What my burnout taught me?

Getting out of the battleground and experiencing something different helped me reflect on my own contributions to the burnout.

1️⃣ My job scope itself was not satisfactory and majority of my job satisfaction was coming from recognitions and praises.

Reflecting back my day to day life back then, I didn’t have a proper sense of ownership on my job. It was as if I was hired for the firefighting role. I was able to cover everyone else in the team. The features I built was so stable that everyone forgot about them coz everyone was too busy fighting fires and I also forgot about how well I did in my own job scope. This made me think that firefighting was my only job scope because it was my everyday and it was so draining and going to the office everyday is such a drastic journey.

I was barely hanging onto how fast I fix an issue and how many issues were resolved where in real case with proper management and timeline, these issues would not even exist. It was like 50+ people could be removed had they done a proper resource and timeline planning.

Since I was not happy about the work I was doing, no amount of praises helped. When someone told me “omg you saved my life”, instead of feeling happy or good, I would internally say “do I have a choice not to?” And instead of feeling happy about being good at my job, I hated it bcoz it brought me more work. When people referred my name to others, instead of being proud of my reputation, I will be like “thanks but no thanks, 🙂‍↔️ I am so done”

How I noticed this 👉 one day in my current job I was building a challenging feature, i didn’t get to talk to anyone for a day or two, and my boss or peers never told me I was doing a good job but once I pushed out the feature, I was just simply happy with my work with no one saying anything. That’s when I realise that job satisfaction shouldn’t come just from recognition unless for service roles and I was not getting any such satisfaction for the past 2 years.

TLDR - find something you enjoy doing even if no one is telling you that you’re good

2️⃣ It’s not an industry thing, it’s a management problem‼️

Don’t fall for such illusions. It’s not like I was working for a startup and we were fighting for IPO. It was an established company with a hierarchy and the company could hire resources. It was just more than 3 layers just doing telephone games and not pulling in their weight which has led to the bottom layers suffering. If they wanted to fix, they could fix it.

How I noticed this 👉 Now that I am in a place where each layer does the actual job, delegating work, filtering and monitoring workload and managing resources as it deems fit, the same industry feels much more survivable.

3️⃣ I thought it was the incompetent people but it was more of the direction issue and information overload. 🫨

When pushing someone who doesn’t know how to swim into the water, a few people learnt how to swim but that doesn’t mean that it is the correct way to teach swimming. Some people might die there. It was the same for my workplace. Some people could survive and management thought it was just a matter of time to get used to. Developers spending time on navigating through unclear design and hard deadlines and pushing things just to meet the deadlines was just insane

How I noticed this 👉 My current boss told me that I should always monitor the amount of time I spend everyday and if I’m spending more time removing obstacles than actually building stuff, that means someone else is not pulling their weight and I am not responsible to make it up so don’t even bother figuring out, just highlight to him and he will sort it out coz it’s his job.

TBH, this is my first time hearing this from a manager and I internally cried 😭 coz I needed this‼️

4️⃣ My priorities never aligned with the priorities of my management 🫤

back then, I focused on delivering the product and making it good quality but my management’s priority was more on skyrocketing the number of tickets and pushing blame to the other company, saving face to own company.

They would literally just create a number of tickets on the same issue, park some tickets or route back to other teams just to buy time even though they know it’s their issue

This causes us to really spend time on just the status updates bcoz the ticket creator itself has no understanding of the tickets he created and would keep asking repeated questions just to keep track

How I noticed this 👉 when someone told me that I lack political skills and I asked for an example and he gave me that I am too honest in such scenarios.

TBH I knew but I just didn’t want to be one of them coz at the end of the day, I need to be able to respect myself and had I done that, I might not be able to.

5️⃣ I need to learn corporate communication skills.

I am a direct communicator and I don’t take comments or feedback personally. I would usually be happy if someone were to give me feedback about my work. But that doesn’t mean everyone is ok receiving direct feedbacks. I didn’t even try to put on a nice front when I communicate with my manager. He lost my respect when his regular status updates in standup was his boss’s emotions instead of the work he done. And what’s worse, I didn’t keep quiet about it. I would just be literally like “sorry I don’t care whether your boss is happy or angry, and that will never be the good enough reason of urgency on completely non urgent things. Give me a better reason so that I can push this forward”. If I knew how to communicate better, I could give the same message but not as crude as it sounded

6️⃣ Vacations and promotions are nothing if you are suffering in your day-to-day life.

back then what my manager would do when I was on vacation, he told the team to rest and wait for me to come back should they encounter any blockers even though I did my best to handover before I go on leave. He didn’t even try to solve or get help. And disclaimer I was not a lead of the team hence not my responsibility but he’d rather wait for me to come back and pick up.

7️⃣ So many things happen in day to day life and we only have limited energy so we have to choose wisely on which battle we are going to fight. 🫶

A lot of things happen everyday and information overload was real so just by keeping up with the messages could suck up all your energy. Some of the emails should have gone straightforward to the deleted folder and some chats should be muted forever.

8️⃣ I did speak up to management about the issues but I didn’t give them a solution even though me and my teammates already had a draft solution in our end. In my defence it was not what I hired for so I didn’t really want to get involved or volunteer. I assumed it was their responsibility to figure out a solution once a problem was raised but little did I know this is not always the case

9️⃣ I ignored all the small red flags 🚩 in the early days

🚩 So I was interviewed by someone and I had a good feeling working with him, I thought he was my direct manager. The moment I joined the company, he was no where to be found and when I asked around, people told me that he moved to another project

🚩 during the initial days, my manager would forward all the meeting invites and emails to the entire team without filtering saying everyone should be on the same page. This was a sign that he couldn’t process and do his part.

🚩 the turnover was high and 5 months into the job, the table behind me was empty coz the entire team left the job.

🚩 6 months into my job I already knew that my direct manager was a problem but I never bothered to do anything about it coz I thought he was learning.

So was it all bad❓

Nooooo.

✨I learn a lot about myself, my triggers, my breakdowns, my frustrations, what I like and what I don’t like

✨I gained so many close and trauma-bonded friendships that we would just want each other to be successful. Anyone got a new job? We would wholeheartedly be happy for him just bcoz he managed to get out. And these people will help out back by referrals again. There were times we were all interviewing for the same role 😂 and we were just happy for the person who got the offer and asked how he passed and learnt. This bond does not happen in real corporate I guess.

✨I met so many like-minded and strong-willed peers that would enlighten my day or motivate me.

✨ I learnt a lot of different styles of management and if I ever considered myself moving towards management, I could see examples of people I don’t want to become and examples of people I want to become.

✨Skills wise I improved a lot and at the fastest rate as I could ever be.

✨I find myself more confident and outspoken in general and I find myself more brave and loud about my wants and needs.

Related posts for backstory

📝 The breakdown

📝 How I hanged on

📝 Consequences

#burnoutrecovery #redflags #corporatelife #reflectionjournal #lessonslearned