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After 7 years in the IT industry as a programmer and team leader I felt
really burnt out and couldn\'t explain why. This post will be a self
reflection about that topic. It will also cover my early time in the
industry.
Since I remember I always was a self taught person. I used to love the
music, extreme sports and anything related to improving your personal
skills. I didn\'t find competition and team sports much fun. The self
growth part drove me though. I loved freedom of such activities, the
fact that there was no training plan or a single path to follow. You had
to pick your own.
Back in 2015 I studied management engineering which was a weird mix of
classes that supposed to prepare students to manage companies, design
products, prepare patent documents, do marketing research all the way to
project management, production and optimization of logistics. I found
these studies quite interesting but due to lack of understanding on the
Polish job market, it was quite difficult to find a company who wanted
someone just like that. You were responsible to take something out of
it, pick a field of interests and craft your way based on the knowledge
you gathered.
I really wanted to find some internship in project management and failed
for over a year so I had to change my plans. At first, I tried to get
myself exposed on local NGOs, one of them was [Project Management
Institute](https://pmi.org.pl/oddzialy/gdansk/) who did their charity
activity such as [English Camp](https://english-camp.pl/) using agile
methodologies and act as asynchronous teams of volunteers. It was great
to help others and learn at the same time and a pleasure to work and
learn from experienced people. Unfortunately, in my case it didn\'t help
me much on finding my dream job.
My adventure with programming started thanks to one of my friends in the
music band I was playing at the time. I found him a job at the place I
used to work. In the meantime he was looking for something else and
found a position at Intel Technology Poland. We talked about his new
role and from one word to another he gave me rough estimates of how much
he earns. We drank a lot that night. I got frustrated a bit and started
rambling about how hard it is to find something good in my field, and
then he shared me with a book about C# programming language he learned
at his computer science classes. And almost forced me to try to learn it
saying it\'s not as hard as it seems. As hesitant as I was about my
capabilities back then (after all I had nothing to do with IT apart from
gaming and using MS Office suite) I gave it a try.
My general plan about learning programming was to find a job as
developer, work there for a few months, a year max and trample my path
towards project management in that company. I dreamed about a role such
as Product Owner of Scrum Master as so much PMI members were into it.
I started as many other young software developers, by applying to any
company I could find on local job fairs. I tried to learn what they
expected in the requirements. The little I knew, my application was
refused mostly by lack of any experience, both commercial and open
source. All I did was learn from few books and try to do some simple
projects along the way. That is it. I needed something better than that.
I stumbled upon some Microsoft certificates for C# developers and I
decided to go with it. I think it was [98-361 Software Development
Fundamentals](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/98-361)
. I found some certification company in Warsaw, traveled there and
passed it the first try. It was relatively affordable and gave me some
proof I am competent to work at that field. I do recommend newcomers in
the industry to invest in cheap certificates rather than expensive
bootcamps. You will either learn a lot or make your potential employer
more willing to hire you.
My first job was UST Global Poland around 2015, a company that delivers
it solutions and outsources their developers to big corporations such as
Intel Technology. Our local Intel Technology Poland, located in Gdansk
refused my application so did many other companies, so I tried my luck
there. They had a small team of 2-3 developers who worked for Intel
Deutschland in Munich and I was the third employee in the Gdansk branch.
As you might imagine there was no internship program nor any idea what I
could do so I was paid to just learn ASP.NET and Entity Framework based
on online courses. It blew my mind at first. \"You want to pay me for my
self improvement? Awesome!\". I can surely tell that was WAY better than
my previous jobs and once they got me into my first project for Intel it
was quite rewarding for my needs. For someone who had to take a loan to
pay out anything above \$1000 (I literally took a loan to pay out my
bass guitar once), that was huge.
I loved the idea that your job as a developer is to solve problems. The
serotonin rush after figuring out solution was great. Even when the
problems were big and frustrating, that last part of delivering solution
felt truly awesome. It took me some time to realize that my project
management future plans are much less tempting than I thought of them at
start. I sunk in.
At 2015 I got sick and I had issues with virtually every part of my life
other than work. I bet my time and energy into it entirely as the single
thing I felt improvement over time. For the next few years I spend every
free hour to learn and expand my competences. It was awesome years and I
meet so many great people along the way.
From mainly C# developer I become a full-stack almost instantly.
Frontend was much more pleasant to work with for the junior developer
due to how fast you could verify whether your code works or not and the
fact you have a visual feedback of your actions constantly. The learning
curve was there but still. I started shifting my interests towards
JavaScript, Angular and React frameworks.
Over time I started have a dejavu more and more often. Every web related
project had similar issues, similar job to be done. Add a new table,
write an API endpoint, add some front-end part, upgrade framework or a
tool you need, improve database performance, or modify simple SQL stored
procedure. At first I was bombarded with issues I felt challenging but
the longer I did that, the less challenges I experienced. And so I
switched some technologies, frameworks, exposed myself into new ideas.
Satisfaction was stabily decreasing though.
In 2021 I decided I am tired of the industry as I saw it. Huge
corporation suck the blood out of young, energetic, ambitious people and
try to shape them to fit their needs. For many it works great, to me it
was always difficult to leave my autonomy behind to fit into code of
conducts, rules, political correctness of these places. I wanted
something fresh, something new. I rejected raise I waited for at Luxoft
where I was team leader of small project in AMD Technology and decided
to start my own consultancy business.
I found awesome customer at the south of Poland,
[Emphie](https://emphie.com/) based on Silesia region at beatiful city
of Gliwice where I spend next year or so. The way they operated was so
refreshing to me. Marlena Chlost, CEO of that small software house was
able to combine [charity](https://naszachatka.pl/), working on own
[chess platform](https://chessgrow.com/) along with commercial activity
of a software house for smaller companies and startups. Now THAT is a
mission. Don\'t get me wrong, it\'s not as if big companies don\'t have
a mission from time to time. Its just another level when whole company
is aware of what it is because you act on it personaly and you as a
leader feel responsible for your crew, team and every single employer.
[Emphie](https://emphie.com/) opened me onto the world of startups and
young companies with very little of legacy code. I could really spread
my wings and help with architecture, infrastructure, sometimes even
mentoring of our customer\'s interns or give some presentation. It felt
truly awesome at times. I figured it was not the projects nor
technologies I had problems with but a corporate culture. Also, the fact
that startups need an external help as a kickup start at the beginning
meant that the projects were quite short or we ended up delivering first
proof of concept or iteration and leave it to internal employees hired
along the way. Usually I had to help our customer for 4-5 months and
move on to another project in different industry, culture and/or
business requirements. That constant change was so refreshing compared
to my previous projects where I usually spend 2-3 years maintenance it
kept me interested for the whole project period.
Although I had great fun in Emphie everything that\'s good comes to an
end. As much as I loved working with startups, I think my burnout got me
regardless of that. Almost 2 full years of COVID restrictions and remote
work at home made me adventurous, with strong desire to meet new people
and just live my life without a computer for a moment. I also feel it
gets more and more difficult to me to take some time and learn something
new after 8 hours at work so I hope I will use that time to learn new
things as well.
Mental health is way more important than money. Keep that in mind while
being stuck in your project or employer forever. If you feel no
satisfaction today it is very likely that you will regret you haven\'t
changed things you wanted sooner.
I decided to give myself few months off and see how it goes. I also
developed huge interest in Linux community, which made me realize that
new challenges awaits right behind the corner. Maybe web is not for me
after all? Maybe I should learn Go, C or Rust and see whether that\'s
for me? I guess I will revisit that blog at some point to give you
follow up on that.