a while, I was indeed burnt out. But with all this time dealing with it, with the benefit of not having too much tasks to complete per day, allowed me to think it through and come to some new discoveries.
I will probably write a new entry for it, as I think it deserves it. But there are some clear conclusions:
I am not looking for a new job. After trying with a few companies that were offering some interesting positions (in trading systems and algorithms, another in embedded devices that forces you to go to the basics again…), I realized that they were not able to provide a convincing offer, and that the new projects would solve nothing, as my problem was about being tired of coding.
Having time to do other things and focusing on learning unrelated stuff, cleared my mind and helped me learn how the codebase I work in fits in the full picture, being more aware of how it could affect business and customers. Let’s say I developed an architect vision.
I should look into things that interest me, and not trying to find a coding project that I may be interested. At the end, coding is a mean to an end, and the important thing is to find an interesting project. Even if its requires no coding. Or using Excel.
In part, I discovered that the “problem” was that I and my teammates have such a complete knowledge of the actual code base (and surrounding systems) and the software has become so good, stable and well designed after years working on it, that almost any task or new development needed, feels like small and boring. Because it is easy to do. That is called expertise, and if the time to completion is 1 week instead of the 3 months that was needed 2 years ago, it is a good signal. Because of the codebase evolution and because my own knowledge base increased. And that is good.
So as I said, I will do a follow up on this. If some weeks pass and nothing new gets published on this topic, feel free to remember it to me.