Honestly, it feels really strange to not be working at my previous employer anymore. I have a lot of feelings about my time there and I don't really know how to interpret them in a way that makes sense to me.

I am tired. I've never felt more tired than I have lately. Part of that is obviously that I have a toddler. He's almost two, and I love him to death. He brightens up every day and he is an obnoxious little goober. There's the associated sleep deprivation that goes along with that. But I don't think that's really the core of why I've been so tired. Yeah, I think it contributes physically. I literally get less sleep. But I think my work at my previous employer has also contributed significantly. At the core of it, I've been burnt out. I've actually never felt such burnout in my life as I have in the last year to year and a half.

How bad it actually got

There were times where I'd come home and I was just angry. Sometimes I'd put my bike away and stay out in the garage for an extra twenty minutes because I couldn't keep it inside, yelling, throwing things around, beating up a punching bag I had in there for a while. And I'm not an angry person. I really am not. I don't like being angry. I avoid things that make me angry. But you can't exactly avoid going into work, especially when you have a family to feed.

What I think caused it

Part of this was probably brought on by poor management decisions. We had a lot of really high-stress events. There was a lot of overriding of our priority system to please higher-ups, and not just in a "this is now highest priority, work on it" kind of way. More like rolling high-priority overrides where we'd get halfway through one urgent thing and then the next urgent thing would come in and we'd have to crunch to finish the previous one before pivoting. It happened a lot. That was exhausting mentally.

There was also a lot of really bad technical debt that I was unable to help fix. And it wasn't just debt I wanted to fix but wasn't allowed to. It was debt that was actively making it so that cards that could normally be finished in a matter of hours would take a week to a month, because the stack was inherently hostile to change and to testing. I really wish we had been allowed the time to go and actually rectify some of those things. But we never were.

The guilt about leaving

I'm glad it's not my problem anymore, personally. But part of me feels a little guilty, because now it's solely my teammates' problems. I feel this strange obligation, not just to help them, but to fix it for them, to give them an environment that's deserving of them. I was unable to do that. Not for lack of ability, but just because we weren't allowed to.

The fundamental issue

I've thought about this quite a lot over the last two and a half years. I think ultimately what's wrong with my previous employer is a fundamental lack of trust in their engineers. A lot of decisions are made from very high up, not just business decisions, but technical and engineering decisions, that management won't trust to anyone but the topmost engineers.

We did a time survey for all the engineers to see how much time each group spent on different kinds of tasks. Our best engineers were doing no programming whatsoever. Now, I recognize there's a certain amount of architecture and refinement work that they need to do. They have the most context about the domain and are best suited to reason about business logic. But all of that was only trusted to the most senior engineers, which meant that the rest of us did essentially zero problem-solving. It was: here's a card, do the card.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I have this weird thing where I want to be able to problem-solve and maybe I'm being bratty about it. I don't know. But I love problem-solving. I love abstract thinking. I love taking a legitimately hard problem and breaking it down into a series of good abstractions that we can reason clearly about. It's elegant. It's inherently mathematical in nature. And I got to do none of that at my previous employer. Which is super frustrating.

What I hope changes

I really hope that they change soon. There are a lot of good people left there. Honestly, all the engineering people I worked with were awesome. I would absolutely work with them again. But there was a lack of trust from management, and there was also a lack of protection for us engineers from the whims of higher-ups, whether that was c-suite or not, I'm not sure.

There's also a lot that needs fixing in how they approach legacy systems. I'd say three-fourths of the applications I worked on during my tenure shouldn't have existed in the first place. They were built to accommodate member requests that weren't really common, or were slight variations on things that already existed and could have been rolled into existing projects. And there were lots of applications that should have died a long time ago and been rebuilt. Things need a lot of help. I hope they figure it out someday.

Moving on

At this point I'm just trying to accept that it's not my problem anymore and to grow from what I've learned there, and I've learned a lot, genuinely. But a lot of what I've learned are ways not to do things, which is valuable in its own respect.

I want nothing more than to encourage a culture of passion and excellence around me, and at my previous employer I felt unable to do that. There were times when things were so stressful, and I had so much anxiety, that it was next to impossible to even look at my work laptop. I've never felt such agonizing anxiety for such a long period of time in my life. Honestly, it's making me feel a little anxious just thinking about it.

Anyway, we're past that and I'm moving on to new chapter. My next opportunity seems a lot more promising culturally. There seems to be a real desire for excellence and a lot of passionate people there (including some folks I've worked with before!). I think I need an environment like that to heal. I'm very much ready to move on.