I think I’ve posted something similar to this before, so apologies if I’m repeating what I said previously. This is also probably a “first world problem”, I fully acknowledge that I’m in a privileged position.

I have been in the tech industry since the early 2010’s and I can definitely say that technology was always a passion of mine. I loved almost all aspects: hardware, architecture, programming, scripting, design, and even documentation. In some ways, that’s still true. My homelab is still one of my happy places. However, from a career standpoint, I’m pretty done.

At my previous company, I survived 4 layoffs, somehow. Every time layoff news leaked, I would end up staying up almost all night to find out if I still had a job to go to. I would check if my team members still had profiles in the company portal, so I’d know what mess I’d be coming into if I was retained and the rest of my team was not. Eventually, after the fourth layoff round, with another one planned in the coming months, I decided to apply for jobs elsewhere. It was mostly because of the mental issues the layoffs were giving me. I otherwise loved my coworkers; even my manager and skip-level. I even sort of liked what I did for my job at the time, even with all the layoff bullshit.

Anyway, by some stroke of luck, after nearly 6 months of applying, I finally landed an interview with a new company. I studied my ass off since I knew part of the interview process was a coding session, and somehow, I landed the job. It was the only response I got to over 300 applications, and it was a nice pay bump, too. I was very lucky, I was starting to get very demoralized and it even started to affect my job performance.

The team members I now have, manager included, are pretty good to work with. The rest of leadership, not so much, but that’s how it is these days. The soul crushing part of it for me is the drive for ultimate productivity at any cost. In the year or so I’ve been here, leadership has increased how much they’re micromanaging every aspect of our jobs. Constant escalations with little warning, watching our individual scrum point burndowns, and enforcing the use of LLMs for almost everything. I can’t even be myself at work, I have completely hidden that I’m trans from everyone due to the whole DEI crackdown bullshit. While my company still seems to have support networks for queer people, I just don’t feel comfortable revealing that to them while Trump is in office.

There was also a round of layoffs, so I’ve now survived a layoff at the new company, making it a grand total of 5 layoffs I’ve survived in the past 7 years.

Honestly, this round of layoffs didn’t make me all that anxious. It didn’t make me stay up all night in worry. I’ve gotten used to it, and in fact, the severance package, I’d later come to learn, was very good. Even though I had only been at the new company for about a year, I would have been able to get nearly 6 months off. In the back of my head, I was slightly hoping or wishing that it would be me, as bad and fucked up as that sounds.

I’m burned out. Since I had a very bad injury in 2022 (and had to take around two months off), I haven’t taken more than 5 consecutive days off. Before that, I barely took any time off. It feels like if I take time off, I’ll fall behind and end up on a PIP and then be let go without much severance, if any. I’m struggling to be motivated at work, and it feels like any minute now, I’m going to have some sort of breakdown.

I have no other marketable skills outside of tech. I like to do GIS work, but I have no real long-term professional experience in that regard. I’d love to do something for my local county, but I have no idea what that would be other than another tech job that I’ll get laid off or fired from eventually. I’d like to maybe do something outdoors, but those jobs are very difficult to get and I have a bit of a bad knee from the 2022 injury. I daydreamed about working at Costco (at the retail level), but I know it’s also a hard place to get a job at. The job market as a whole, is entirely fucked, as I’m sure everyone knows. It’s hard to see anything bright in the future. The only things that keep me going back to work are my family and pets. If I had no one to support, I probably would have moved to the middle of nowhere and turned my back to society by now.

I don’t really get much sleep these days, to say the least.