Comment by dheera
2 years ago
I have a couple Github repos with a lot of stars and a bunch of pull requests and issues. I used to work actively on them.
However in the past 7 months I've been constantly being told at work that what I do isn't enough, without constructive feedback. Pretty much every single 1:1 is "you're not doing enough" and no action items, not enough compute to do what I should be doing, being left out of meetings, and no access to the data I need. Then the next meeting and another "you're not doing enough". Not one "what's blocking you" and "thanks for telling me, I'll get to work on helping you unblock that". It's so brain draining that coding is no longer fun and I've lost a lot of motivation to maintain things even outside of work.
Sounds horrible. Have you tried to ask what makes people think you are not doing enough? Also, have you started looking for other jobs so you can run from this place as fast as you can?
In any case your priority should be to find a way to fix this before you burn out for good. Losing energy for your spare time is already a big deal. You are mentioning brain draining. 7 months is a long time. Your job should be supporting your life and what you want to spend your time on, not the other way around.
If you can maybe take holidays. A good break.
Good luck, you can do this.
> Have you tried to ask what makes people think you are not doing enough?
It's complicated. For one, the culture is such that 1 out of N people need to be kicked out every year, by policy, even if all N people are doing great work. So people largely end up just clawing at each others' scope to try to not get kicked out, and stealing other peoples' work to be the first one to put their name on it. Yet others team up and protect each other, excluding other team members from meetings (which results inevitably in those team members being accused of not having done work). There is no real teamwork, nobody wants to be helped, everyone wants to be the hero so that they don't become the one that's kicked out.
Add on top of that forced RTO where if you don't badge into the office 3 times a week the system creates a ticket to your manager requiring them to explain to your skip why you weren't there. This system causes people to go to the office sick. I got COVID once and colds multiple times from the stupid RTO policy. When I was beaten up from COVID, in bed for several days, absolutely drained, unable to work, and informed my manager, the VP a few levels above me accused me of not contributing to a paper that some coworkers wrote that week, to which my manager did nothing to explain the circumstances. Meeting rooms are hard to get, and I often have to take meetings from storage closets, copy rooms, or my car in the office parking lot.
> Also, have you started looking for other jobs so you can run from this place as fast as you can?
Yes, I am doing this, thanks!
> If you can maybe take holidays. A good break.
Yeah, after taking no vacation days for a whole year (and not even having the desire to) I took 2 weeks off at the beginning of this year. Hopefully once I lock in an offer at a place with real teamwork I can take a longer break. Or maybe go funemployed for a while and take a 2nd shot at building a startup but I'm nervous about the current state of the economy.
This sounds more like high school than a workplace. You're really not at fault here. But I also understand how real life work can kill passion. It is why I went to pursue computer science instead of art. Don't let others take your joy away. It takes a long time to recover.
My guess is that your company is planning some kind of layoffs, manager received directions to identify XX% of low performers, and he is now building narrative.
I would invest time looking for new job.