Getting so monumentally burnt out recently. It's been coming for a couple years I guess but even more so recently.
I've mentioned it but I am the tech lead for a very large piece of a business critical product. For several generations we were a nice commodity that was supported in a limited number of SKUs, but this generation our support expanded ten-fold (or more, they keep adding SKUs). About 90% of our code is common, but the last 10% can't be due to CPU/chipset differences and hardware differences. The absolute braindead PMs don't talk to each other so they scheduled all of these on top of each other. But that's only a part of the problem really. .
The bigger problem is no one in the company seems to know how to debug problems or get the right people involved. I feel like I am the only person that actually understands the product, what the error conditions translate to, and who should own the fix. Sometimes it's my team, but a lot of times it's not. And debugging this product is very complicated because it's an end-to-end product with pieces in all aspects of the hardware and software. Valuable skill for me, but I'm absolutely drowning.
Even just today I asked a team member to take a ticket because I am overrun dealing with issues. They just floundered and couldn't even be bothered to read release notes to check when a certain fix had been introduced. Threw their hands up in the ticket and told the reporter some bullshit that was way off base. So in the end I just said fuck it give it to me, and I transferred the ticket to our sustaining team. Meanwhile the dude is throwing up constant code reviews made by Claude that I simply do not have enough time to handle.
Even then .. the changes the team makes are so low impact. I asked another engineer if we could investigate some huge improvement I thought of in my head, a new architecture for our stuff that I think could solve many issues we saw. They simply said it can't be done. So I said fuck this, implemented it myself (and got it patented), got business unit buy in and got praised for such a great idea.
I know a lot of people think without them a company will fail, but this is the first time in my career I've felt both completely overwhelmed and drowning and also uniquely in a position where without me we'd actually lose business.
I don't know what the solution is here, so I'm mostly bitching. Had to write this shit down. I have a 1x1 with my manager next week where I need to at least make him aware. I actively feel like I'm drowning.
