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.
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.
I agree that I care too much. I've always had a very challenging time decoupling my life from my job. It works the other way around too though, where when things are going well at work and I enjoy the work I do, I feel excellent even outside of the office. But when it doesn't, I don't feel well at all. I really need to learn how to leave work at the office because to be honest this will probably not be my last job that sucks.
>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.
That is the strange part. My boss who is head of product for my organization has given me good feedback so far. It's mainly just me who is beating myself up. But it's mainly because I have a strong feeling I know what is to come. If we can't even ship a few trivial GET endpoints in six months, how the hell are we going to implement more complex API endpoints in any meaningful amount of time? Is the whole project just going to get scrapped when they finally realize I wasn't exaggerating about how long things will take if a few simple endpoints take this long to ship?
> While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it.
Definitely doing my best here. Long walks listening to some podcasts have helped a lot. Spending time with my family has helped a lot too. But above all I'm trying to stay positive, because I feel like being negative and constantly being in a bad mood is just going to make things worse.
Fully agree with the second point. For me, learning another language (and a hard one for English speakers) has given me a new outlet for my brain and something difficult and rewarding to do.
In the past I would've given the majority of my "brain power" to just work, and while I have enjoyed that at certain points when I've learnt a lot, I feel like it is not great for mental health and well-roundedness long term. Especially as you say caring about something you don't own where more work =/= more gain.
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.
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
One good developer can start a shift but only if there's absolute buy-in from management (and you) to carve out the time the rest of the team needs to get up to speed.
Since you say the current developers are also decent but otherwise inexperienced with the kind of work you expect there's a chance that with the right organisational changes and support (i.e.: allowing the experienced new developer to work more as a mentor than being responsible for deliveries right away) and given time those people could become more effective.
The issue will land squarely on the engineering management though, they need to accept the current team is not up to par for the deliveries while not making them scared for their jobs (that would just make the current developers cynical, and doing whatever they can to claw back power before retirement). It's a long road ahead that requires a very competent engineering management team to pull off.
Ah, then I'd say this is definitely not a good job for you.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your peace of mind.
Been there very recently. The very difficult tech job market makes this even more stressful now.
Concrete things that helped me:
- Prioritize savings if you haven’t already. Do everything you can to have a cash cushion.
Not having a cushion will multiply all other stresses.
- Work your contacts and network, If you don’t have one, start building one. You may be surprised even faint acquaintances can help
- Prioritize self-care. Exercise, eat healthy, don’t fall into alcohol or drug traps. And if you do fall into them, forgive yourself and try again
- De-stress your current job to the extent you are able
- Take time out in your day to do something you perceive as positive
This probably sounds trite and easy, but when you’re in the thick of it it can be very hard. Get the body and savings account in shape, the mind will have a better foundation to heal.
My money is that the vast majority of people on this board have been in your exact same spot, including yours truly.
What to do:
a) First and foremost: make finding your next opportunity your full-time job, above and beyond your present full-time job. And take the time to build your professional footprint for your next opportunity too. Let me explain: do you have an online portfolio of your work? If no, start one right now, and maintain it forever. Do you have a blog where you talk about your market/industry/profession; which existing tools are best of breed, which ones can be improved, and which ones are missing? How AI is affecting your market/industry/profession? Publish white papers and case studies. How's your GitHub?
b) Secondly use this opportunity as a training ground for Life. This is Life at its finest, what will make the difference will be your reactions and responses to these events. Read about the ancient Stoics (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero), Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli (very misunderstood), Jung. Make this the most consequential job of your Life.
c) Related to b) above, tweak your language paying special attention to the language you use. Just from your title, "Survive" and "hate" are problematic words. Read Shane Parrish's works.
I am not saying that it's easy, quite the opposite. Think of this job as a short-term problem and you are building a long-term solution that will take care of this and much more. In order to be successful, you will need to change your worldviews, your belief systems, and imprints.
> 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.
Seconded. No job is worth damaging yourself permanently like that, even if it's "just" a temporary burnout, pull the ejection handle. It's a life safety issue.
Start looking before you leave, preferably, but at the very least scale back your commitment so you don't burn out in the mean time. If it's bad, quit. This is why you need to have savings and spend less than you earn.
Sorry to hear about your situation. I had a couple of times been in similar situation. It sounds like you are getting burned out.
The only way to cope is to only deliver the minimum, and not care too much about it. This is risky as there is a chance that the minimum delivery and no care attitude could filter into other areas of your life.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a job soon after.
It's wild that you are on antidepressants because of your job. Have you looked in to side effects and how hard they are to quit? I think you should quit both the antidepressants and the job. If you can't quit the job, don't make it the source of your personal worth, like other commenters say. You're selling your time for a salary. It's not that serious. If you're not getting any negative feedback, they're probably happy with your effort.
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.
I don't want to give out too many details of my own situation. I am in a similar situation. I've decided not to worry about it and just get the cash and bide my time. I now vibe code almost everything at work and listen to comedy podcasts. If things need to be done quick, I "ramp up" until the panic situation passes.
Most of the work I have done will be thrown away after 5-10 years (I have written some really nicely optimised software, that worked perfectly and companies have just thrown it in the bin because of management doesn't appreciate this). So I've given up caring.
Wow, what a story. I'd say part of it is either you are not communicating with enough clarity or there a people in your team or above who are actively trying to not make it happen.
This definitely helps and honestly should be done even the job isn't toxic! If for any reason sports is not possible, brisk walking is very effective as well.
There definitely are people out there. A lot of skilled individuals in Sweden are currently unemployed. But whether or not companies have the budget to hire them is a different story.
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.
> My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
This was my first reaction as well. But it's relatable. I've held myself to similar expectations and caused a lot of stress in the past.
You think the customer is thinking you'll be done in six months? Only if they've never bought enterprise software before. Their expectations are dramatically lower than what you might be holding yourself to. In fact, the expectations may even be lower than what is in the contract.
Even if you moved heaven and earth and shipped an API tomorrow, they likely aren't going to be able to start integrating it right away. That requires work on their end that needs to be planned into a quarter etc...
I wish I were joking that I literally haven't received a delivery of four GET endpoints I wrote requirements for six months ago. The problem is that nobody seems to understand why this is an issue. We are constantly advertising to our customers that we are moving to API-based integrations and that the future of our product is being able effectively use our product without a user interface, and yet the management team is okay with four GET endpoints not being shipped in six months.
The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.
OP said in a comment that the devs are approaching retirement and their expertise is in COBOL and other really really legacy systems. I doubt they’re inclined at all to start using LLMs, or anything that changes how they work.
My last job was API integration related on a government contract. I was the team lead for one of two prime vendors. The lead for the other prime vendor was also the projects project manager. That PM was super toxic.
So the clients wanted me to do one thing (run operations), my supervisors wanted me to focus less on technical contributions and more on administration and leadership, the PM wanted me to be a junior developer. The PM knew I was a supervisor as nd knew of the client expectations and still wanted me to do something else. He even thought he was my supervisor even though my bosses were meeting with him every two weeks and told him the reality. The dude lied to the clients and withheld client communications until I was fired. I think he is autistic because he perceptions of reality were frequently wrong, his only management style was hazing people, and he confused lots of things between various people and work assignments.
I really miss my team because they were awesome people and I kind of miss the income. I really loathed that I was leaving my people behind in such a toxic environment. I was super relieved to not have to do that job anymore though. I had been considering walking away from it two months prior to termination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finding hobbies and working out didnt work for me. People say it works. It doesnt for me and sounds cliched.
But dont let it fool you in the manner that these things work for others but not for me, I must be doomed then.
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?
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.
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.
> My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick.
This needs addressing sooner rather than later, either by fixing the problem(s), managing to care less, or getting out of dodge. It sounds like you want option 3 but are having trouble finding somewhere to go to.
For fixing the problem: make sure that you definitely understand the problem. This sounds odd (surely you know what is going on in your own head?) but it is often difficult to see the rotten needle of wood amongst the treestack. Are there other problems with the job, and this is the final straw or the squeaky wheel?
> the slow and low quality outputs
> it may be that the only way to fix is to address the inputs
Yes, you may be looking too much at the symptoms of the problem - the slow and low quality outputs, and the only way to fix those is likely to be to address the inputs by taking time out to try to retrain the team for the working patterns needed. That will mean more delay short term, because that training/practice will impact on time available for work, but could pay dividends in the medium/long term. It is worth a shot pushing that option while you are still unable to find work elsewhere: if you can't find the job/team you want, then try to mould this job/team into something better! If either the team or the management above you resist this, then there might be little you can do, but it does seem to be the way forward for the company (if they can't accept that then the company may fail, and you'll no longer have the stay/go decision to make - if management resist then make it clear that you see this as the risk of inaction).
If you can't fix it, and can't find better work elsewhere, then you might have to think about a drastic move to something else entirely, at least temporarily. This may well entail a pay/benefits cut though, so not something you can do unless quite financially secure. Very drastic, but you only have one mental health, and it can be very difficult to repair if things go to far. Your mind isn't a server that you can just pave and restore from backups!
What other people say about “trying to care less” is correct, especially trying to stop thinking about it in your personal time, but if you are anything like me then not caring feels wrong so it is very hard to turn that off (or down much).
Reference: I was suffering burn-out a couple of years ago due to a mix of work issues, personal responsibilities/stresses (ill parents, nearly lost both of them, have essentially lost one due to dementia, a lost cat (lymphoma, poor lass), and so forth), and my own mental issues (I'm “more than a tad bipolar”). Dropping to a four-day week has helped a lot, giving me more time to sort my self out or just to relax, and I've been doing that for two years. It turns out though (this is my personal “wood hidden by the trees” thing) is that I don't cope well with remote working long term, being alone with my own thoughts and no other real company (the cats help if I'm working from home, but I can't talk to them about work matters!) is not good for me. Mid/late 2020 is when I really started going down hill (though I didn't quite see it at the time). Even now I'm in the office four days a week and so are some other people, most of the people I'm working more directly with usually aren't, so I'm still effectively remote. I was starting to get a proper handle on all this when AI hoved into view, and I really don't want that for a list of reasons to long to rant about here. At some point very soon the combination of not getting on with remote and not wanting to get on with AI doing my job are going to be too much and I'll go. I'm lucky though: mortgage paid, no partner nor kids, some savings - which means I can afford to take the cut needed to just go when I need to. Heck, I might end up waiting tables or being a hospital porter, there isn't a lot that I'm qualified for that isn't going to be both remote and increasingly steeped in AI… The thought that I can do that is actually helping with the current situation, reducing the feeling that I need to do that, so keeping muddling on, doing the job while I can and putting the money safely away, is more palatable, giving me more time to research future options (or see if the balance changes much when the big AI firms start trying to recoup all that investment (https://isaiprofitable.com/) and AI-driven work looks less inexpensive).
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.
Thank you for writing this.
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.
I agree that I care too much. I've always had a very challenging time decoupling my life from my job. It works the other way around too though, where when things are going well at work and I enjoy the work I do, I feel excellent even outside of the office. But when it doesn't, I don't feel well at all. I really need to learn how to leave work at the office because to be honest this will probably not be my last job that sucks.
>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.
> Do they say they like what you do there or not?
That is the strange part. My boss who is head of product for my organization has given me good feedback so far. It's mainly just me who is beating myself up. But it's mainly because I have a strong feeling I know what is to come. If we can't even ship a few trivial GET endpoints in six months, how the hell are we going to implement more complex API endpoints in any meaningful amount of time? Is the whole project just going to get scrapped when they finally realize I wasn't exaggerating about how long things will take if a few simple endpoints take this long to ship?
> While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it.
Definitely doing my best here. Long walks listening to some podcasts have helped a lot. Spending time with my family has helped a lot too. But above all I'm trying to stay positive, because I feel like being negative and constantly being in a bad mood is just going to make things worse.
Fully agree with the second point. For me, learning another language (and a hard one for English speakers) has given me a new outlet for my brain and something difficult and rewarding to do.
In the past I would've given the majority of my "brain power" to just work, and while I have enjoyed that at certain points when I've learnt a lot, I feel like it is not great for mental health and well-roundedness long term. Especially as you say caring about something you don't own where more work =/= more gain.
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.
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
One good developer can start a shift but only if there's absolute buy-in from management (and you) to carve out the time the rest of the team needs to get up to speed.
Since you say the current developers are also decent but otherwise inexperienced with the kind of work you expect there's a chance that with the right organisational changes and support (i.e.: allowing the experienced new developer to work more as a mentor than being responsible for deliveries right away) and given time those people could become more effective.
The issue will land squarely on the engineering management though, they need to accept the current team is not up to par for the deliveries while not making them scared for their jobs (that would just make the current developers cynical, and doing whatever they can to claw back power before retirement). It's a long road ahead that requires a very competent engineering management team to pull off.
Ah, then I'd say this is definitely not a good job for you.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your peace of mind.
Been there very recently. The very difficult tech job market makes this even more stressful now.
Concrete things that helped me:
- Prioritize savings if you haven’t already. Do everything you can to have a cash cushion. Not having a cushion will multiply all other stresses.
- Work your contacts and network, If you don’t have one, start building one. You may be surprised even faint acquaintances can help
- Prioritize self-care. Exercise, eat healthy, don’t fall into alcohol or drug traps. And if you do fall into them, forgive yourself and try again
- De-stress your current job to the extent you are able
- Take time out in your day to do something you perceive as positive
This probably sounds trite and easy, but when you’re in the thick of it it can be very hard. Get the body and savings account in shape, the mind will have a better foundation to heal.
My money is that the vast majority of people on this board have been in your exact same spot, including yours truly.
What to do:
a) First and foremost: make finding your next opportunity your full-time job, above and beyond your present full-time job. And take the time to build your professional footprint for your next opportunity too. Let me explain: do you have an online portfolio of your work? If no, start one right now, and maintain it forever. Do you have a blog where you talk about your market/industry/profession; which existing tools are best of breed, which ones can be improved, and which ones are missing? How AI is affecting your market/industry/profession? Publish white papers and case studies. How's your GitHub?
b) Secondly use this opportunity as a training ground for Life. This is Life at its finest, what will make the difference will be your reactions and responses to these events. Read about the ancient Stoics (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero), Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli (very misunderstood), Jung. Make this the most consequential job of your Life.
c) Related to b) above, tweak your language paying special attention to the language you use. Just from your title, "Survive" and "hate" are problematic words. Read Shane Parrish's works.
I am not saying that it's easy, quite the opposite. Think of this job as a short-term problem and you are building a long-term solution that will take care of this and much more. In order to be successful, you will need to change your worldviews, your belief systems, and imprints.
I wish you a lot more then dumb luck.
> 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.
Seconded. No job is worth damaging yourself permanently like that, even if it's "just" a temporary burnout, pull the ejection handle. It's a life safety issue.
Start looking before you leave, preferably, but at the very least scale back your commitment so you don't burn out in the mean time. If it's bad, quit. This is why you need to have savings and spend less than you earn.
Sorry to hear about your situation. I had a couple of times been in similar situation. It sounds like you are getting burned out.
The only way to cope is to only deliver the minimum, and not care too much about it. This is risky as there is a chance that the minimum delivery and no care attitude could filter into other areas of your life.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a job soon after.
It's wild that you are on antidepressants because of your job. Have you looked in to side effects and how hard they are to quit? I think you should quit both the antidepressants and the job. If you can't quit the job, don't make it the source of your personal worth, like other commenters say. You're selling your time for a salary. It's not that serious. If you're not getting any negative feedback, they're probably happy with your effort.
I empathize. Deeply. I’ve experienced severe anxiety as well, and very high stress due an environment where I felt powerless.
What saved me (in no particular order)
1. Sport. I felt I was “burning” my stress and anxiety by doing 1h of sport a day, in nature.
2. Therapy
3. Family and friends, quality time
4. Find another job
5. Stop social media
6. Fixed sleep schedule
- upvoting sport, its a real mood stabiliser. I agree with all the others in your list and would add music (I sing) as real mood enhancer.
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.
And when growing from the bottom, compensation never seems to scale in line with responsibility. We need to be asking for way more.
You don't survive a thing that's making you sick. You quit.
No job is worth your health.
In the US, the equation isn't quite so simple. Being unemployed can mean poor or no health insurance, which is also a health risk.
The economy is not in good shape right now.
I don't want to give out too many details of my own situation. I am in a similar situation. I've decided not to worry about it and just get the cash and bide my time. I now vibe code almost everything at work and listen to comedy podcasts. If things need to be done quick, I "ramp up" until the panic situation passes.
Most of the work I have done will be thrown away after 5-10 years (I have written some really nicely optimised software, that worked perfectly and companies have just thrown it in the bin because of management doesn't appreciate this). So I've given up caring.
Wow, what a story. I'd say part of it is either you are not communicating with enough clarity or there a people in your team or above who are actively trying to not make it happen.
Wake up earlier and do sports outside before starting to work
This definitely helps and honestly should be done even the job isn't toxic! If for any reason sports is not possible, brisk walking is very effective as well.
If the job market is so competitive, then surely there's someone out there with experience building APIs?
There definitely are people out there. A lot of skilled individuals in Sweden are currently unemployed. But whether or not companies have the budget to hire them is a different story.
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.
> My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
This was my first reaction as well. But it's relatable. I've held myself to similar expectations and caused a lot of stress in the past.
You think the customer is thinking you'll be done in six months? Only if they've never bought enterprise software before. Their expectations are dramatically lower than what you might be holding yourself to. In fact, the expectations may even be lower than what is in the contract.
Even if you moved heaven and earth and shipped an API tomorrow, they likely aren't going to be able to start integrating it right away. That requires work on their end that needs to be planned into a quarter etc...
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
I wish I were joking that I literally haven't received a delivery of four GET endpoints I wrote requirements for six months ago. The problem is that nobody seems to understand why this is an issue. We are constantly advertising to our customers that we are moving to API-based integrations and that the future of our product is being able effectively use our product without a user interface, and yet the management team is okay with four GET endpoints not being shipped in six months.
The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/pattern...
OP said in a comment that the devs are approaching retirement and their expertise is in COBOL and other really really legacy systems. I doubt they’re inclined at all to start using LLMs, or anything that changes how they work.
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.
My last job was API integration related on a government contract. I was the team lead for one of two prime vendors. The lead for the other prime vendor was also the projects project manager. That PM was super toxic.
So the clients wanted me to do one thing (run operations), my supervisors wanted me to focus less on technical contributions and more on administration and leadership, the PM wanted me to be a junior developer. The PM knew I was a supervisor as nd knew of the client expectations and still wanted me to do something else. He even thought he was my supervisor even though my bosses were meeting with him every two weeks and told him the reality. The dude lied to the clients and withheld client communications until I was fired. I think he is autistic because he perceptions of reality were frequently wrong, his only management style was hazing people, and he confused lots of things between various people and work assignments.
I really miss my team because they were awesome people and I kind of miss the income. I really loathed that I was leaving my people behind in such a toxic environment. I was super relieved to not have to do that job anymore though. I had been considering walking away from it two months prior to termination.
What does your boss say? Do they think the company is doing fine?
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!
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.
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.
"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.
It also might help if you are a praying man.
Finding hobbies and working out didnt work for me. People say it works. It doesnt for me and sounds cliched. But dont let it fool you in the manner that these things work for others but not for me, I must be doomed then.
Again detach yourself and wait for better times.
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?
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.
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.
Making all of your coworkers look bad so you can be "Prometheus"? Sounds like a great way to become unemployed.
Sounds like unemployment is what he wants.
> My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick.
This needs addressing sooner rather than later, either by fixing the problem(s), managing to care less, or getting out of dodge. It sounds like you want option 3 but are having trouble finding somewhere to go to.
For fixing the problem: make sure that you definitely understand the problem. This sounds odd (surely you know what is going on in your own head?) but it is often difficult to see the rotten needle of wood amongst the treestack. Are there other problems with the job, and this is the final straw or the squeaky wheel?
> the slow and low quality outputs
> it may be that the only way to fix is to address the inputs
Yes, you may be looking too much at the symptoms of the problem - the slow and low quality outputs, and the only way to fix those is likely to be to address the inputs by taking time out to try to retrain the team for the working patterns needed. That will mean more delay short term, because that training/practice will impact on time available for work, but could pay dividends in the medium/long term. It is worth a shot pushing that option while you are still unable to find work elsewhere: if you can't find the job/team you want, then try to mould this job/team into something better! If either the team or the management above you resist this, then there might be little you can do, but it does seem to be the way forward for the company (if they can't accept that then the company may fail, and you'll no longer have the stay/go decision to make - if management resist then make it clear that you see this as the risk of inaction).
If you can't fix it, and can't find better work elsewhere, then you might have to think about a drastic move to something else entirely, at least temporarily. This may well entail a pay/benefits cut though, so not something you can do unless quite financially secure. Very drastic, but you only have one mental health, and it can be very difficult to repair if things go to far. Your mind isn't a server that you can just pave and restore from backups!
What other people say about “trying to care less” is correct, especially trying to stop thinking about it in your personal time, but if you are anything like me then not caring feels wrong so it is very hard to turn that off (or down much).
Reference: I was suffering burn-out a couple of years ago due to a mix of work issues, personal responsibilities/stresses (ill parents, nearly lost both of them, have essentially lost one due to dementia, a lost cat (lymphoma, poor lass), and so forth), and my own mental issues (I'm “more than a tad bipolar”). Dropping to a four-day week has helped a lot, giving me more time to sort my self out or just to relax, and I've been doing that for two years. It turns out though (this is my personal “wood hidden by the trees” thing) is that I don't cope well with remote working long term, being alone with my own thoughts and no other real company (the cats help if I'm working from home, but I can't talk to them about work matters!) is not good for me. Mid/late 2020 is when I really started going down hill (though I didn't quite see it at the time). Even now I'm in the office four days a week and so are some other people, most of the people I'm working more directly with usually aren't, so I'm still effectively remote. I was starting to get a proper handle on all this when AI hoved into view, and I really don't want that for a list of reasons to long to rant about here. At some point very soon the combination of not getting on with remote and not wanting to get on with AI doing my job are going to be too much and I'll go. I'm lucky though: mortgage paid, no partner nor kids, some savings - which means I can afford to take the cut needed to just go when I need to. Heck, I might end up waiting tables or being a hospital porter, there isn't a lot that I'm qualified for that isn't going to be both remote and increasingly steeped in AI… The thought that I can do that is actually helping with the current situation, reducing the feeling that I need to do that, so keeping muddling on, doing the job while I can and putting the money safely away, is more palatable, giving me more time to research future options (or see if the balance changes much when the big AI firms start trying to recoup all that investment (https://isaiprofitable.com/) and AI-driven work looks less inexpensive).