[artiscode]

Your story is close to home. I was part of a team that integrated our newly-acquired startup with a massive, complex and needlessly distributed enterprise system that burned me out.

Being forced to do things that absolutely did not make sense(CS wise) was what I found to be most exhausting. Having no other way than writing shitty code or copying functionality into our app led me to an eventual burnout. My whole career felt pointless as I was unable to apply any of my skills and expertise that I learned over all these years, because everything was designed in a complex way. Getting a single property into an internal API is not a trivial task and requires coordination from different teams as there are a plethora of processes in place. However I helped to build a monstrous integration layer and everything wrong with it is partly my doing. Hindsight is 20/20 and I now see there really was no other, better way to do it, which feels nice in a schadenfreude kind of way.

I sympathise with your point about not understanding what is expected of an average engineer nowadays. Should you take initiative and help manage things, are you allowed to simply write code and what should you expect from others were amongst my pain points. I certainly did not feel rewarded for going the extra mile, but somehow felt obliged because of my "senior" title.

I took therapy, worked on side projects and I'm now trying out a manager role. My responsibilities are pretty much the same, but I don't have to write code anymore. It feels empowering to close my laptop after my last Zoom meeting and not think about bugs, code, CI or merging tomorrow morning because it's release day tomorrow.

But hey, grass is always greener on the other side! I think taking therapy was one of my life's best decisions after being put through the ringer. Perhaps it will help you as well!