I’m still in software, but I left the toxic combination of health information technology and a troubled mid-sized EHR company that was being further ruined by PE and bad leadership.
My new job is a start-up, very small team with a pretty run of the mill stack. I expected to come in hot and heavy to get them up to speed in a flurry of shock and awe. There was no pressure, no red tape, no standups or scrum ceremony, I didn’t have hours and hours of meetings every day anymore, just a set of priorities and some rough expectations on timelines. I had no fucking idea what to do. Not because the requirements were bad or the code was difficult or the expectations were unreasonable, but because I had been jumping from one dumpster fire after another for honestly two decades and thus had no idea how to prioritize or manage time outside of an emergency or urgent deadline. I absolutely collapsed and struggled for a few months to really get much done. Fortunately, my boss is an old friend who had been through the same thing and expected my transition to be difficult, not because the new job is hard but because I would need to unlearn so much bad behavior and process my trauma/stress. At the same time, I realized how that constant sense of urgency hamstrung the way I approached problems as an engineer. It was clear I didn’t work “best” under stress, I had merely learned how to survive in that environment. That was my great re-awakening.
Yes. I started taking medication, which helped pretty much everywhere in my life.
It also helped me take a step back and realize that sometimes I unconsciously stayed at jobs due to the continually changing (typically stressful) environment.
Regular exercise and medication. Ruthless self imposed deadlines on everything both personal and work related to help keep focus. Even then, accepting there’s no silver bullet and sometimes I’ll have to deal with the consequences of having this stupid monkey brain constantly throwing random things at me.
Just run a second LLM pass on it and adjust the writing style by feeding it examples. Then run a final manual pass on it and remove the unnecessary parts.
Write shorter. Half the words would have worked.
Besides that, it’s embarrassing for me to read, because our spot on describes me.
I have one coping strategy: when I’m taking care of my kid, or it’s a day off work where I’m grumpy because I left my dopamines at the office: I tell myself, I don’t get to enjoy computers all day. Knowing that resets my expectations and I can better enjoy family time.
Took my entire 6 month paternity leave and 3 months of work before I finally “got it”. Still a struggle. But just being not cranky is a gigantic life improvement, my wife says.
