Ask HN: What do I do if a job is causing me to be depressed and demotivated?
It is a legacy application with lots of internal tech and proprietary software I’ve never heard of or am able to find online. The manager and team push the undesirable work onto me despite me asking to do something else. The job market is pretty awful now and I’m not sure if I could find something else if I quit. The code base is of poor quality and just opening it makes me demotivated. All of this has caused me to spiral into depression the last 1.5 years. Is it possible to get out of this situation? Your job is now to find a new job. Push as hard as you can on job searching. Dial down the effort you are putting into your current job. You absolutely should not stay where you are. You are also extremely unlikely to be able to make any positive changes there, the company product and needs “are what they are.” I will try this. I unfortunately don’t really know how to dial down since it makes me feel guilty. > since it makes me feel guilty I know I often feel guilty if I feel I'm not giving my best, trying my hardest, and helping out as much as possible. That affects all aspects of my life, including but not limited to my job. One thing that helps me with this guilt is when I have concrete evidence that the other party is not acting with the same worldview. In this case, you're trying to do the right thing and help your employer, but your employer is not heeding your reasonable demands to be put on something else. Basically, they're not thinking about finding a "win win", they're only thinking about what's best for them. They reckon they can force you to stay on this project, which is best for them, therefore that's what they do. Given that they're not making an effort to help you despite you asking them to, I think it's reasonable to not feel guilty about doing the same i.e. thinking about yourself first. I mean you're simply playing the game, where they have decided the rules, which is just doing whatever is best for the person taking the action. You did not force them to create these rules, they decided on that. And you're not imagining they have this mindset, they have demonstrated it through their actions. And don't get distracted by words, look at the actions. They may well say "we're all team players, we help each other!" then keep you on this project. It might be tempting to believe the words they say, but their actions demonstrate their actual values. That helps me when this sort of situation comes up, I hope that helps you a bit. Work on processing the feeling. No need to feel guilty, it’s just work. It won’t matter in the end anyway. If you quit tomorrow, they’d just put another human cog in the machine. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-to-stop-feelin... We can naively split the world into two types of people: givers and takers. I'm guessing you are a giver and you are feeling resentful because too much is being taken from you. But it is actually your choice about how much to give that causes your resentment. Watch for how others deal with giving and taking in work and romantic situations. The ideal solution is to find a place to work that consists mostly of givers. It is not easy to find these places - look for somewhere that people never quit because they all like who they work with. This comment feels ill-advised and poorly thought out, but it's a way of looking at life I'm still investigating for myself. Hopefully it helps, but I fear it could harm... > We can naively split the world into two types of people: givers and takers. It’s a sliding scale and not set in stone. I used to be too much on the giver side until burnout forced me to learn how to apportion my time better. At the end of the day, most employers pay you to spend x hours per day solving their problems and thus creating value. If you stretch and give them more than you are obligated to then is it really their fault or your fault? You should use neutral phrases like “I don’t currently have bandwidth for this” or “I can’t make any promises because X is a higher priority”. Your manager most likely has no clue of how overloaded you are and will appreciate being informed before it becomes a medical issue. Of course, some employers are toxic and will not take no for an answer. These are the exception to the rule and the only resolution really is finding a new job. A better word for takers might be users. Find a new one. I was a FF/Paramedic for years. I was miserable after the initial awe wore off. Hurt my relationships and i was just a miserable person. Find what males you happy, Don't just up and quit. Put your feelers out and see what you can find. Maybe schedule a 1on1 with you boss and express this (once you might have found a new position). Idk what your boss is like, but it doesn't hurt to be honest bro. Suffering through a job you hate is a torture unlike any. Best of luck man. This might sound odd, but do you do much physical exercise? There's nothing quite like hitting the gym and lifting weights (or whatever you like), to get things pumping and getting dopamine hits. Personally I find it a great way to not think about work and may help. IANAT Of course you can find something else. There’s a 0% chance that you’re incapable of getting another job. That’s a lie you’re telling yourself so you can continue being miserable. Start looking today — before you quit. Like others said, chill and find a new gig. If they fire you all the better with the extra cash. But first you have to chage the mindset. My realization is that, I need to be responsible to myself first. My family is second in order. My close friends is third, and then it goes on. The fucking job is at least out of Ring 5. Once you realize that, you would agree that you simply should not let Ring 0 suffer for the sake of some Ring 6 or 7. And then you will start do paragraph 1. The best strategy is to find a new gig ASAP, but push it to 4-6 weeks before starting, then figure out a way to let the current company lay you off and pay some $$. Your manager and company obviously don't give you a fuck so let them pay you. > All of this has caused me to spiral into depression the last 1.5 years. Is it possible to get out of this situation? Honestly, I'd doubt that working with legacy code simply causes you to feel depressed. You might have an actual depression and changing jobs might just make things worse. Go see some therapist, at least do some online screening for symptoms of depression. I've had a very good time at my first job where my only task was to maintain a horrible legacy Java codebase because I wasn't depressed. I've had some tough months in my current job at a startup, working with modern NodeJS, Python + ML, Docker stack because I was depressed. Yes it is possible and you will make it thru. You are on a journey of self discovery and enlightenment and you recognize that something is wrong, that your life is out of balance with your values. That is a huge step. This is big psychic pain which is a real thing like real pain is when you break a leg. You are also experiencing something called "learned helplessness". Learned helplessness and depression are inevitable responses to long term stress. Inevitable means every human will experience it. You are stuck in a shitty job you hate and can't get out of and have no control over. The lack of control piece is fundamental to that stress. This is the rat in the shock box experiment. The rat becomes depressed because it can't control or stop the shocks. You know you are depressed like the rat in the box... so take this very seriously and seek out a therapist and even ask your doctor about medication. The therapist will teach you skills to understand yourself and strategies to cope or change.. and the medications will probably help. Start with the professionals: a therapist and a medical doctor. Eventually you learn that the box is a lie and you can step out of it at anytime and go off free from the trap. Try to find a new job before quitting. You could try awitching teams internally. Try being indifferent - you're getting paid anyways, who cares if the system is a piece of crap. Or try being angry - fuck those guys for pushing all that work on you. I've hated my job for the past 6 or 7 years. It's not going to be much better anywhere else. Even bouncing from team to team internally doesn't really make it better since they all have problems. The way to think about this is imagine someone from a 3d world country, living in poverty on the borderline of starvation, and how EXSTATIC they would be to be in your situation. Having a full stomach, roof over their head, disposable income, and a day job where you sit in a chair? Sounds like heaven. But you don't feel the same, despite being in the that situation. So it naturally follows that your depression is either a frame of mind, or something intrinsic to you, i.e not job dependent. Switching jobs can possibly cause you to not be depressed, but this is a bet that you actually don't have a problem vs sweeping the problem under a rug with a chance of occurring later, which is not a safe bet to take. As such, you should first and foremost seek therapy and psychological evaluation to figure out why you feel that way. It could be stress related, or it could be something else. For me, what I though was depression was actually a combination of ADHD and being on the spectrum and stress as a result of that. It is a challenge to deal with software that is not common, but that may be a sign that they trust you to handle it. You do not give a barely-competent junior tasks like that, you would trust it to someone who has what it takes to dig in. Also, to add to the above, you would not want incompetent people maintaining legacy applications. Those typically exist because they are stable, because they work, and their owner expects that to continue. All of this leads me to think that maybe you are actually more valued than you believe. With that in mind, may I ask what exactly is it that you find frustrating about the job? The your job is to find a new job is the nice, rational answer but it's not what most people are able to do when feelings are in the way. You are probably feeling so mant emotions, I'll dare one guess: feeling disrespected since you wrote how they are pushing this undesirable project on you. It's not easy to look for a job when emotionally charged, so I would set aside a space with silence and focus on the feelings. Repeat for a few days. Processing the emotions will help. Look for something better. The jobs like that can make you feel defeated but there is always something out there you can interview for. Then quit. The fanciful suggestions about rewriting legacy apps in some fashionable new tool are fantasies. It never works other than for trivial apps I had a similar thing and it was literally causing my eyesight to go. Just bail. Grab something new. Even if the reason for your unhappiness is unreasonable it doesn’t matter, it’s not worth staying at a place that makes you physically unhappy. How to turn a pit of misery and doom into an exciting challenge that
makes you want to jump out of bed each morning? Talk to your bosses. Explain the situation (as above is perfect - keep it short and sweet) Suggest that if you leave they won't find a better replacement because
the problem is structural. And that if you stay you'll probably burn
out soon and that won't help anyone. Ergo: the project is doomed every which way. Except for one hope: Ask permission to rebuild it from the ground up using modern tools and software
engineering. Ask for one or two additional helpers to build a small team
to do: Full system analysis of what it's supposed to be doing Requirements finding to identify what needs removing or updating Building a POC replacement alongside the legacy Implement using all the fun things, including AI assisted code translation From this system's POV you're probably the last hope. If they say no
then; You tried You can quit with a clean conscience and escaped a slow miserable death That is irresponsible advice. What if it loses them their job and they struggle to get an equivalent job? What if they have any financial responsibilities? Great advice if you can change careers or easily slip into another position (which they've said they're worried they can't). Fine advice if you're a hippy hobo like me. Hopefully they can find some other motivating force apart from the tech. Read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... Concentrate on other goals like learning how to influence the business, rather than technical goals. > That is irresponsible advice. "Well, son, a funny thing about regret is That it's better to regret
something you have done Than to regret something you haven't done."
"And by the way, if you see your mom this weekend,,," Regrets are hard to measure - the things you didn't do are usually hypothetical and often only occur due to perfect hindsight - using information you didn't have at the time you made your choice. Optimising for immeasurables is not a good path to success in my opinion (and I have some external measures of success in my own life, plus some failures). Depending on the application, this can be easier said than done. My company has a lot of legacy apps. To de-risk and modernize they decided to write a replacement for one of the bigger ones. I first heard about it probably 12 years ago, after it got its first client and had already been in the works for quite some time. From what I can tell, they are still working on it, but the strong push behind it has faded, and the legacy app still exists and runs a vast majority of the workload. They put millions into it. If the rebuild route doesn’t seem like it will work (OP might know this without the conversation), I think education is another viable path. When I don’t know much about a system, I don’t want to work on it. OP sounds the similar. Taking the time to learn about it and become the expert can make the tasks seem less daunting and can allow a person to find creative solutions or better ways to do things, working inside the existing systems. For example, we had a legacy ITSM system everyone hated, so did I, until I spent time with it. I got a project working with the guy who had been running it for 10 years. I was able to learn from him, I got the white papers on it and read about the various ways things work, and was able to build things in there to solve problems I had, and our team had. In some places I went to the code to see how something worked, because the documentation wasn’t clear. In other cases, I ran a series of tests to better understand certain features. The fear and uncertainty around working within the platform went away, and I started to enjoy it. I became the go-to person in the company on some parts of it, because I took the time to get good at it. 9 times out of 10, when I hate something, it’s covering up for a lack of knowledge and fear around it. Then I have a choice, I can be depressed and miserable, run away, or take it on and learn/grow until the fear subsides and the depression linked to it fades. > 9 times out of 10, when I hate something, it’s covering up for a
lack of knowledge and fear around it. Good point, I've experienced that. Equally I've experienced great
frustration at things I can't understand, not from stupidity
or lack of trying, but because the information is guarded or lost. Interestingly we're getting back to the roots of why Stallman
first set out on the Free Open Software mission. The OP mentioned difficulty with opaque/obscure proprietary systems.
I wonder if that's a factor at play? Definitely a factor. He is working on something he does not work on because it is impossible to look online for help and resource. This is frustration. Been there and still continue to be there. What could my advice be worth then? I work for my dad. It is a different world. But in a way, I am trying to make things work. How do I put this? Your feelings are a result of your frustration. Frustration can lead you to either anger or sadness. In your case, it is sadness. Anger gets work done. Sadness gets you go to connect more with those around you. And that includes looking for help like you are doing. Frustration, frustration, frustration ... from having certain *expectations*, and yet finding a world completely different from those expectations. We can call it culture shock for lack of a better term because it has the same symptoms. Let's rewind the clock. Turn back your expectations. Turn down your expectations. And reassess. You are not working on the greatest tech in the world. You are not that great to begin with. A great person can go through mud and come out to the other side because a great person is humble and less frustrated and does not have a problem with the disgust and difficulty of mud. You are working on old tech. You are having to solve a problem no one can solve normally. You have to work a really long time to get this problem solved. It is not hard. It just takes a long time. And makes you feel like you don't know much. It is just really hard work and you wished you already knew how to do it. Plus, you have so many great ideas and no opportunities to implement them. And this piece of garbage tech is completely different from your ideas. And that is more frustrating. You can't even fix it. But when was fixing the tech into your great idea even a choice... or a thought? Why did you even think that you could do this? Because you saw some stupid hacker friend who generated a great idea and great attention? And you are never going to get attention so now you hate your job? GROW up. You are not living a fable. You are living a reality that never gets lauded or talked about. Shun the ideas. Discipline yourself. There is a task that needs to get done. And it does not need greatness. It just needs discipline. Give that discipline some time. Soon it will morph to creativity in the boundaries you will soon learn exist. Then ... you can have your ideas. (This is a note to me. Sorry if I came across too hard on you.) Find a new job. Then tell those guys to jam it! im in a similar situation. i just do my job, and then focus on what i want to learn, while I find a new job A ton of people are probably asking themselves if you wouldn’t be the new guy on their team. What does this mean? Sorry it was sort of joke, cause the problems that you describe are extremely common, and people running those teams really struggle to keep people on. Anyways, you should try both to find a new job, and (since it could last a little bit), try to improve your situation internally. Also, when you interview for your next job, make sure you ask the devs what it’s like to work there, what’s the general code quality, is there a bunch of “legacy” stuff. People generally open up when it’s bad… you should find some bits of internal motivation (even if just improving your willpower or reducing the amount of shitty code in the universe) while you’re looking for better place. But in bigger picture you shouldn’t expect the job to entertain you. It is an infantile position. Employees are paid to bring something meaningful to the table, not to have fun. Generally speaking. Get onto some open source work or ask around to see if there’s any startups you can help for free from which you can learn more up to date tech. Only you can change this situation. I didn't downvote (I don't think I even have the reputation to do that), but it's probably because you're advocating something that takes more energy but doesn't make the situation any better. Getting into open source work or working for a startup for free means doing more work for absolutely 0 compensation, some percentage of which will still be drudgery and annoying tech debt, while still wasting 40 hours a week doing something the OP hates. The chances are almost 0 that this helps the OP in any way. Putting that same energy towards getting a new job or learning - which could involve some amount of open source work but isn't pointlessly pouring time down the drain for someone else's benefit - or therapy or exercise or almost anything else, is more likely to be beneficial. I’m curious - what is it about this that’s causing downvotes? It was meant to be helpful.