I never truly was against work in general, it was more of a “if you don't value your worker's time enough you should not have workers in the first place” type of deal I thought about it from a early age (eg. a lot of underpaid people etc.) I also despise fixed working hours because this does not make sense but that is not the topic here
I am 25 and experience early/midstage symptoms of burnout syndrome. Well, I am somewhat mentally predisposed to stress induced illness but it is still sick, let me explain.
Started to work in this company in late 2018, it was boring but got better overtime. Got 2 promotions and eventually started working in a software development team as quality assurance. Actually that was something positive and I was on the verge of quitting shortly before but then thought “let's see how this goes, can also start university after trying that after all”
And this is how it went:
- Management nagging why this and that is not working even if it is not my responsibility (the thing about Quality Assurance in Software is that management “people” can always make it look like QA is at fault, because why did no one have a look at that, even when the issue persited for years without notice)
- Management expectations constantly not met because of unrealistic expectations (you are 2 QA guys now, why are there not half as many bug and defect reports? That's not how it scales btw and effectively the % of bug/defect reports after deployments went down while burning through more tickets but apparently is not good enough)
- Quarter day is justifications, quarter day is doing some dumb thing no one needs to please management, quarter day is work I am supposed to do, quarter day is scrum meetings or other meetings that I do not need
- Every week is a “why is this not finished yet?” meeting with the reason almost always being because management suddenly shifted focus away from the current development sprint because something else suddenly is more important
How bad this already might sound, the workload was still somehow doable in time. But the past 2 months man is when things got really bad because the other SDQA guy is away for 2 months and now I have effectively almost double the workload… Management was assuring that they will be understanding of this, but that was a lie. The above problems are still persisting, Devs constantly messaging me with questions, Management being not pleased with something = always my responsibility because I am QA and apparently I need to look over the tasks of 2 teams (even thoug hthat is not even possible because a lot of meetings are at the same time with both teams) etc.
Went to doctor's office, they told me I developed Heart Arrythmia, likely because of stress and other burnout symptoms (tiredness, lack of motivation, being unable to think, sometimes not even able to function… the usual) and wanted to write me sick for months… I told thjem that was not possible (I don't even know why I did, I did not want to seem shady I guess) and compromised it to 2 weeks… and then look if it is better
tl;dr feel like a lemon being wrung out by corporate pigs and got heart disease from it in this sick world