Scene: Surprise meeting with the project owner 0-3 days before the go-live date
“Hey team, the business and I have decided to postpone the project release by n=1-3 months because [they aren’t ready for it / it isn’t finished /regulatory reasons]. And since we have some extra time now, we can tie up all the loose ends on this project (i.e., ‘we’ve added n+1 months worth of backlog items to the MVP’).”
I’m still a greenish dev, so maybe this is normal, but I’ve had the same story going on for over a year now, and it’s really starting to burn me out. In the beginning, I was optimistic. Now I just hope for the project to fail, or me to get off somehow, but this thing just won’t die.
Anyone with experience on similar projects able to share words of advice? Do they ever end up working out? Seems there’s a death spiral, since we are always rushing to a deadline, forgoing tests and quality but never cleaning up our mess because we’re already behind. Yet I somehow feel like I’m the crazy one for thinking this 6-month “quick” side project turned 2+ year half-rewrite will have trouble meeting it’s Nth deadline.
Look for another job.
Companies like that are very unlikely to change their view that engineering’s quality and sustainability practices are a perpetual waste of money.
That, and product doesn’t know what they’re doing, and they’re okay with making engineering also suffer for it.
Nor do they care in practice about the engineers getting burned out.
After you leave, when you glance back at the company at any time for the next 5+ years, you will see that they have learned pretty much nothing.
I’ve been burned out once, and I’ll never let it happen to me again, or anyone I work with. It’s like depression; it’s an indescribable experience.
Here’s one self-test to measure how burned out you are: https://www.peoplestorming.com/burnout-assessment.
High on all fronts on that test, which does not surprise me. Though what you describe sounds worse than what I have. I’m just generally tired and pissed off, despite thinking myself a normally happy guy.
I’ll take this as my nudge to put my casual job search into overdrive.