Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?

GianFabien

After I read the first paragraph, I could guess the rest. It is typical for the legacy enterprise system space. My diagnosis is that you care too much . The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre. So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba. Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production. ... and keep sending out resumes, etc. No job is worth jeopardising your mental health.

thiago_fm

Make less your life about your work. It's so hard for some people, myself included to do that. But you need to do that! Some people don't even want to work at all or work in a successful product or whatever. We created all those silly expectations for ourselves, often they aren't even our expectations but the expectations of others. Those expectations, our desires often make us very miserable. For instance, 90%+ of the people in the world would dream of living in Sweden, despite your bad outlook of the job market. It's all about perspective. Of course, if you can afford, pay a psychologist. They may help you better to deal with your emotions and help you find out what you need. Maybe try building something... if you want, hit me up, see my profile. But maybe first try to chill down and enjoy life a bit.

genezeta

If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation . In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be. From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated. So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job. But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to: 1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing. 1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving. 1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead. 2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals. 3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure . Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related to the project's technologies. The team may need some rearranging too, but try to keep this at minimum so that they can be confident that all of this is strictly related to a technology and skill update, and will not imply any sort of job insecurity or competition. You may have noticed that all of this is mostly people management . If this is not something you'd like to do, then the only option is leaving. The job you're in right now is clearly one of people managing and not so much a technological one -though is still requires knowing and choosing the technological goals to seek, obviously-. If you do follow, then who knows what will happen. But if things go well, you might expect to see some results in around 6 months or so, depending on how large/small the team and project are.

sph

You don't survive a thing that's making you sick. You quit. No job is worth your health.

iamflimflam1

What support do you have in your job - are you in a team of product managers/owners. Is there a tech/team lead on the project - what’s their opinion of the progress the team is making? It sounds like you are taking all the delivery responsibility on your own shoulders. Is this project really top priority with your management? It sounds like it might not be.

reeredfdfdf

As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control. I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies. Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.

snyena

Just wanted to say - hope things ease up soon. I'm a PM/PO too (7 years in), and my first 15 months in my current job also felt like total shit, for different reasons. Got better mostly because some good people joined the team. Not sure that's replicable for you, but honestly - do what's within your power, within reasonable limits, and try to switch off from work once you're home. Easier said than done, but try. Also, being told to sell a modernization roadmap to customers while the team can't actually ship it isn't really a you problem. That's just a bad setup. I'm in Slovakia but have a bit of a Swedish connection myself - studied there, speak alright Swedish, even made it to the last round for a PM job in Skövde once (didn't get it). Market's rough right now but your CV sounds solid, that'll turn. Hope you find something better soon. Lycka till!

amelius

What does your boss say? Do they think the company is doing fine?

lifestyleguru

Having had an experience with legacy enterprise software from Sweden once, I just passed out in the the workplace mentally, was absent few times, then they fired me. Hope it helps.

jraph

> My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick. I have started to have really concerning mental health symptoms, specifically severe anxiety, due to this job. I've also had some really dark thoughts which has scared me a lot. Leave before burning out. In the meantime, maybe take sick leaves if you can. Consider many people don't notice they are burning out as well. Leaving even if you don't yet have another plan could lead to a better outcome even considering that leaving your job creates financial difficulties right now because burnouts can take years to heal, some never manage to fully heal as well.

toyg

This sort of thing is why I'm not in that kind of job at the moment. One can have the best product knowledge and perfect instincts about roadmaps and features, and still struggle massively to be a PM in a large enterprise - because most of the job is actually people-related: * getting buy-in from stakeholders, developers, and testers * dealing with low performers * protecting yourself from backstabbing attempts * deflecting the barrage of scattered requests coming from the top brass * appeasing customers angered by actions that someone else took * reacting to big shifts from other parts of the organization etc etc. That sort of thing worn me down so much, I had to move sideways to regain some self-respect. Even though I was eventually vindicated by most of the calls I made (which someone else shipped and got credit for, another frustration of the job), I just accepted I am currently not in the right headspace to be a PM/PO in a big company. So my only suggestion is to keep looking for another job, or even better create your own: with AI getting incredibly good, there has never been a better time for PMs to build their own prototypes, which can then be used to hunt for the job you really want. Otherwise, take the Serenity Prayer to heart and find more meaning away from the job.

burnt-resistor

Take a sabbatical without going into details, if at all possible. It's unfair to expect someone to perform at a high level while suffering. When not depressed, work becomes a whole lot easier and many things aren't as seemingly insurmountable. It can also take steadfastly trying dozens+ of antidepressants to find one that works best with least side-effects. Don't have anything important to do when changing medications because some side-effects are difficult. It can take around days to a week to stabilize to titrate on and about the same off, depending on the medication.

altern8

Even with LLMs, they can't ship a GET endpoint..? I feel like there are a lot of people nowadays that are just pretending to be devs and ship things to prod using LLMs

hugodan

Wake up earlier and do sports outside before starting to work

nobodyandproud

This is why I was always happier as a worker bee, over being responsible for an entire team or org. You outlined the root cause: “our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult.” Do you have any authority or influence to change this, either through training, bringing in consultants (be very careful with this one), or worst case via hiring/firing?

Muromec

>when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work... If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here. There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner. Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have). While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.

lain98

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described. Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes. I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something like - these are just thoughts and I acknowledge them and let them pass. Few of my friends did not have good results with medication. I am also detached from my job, its only purpose is to make enough money to no longer need doing the job. Today I work to live and see tomorrow and the same thing tomorrow again. I suggest talking to someone elder and with a more positive outlook on life, not from work. Preferably retired. In summation- You are not your job friend. Not should it give meaning to your life. Live to fight another day. It helps to detach oneself.

Tade0

If the job market is so competitive, then surely there's someone out there with experience building APIs?

deadbabe

tbh I envy your position, you have a real opportunity to blow people away showing them what real modernization looks like. Like Prometheus bringing fire to humans. I don’t understand why you haven’t just let an AI agent do all the tasks your incompetent coworkers take months to do.

sdcfgy

Sounds exactly like my place. Never take your primary source of personal worth from a job. Get out of that mindset as soon as you can. In most companies like that you’re fungible in a moment’s notice even if they tell you they value you. As for non delivery, everything we build loses money because it’s built on a guess and doesn’t work properly because it’s designed and built by idiots. Do not listen to the people here doing 90 hour weeks on a startup. That’s insane. I manage about 6 hours a week :) What they do provide you with is income. Save money so you can afford to lose a job first. Security helps. Find meaning outside work with that income. That is your purpose. And it probably shouldn’t be another let’s just do a side project at home and do another day of work. It should be social in some way.