I'd rather not have my manager forcing me to do group therapy. I owe the company some work hours and they own me money.

If I want to have personal relations with someone from my work, befriend somebody, share personal things, that is my choice. My personal life is not the company business.

Of course I wouldn't say all that to the manager, but 'I'll put him on the list of people I should be careful about, and fake some confessions.

Coupled with the fact that, as you yourself pointed out, there is a literal endless amount of work to do, forever. This is also due to the nature of the company being so big.

All companies always has work to do, and no one is ever «done», but in a giga-enterprise all meaningful deadlines and deliveries sort of tangentially rounds down to zero in terms of impact.

I almost burned out from this myself working in Microsoft. I was succeeding in my work by most metrics, but I am motivated more by my work being MEANINGFUL and having impact more than anything. That is almost impossible to achieve in any large enough company.

Jumped off to be a startup CTO and life started smiling again instantly.

Take time away from work, but not too much time. Comments such as «it takes years» can be true if you have ground yourself down to a nub, but trying (and being ok with failing) to do some work that lets you feel like you mean something and contribute back to society is an understated and important part of the healing process.

Good luck!

He expected doing something meaningful that will change the world. He expected to be applauded like a hero for his efforts.

But things don't work like that.

If you work your ass out, don't expect more than a pat on the back. Managers won't care about your efforts, your mental state or your sleepless nights. They care about looking good in front of their superiors.

So it's better to do just that is expected for you, enough to get a good evaluation.

If you come out with a brilliant idea that might help the company a lot don't just do it. Find some allies in the higher hierarchy, explain to them what is their advantage, do a POC or MVP, then let the top management know in a public meeting. That way you get a lot of credits and applause for doing great things for the company and fighting the good fight.

In a complex job with a fast pace, a fair amount of tech debt around every edge, a relentless pace of innovation happening, and - yes - growth, there’s too much to be invested in everything. It doesn’t have to matter that much. The parts you really care about, the craft and quality of your work, your relationships, mentoring and growing the people around you, seeing things get better one piece at a time, and a few things - they can matter. But everything can’t. And even those you have to at some very deep level realize don’t matter really.

Stripe doesn’t really exist in this world. It’s a shared fiction to help frame the interactions between you and a few people you actually interact with in a day. The real truth is the only thing that happens in your days is you type on a computer and talk to a few people. It actually doesn’t matter in any meaningful way what you typed or some higher purpose around humbling honesty or exothermic curiosity or PMEs or whatever stories we tell ourselves to create some sort of reality out of the fiction. The only important things you really do is how you shape the lives of the people you interact with, and how you shape your own life.

Burnout is hard. Adopt a daily meditation practice. Let your mind heal by letting go of meaning and practice enjoying the moment you’re in with whomever you’re with, but most especially yourself. The joy will come back faster the faster you let go of things needing to matter or have deeper meaning, especially when those things are a fiction like a company or a career or any of the other small and big lies we’ve been told and we reinforce to ourselves daily. I know I’ve been there man, and I know exactly - exactly - the sensations and experiences you describe. It gets better, but I think once you get there it never totally goes away and it’s easier to slip back.

FWIW I don’t think burnout is the same as depression. I’ve felt both and burnout is different. It’s that loss of ability to engage - which overlaps with depression - but usually doesn’t come with the thoughts of hopeless despair and desire for life to be over. It’s just more of a deadness and inability to initiate what you think you should want to do but can’t, and it pervasively impacts everything.

It gets better.

when your mental health collapses nothing else holds value, it really doesn’t matter if you achieved your dream job, got all the prestige and income you initially desired, being mentally healthy is the basis of the pyramid.

Something I learned based on that is to really prioritize it!

Even if someone considers their career to be everything, realize that spending some of your earnings seeking professional help (therapy) is even a cheap investment considering that if you break and have to quit, you’re going to lose hundreds of thousands, and to recover it will suck (I’ve heard of people trying to quit tech altogether after burning out)

Sneaking something else related to mental health: sleep should be #1 health wise, when you’re consistently not getting quality sleep for months, there’s nothing you can really do to get around that, it will eventually just break you (your body won’t care if you’re coping with coffe or exercising!)

Btw that’s great writing and I really appreciate your courage in sharing this! I hope you’ll find your joy again.

On a serious note, in my book there are hints of perfectionism right from the start of the story (fonts dimming, wait 30 sec to join the meeting..). And too much fragility in personal attidudes. S/he is probably a relatively young idealistic person, early in the career. Such people often don't last long, if they can't change inside and take manager's or corporate shit. One needs at least some "fuck it" attitude to preserve one's dignity. Your performance review does not and cannot define you as a person. Else you're likely to end up disappointed and/or emotionally exhausted. And that's what I see here.

But if on most days we're spending most of our time with these people, what do we gain from automatically disqualifying them from human connection just because they work at the same place as us?

And let's not pretend that the manager in this story forced anyone to do anything.

- Refine your definition of what’s “meaningful”: anything that helps you, your colleagues, helps you to learn a new thing or simply allows you to create something beautiful can be meaningful; there’s a lot of meaning in giving a meal to someone starving, even though you’re not solving any big societal issue or being applauded by many for that single act.

- Don’t take people like the OP’s first manager too personally: with time you realize they’re generally not evil or terrible human beings, they’re just in a different mission. Usually they are also as lost as we are, trying to find meaning and recognition. Just lower the importance you give to them (if you’re really incompatible with their personalities) and focus on your work. If even then it becomes toxic, then move.

- Most importantly: reshape your relationship with work. Who you are and what you do are not necessarily the same thing. I don't like the advice of "slacking and collecting your pay check" (been there, you also feel shit after a while), but I think that going a bit to that direction helps to find balance.

The one thing that immediately pissed me off was you doing something awesome, then having management attack you for reason X, where X attacks everything but the results. The reason never really matters, the real reason is that you threatened them in some manner and they need to justify their job.

Honestly, I would have just quit at that point. You're a saint for staying any longer.

This sounds like an absolutely terrible company to work for.

I'm sorry for that. I went through something similar and I managed to bounce back up but it took longer than I anticipated. Years, not months.

Be gentle with yourself and forgive yourself.

Anyway, on-boarding was awful and codebase is terrible. For the first four months I have been struggling, suferring, getting frustrated, and everything impacting my life outside work (weekends, sleeping, etc)

Then I realized. This is just a job. What is the worst it could happen? Getting fired and these people thinking I'm an idiot? I can live with that. I won't probably meet them again (perks of remote) and I could find another job down the line. And that helped me.

What you do at work and how are you seen at work, as long as you are responsible, shouldn't be that important. Leave it at work and try to enjoy your life. Don't carry it with you, especially when it is a position where you don't have much control.

Having had something somewhat similar happen in the past, it seems like this is common at high-growth tech companies. Everyone pretends to be your friend, and there are definitely some genuine people, but getting ahead is clearly number 1.

I feel like I had a similar experience. Start working at a new job, hustle for several years, get promoted, projects do well, then ended up feeling bored and unexcited. Not exactly burnt out, but burnt out on the current pattern of life. I quit and moved to another country.

I don't know if the author is "burnt out" or not. This is a privileged take, but sometimes it feels like a full time job is a leash. Life becomes so defined by your job it can feel suffocating. You can take a few weeks off, but a few weeks a year is hardly enough to have your own life.

I quit trying to find meaning in my work long time ago. And work never depresses me. I work to have food on the table for me and my family. That is enough of a motivation.

If I want to do something meaningful, I either work on a personal project or contribute to one, outside work.

That's from the "values" section of the website under the "Tech as a tool" subsection. How does working for Stripe fit with this value?

As a mere user of "tech", and a concerned observer of what I perceive to be its negative effects on society around me the last 5-10 years, it feels impossible to deny that the main drivers of the tech space haven't been "protecting well-being" and "promoting human flourishing", rather the opposite, and often rather brutally.

The article leaves the question unanswered of what actually led to the depression, and I'm left wondering if the author explored that question specifically. Perhaps Stripe aren't building technology that promotes human flourishing, and perhaps the author's core values were clashing with the reality of a modern tech company.

Note too that "chronic fatigue" is NOT "lack of sleep".

The brain fog is the net resultant of the body being in a constant "fight or flight" mode for too long. Psychologically, you've been doing WWI "trench warfare".

Some of the situations feel familiar to my experience in other companies, so here's some advice to younger folks, which took me some time to grasp:

- Communication with the manager is critical. Better to overcommunicate than undercommunicate. It's a natural tendency for curious folks to do "side quests" and while you were supposed to work on X, you noticed that you can improve Y which in your opinion is more important. At the very least, drop your manager a Slack message like "hey, I was supposed to work on X but I have an idea about Y which can bring more benefit, I will take N hours/days to dig into that if that's ok with you" and see what's their response (also make sure to time constrain it to avoid getting sidetracked for too long). I was definitely burned by this in prev job: I shipped some nice things but I was supposed to work on something else which I didn't do, and each time my manager mentioned this (i.e. N months later in performance evaluation), I knew it was correct for him to point it out, but it made me feel bad.

- In bigtech the work happens in quarters. If you're unhappy about things you work on currently, take some time to prepare the work items you do want to work on, and seed your manager's mind before next quarter planning about things you DO want to work on, why, how is the impact and so on.

- When feeling overwhelmed with too many things on your plate, talk to your manager to dispatch some responsibilities to other team members. Don't be the messiah who needs to fix everything by yourself silently and burn out.

- For candidates: When doing interviews, you absolutely should do everything to streamline things and avoid distractions. Most likely use JS or Python for coding. Probably avoid TS, definitely avoid C++. It's too easy to get lost fighting the compiler or "reinventing the world" with languages like C/C++. You won't get extra points for going uphill, but you will get minus points for not finishing.

Stripe is a great place to work in some ways but judging from the writeup they had a ton of context switching preventing their productivity and the needs of the team didn’t align with what they did best. I’ve seen this feedback many times in many jobs.

I’ve been there myself! No doubt this person will find something exciting in no time.

Apropos of nothing as interviewers we do not put any weight on your submitting solutions after the window closes because we have to evaluate candidates consistently for business and legal reasons. We can’t give one person extra time because that’s not applying a consistent bar. Smaller companies may be more flexible but big tech won’t be. On the plus side big tech knows interviews are often a function of luck and setting and will generally always invite you to apply again without prejudice a few months later.

Being in a position to recover by getting bored and hacking on stuff you’re passionate about without pressure is something we’re really lucky to have, and I always try to do this between jobs.

I'm glad you got out. Gotta look out for you, always; (most) companies sure as shit won't.

Unrelated, but if OP is here, about this:

> Things were moving rather smoothly despite my sweat soaked armpits. I silently resented my wife’s decision to unilaterally give up anti-perspirant due to chemicals.

Check out Arm and Hammer's Essentials deodorants. They don't contain aluminum and smell great despite being all natural. I switched to this deodorant after noticing that Mitchum deodorants were staining the pits of my shirts.

With time you learn to put everything in perspective.

I am worried that the author did not learn that lesson in the end since he quit with no job behind, which is not a sign of emotional stability.

I think this is a ham fisted attempt at trying to solve one of the most isolating and painful issues of modern day work environments: the complete lack of any friendship or camaraderie whatsoever.

I was not born in the 1980’s but just reading stories of how people worked then, makes me feel that there was a level of trust and friendship somehow that is completely lacking in a modern job. It is a painful life when you cannot be friends with the folks you spend 40+ hours a week your entire life. I don’t know why or how it has gotten to be this way. Modern pop psychology recommends you to be vulnerable and open, but that’s definitely wrong, maybe even opposite of what you should do, I was never vulnerable with my college friends, but we did have kickass time in college and we were friends. I would much rather that just have continued into my professional life, but instead we get a sterilized environment, that we just live through trying to find meaning in our work, to make the passing of 40+ hours more pleasant.

I think a good approach would be to consider asking for adjustments to your work hours or talking with your team lead about creating a plan to make your work environment feel more manageable. It might also be helpful to discuss with a therapist why Patrick’s success affects you so strongly. Understanding the root of this could help you focus more on your own growth and well-being.

The challenges you experienced at Stripe aren’t unique to that company. These same lessons are likely to come up in future roles if they’re left unaddressed. You have the choice to face these issues now or later, but life has a way of bringing them back until they’re fully understood and resolved. Taking proactive steps now can set you up for a healthier, more resilient future in your career and beyond.

Sure, job is a big part of our life, but it’s better to leave as “just job”, and not focus on it too much.

Wishing the best to the author!

For anyone coming by that would read the situation as inappropriate or abusive, what's different? Why do you see it abusive where I might see it a waste of time that I would just opt out of?

You can't move the needle unless you are part of management and learn how to do politics. Large companies mean lots of politics being done. And you want to position yourself on the part of the winning team.

Also, people skills always trumps technical skills. Being aware of that helped me immensely on my career, much more than anything else I could have done.

In some jurisdictions you need to check your employment contract as company may feel entitled to your idea you are developing outside of work hours. Ensure you don't have any such stipulations in the contract.

It’s led me to wonder how one could structure a knowledge work job in a similar way. The tough part conceptually is how to make progress long-term while still only keeping your focus on a day at a time, max.

Do you have any guiding star for what work gives you meaning?

I thought getting closer to the users/customers would help me. After all, software is for humans. But I found the social aspects of that, handling bugs, setting expectations for features, was tiresome and not meaningful. The only happiness I did find was when I saw my client/users flourish without me with the software I made tailored as best as it could be for the money. But that doesn't make a business unfortunately...

Though maybe that’s why you can move those needles; nobody is guarding them jealously.

Thankfully I'm not ground down to a nub. I've found a lot of support over the last few years outside of work.

It was always a pretty competitive place, with a lot of smart people working a lot of hours, and a culture of attention to detail that left many people with impostor syndrome. There were pretty good expectations of being nice to each other: No infrastructure team giving your request the cold shoulder, because that was just not OK. So people working really hard and burning out to try to meet every growing expectations was common.

The post also had the other weakness of the culture: A lot of management changes, along with a culture of performance among managers that would be fit for Amazon. So a manager might change teams, and the person that used to get exceed expectations would end up with a PIP with the next manager, often by surprise. You can imagine what it does to morale to tell someone how they are the most helpful person they've worked with, and then see them gone two weeks later. It was a great place to work in many ways, but the negative parts took their toll.

So, if anything, the story showed me that even though it's been many years, a lot of Stripe is still recognizable.

Always be building solid, interesting things and make sure that if someone, for some reason finds them, that they would say "wow, this is cool, who made this?"

Then I casually share links to those things in the right context. If I get a 10% hit rate then I'm happy.

Do this all day every day between assigned projects 9-5 and you'd be amazed at the network you can build outside your own team. Keeps the options open for lateral movement.

Never do it. It will never end up benefitting you, even if you find "allies" - who might even stab you in the back and take credit for the idea and then let you go once they get a promotion.

If you have a brilliant idea, keep it to yourself, try to think of a way it could be used outside of the company and if it is strong enough start your own business based on the idea. Otherwise forget it.

Never do more than you are asked to do.

Eventually, I got married, had a family, found things to do in the community, and do plenty of sports and hobbies that involve shutting off the computer. Even though my jobs after my 20s have been even more soul-crushing than the ones I had earlier, I've never had a hint of burnout. When I'm done with work, I shut off the computer and that's it. I'll go build a piece of furniture, or repair my car, spend time with my kid, anything that doesn't involve office politics, two week sprints, or status reports. Just having a life outside of work has done wonders for my mental health. No meditation or spirituality needed!

It feels flippant to say, "stop caring so much about things", but it's actually great advice.

We should think of ourselves as having a limited "caring budget", and be judicious in how we spend that budget. Part of the trick is figuring out what that budget is, since it can be different for different people, or even different for the same person at different times in their life.

I think framing burnout in this way is helpful: you get burned out when too much is too important to you, and you've overextended your emotional ability to give a part of yourself to each of those things, for too much time.

An important thing about that to me is that it doesn't at all consider whether things are going well or poorly with all those "too important" things. Certainly things going poorly will increase stress, but even caring too much about too many things that are all going well can burn you out.

I think what’s universally important is to keep active and engaged in what we’re doing. Some of us have to tell fictions that what we’re doing has meaning, whilst others just know what brings meaning to their life.

Of the many many hours I've spent on this website, this comment probably made me feel more relaxed than anything else.

Please continue your kind and helpful words on the internet:)

What books/resources do you suggest to follow more on this path of meditation (possibly also stoicism)?

Thank you for pointing it out.

They idolized a company that is known for top-shelf engineering talent and, more importantly, brutally hard interviews...and they just got an opportunity to interview with them.

You have no idea what the interviewee will "no hire" them over, so you assume they want perfection because obviously. You're deathly afraid of making any mistakes because not getting the job you've been dreaming about for years is not an option, so spiraling straight into the ground after your first minor oops makes total sense.

Once you've gotten the dream job, you now have to work even harder to keep it because, shit, have you seen the engineering talent in this place? Getting a "failing" perf review from your management sends this anxiety into overdrive, so you work harder to prove your worth.

Some people barely last under these conditions. Others will gladly torch everything and everyone in their life to succeed, whatever that means.

The second I learnt this and started living by it my happiness shot up and my anxiety went down.

Who cares if you mess up, you have to stop living by your ideas of other people's ideas of you.

I definitely got people-pleasing vibes, and I agree the whole "making my screen look neat and tidy" and "engineering my arrival time to the meeting" bits were too much. If I had an interviewer who cared about or was impressed by those "metrics", I would consider that pretty shallow.

Based on that first performance review they got, my feeling is they had a bad manager. I agree with the manager that communication is a crucially important part of work, but you don't give someone a low rating when they completed an otherwise wildly successful project. That's just cruel and demoralizing. You can attack the communication problem without demotivating your employee and possibly hurting their career progression.

Whenever a poor performance review is a surprise to the employee, that alone is a management failure. Don't wait until review time to discuss problems; bring them up immediately and try to address them. Maybe by the time the review comes up, the problem will be gone. And if it's not, the employee won't be surprised by the reasons behind a less-than-ideal review.

> I’d already had a successful career as a software engineer for the better part of a decade.

OP's resume suggests they've been a professional engineer for over a decade.

I agree with your points about perfectionism and idealism, but they are not isolated to Gen Z.

As an Elder Millennial myself I hope HN and our industry is free of ageism against young and old. Comments like yours don’t help.

I know that he doesn't mean ill or harm by it, but how is the new hire who's anxious to be starting the job supposed to react to it? How can you expect them to say no without feeling like "not being a team player" or whatever other stupid cliche HR types like to use?

> But if on most days we're spending most of our time with these people, what do we gain from automatically disqualifying them from human connection just because they work at the same place as us?

Some people just don't care to make people from work anything more than an acquaintance. They have their own social lives which they invest infinitely more energy into than their work lives, and that's completely fine. I personally can't remember the last time I've spoken to any of my ex-colleagues after they or I left the job, I definitely wouldn't call any of them friends. I still hung out with them at the bar on Friday evenings after a tough sprint, we had a good working relationship, we just weren't friends. I have actual friends who I'd rather spend the time with for that.

I'm not the least bit opposed to connecting with peers. I've extracted two cherished friends of 10+ years from prior jobs. I just require it to occur organically and with peers, separate from groups led by the person signing my paychecks and writing my annual reviews.

While I agree that it wasn't forced (and I know that I would personally have no problem sticking to whatever level of sharing I was comfortable with), I bet you that at least one person on that team felt uncomfortable with it, but also felt like they could be penalized in some way (even just socially) if they didn't share. That's not ok.

If you can't forge bonds with your teammates without your boss asking people to share vulnerable moments during a team meeting, there are deeper problems that this sort of exercise is not going to address.

From my most recent job, I have quite a few strong friendships that we've maintained over the years, even though we've all left that company years ago. But most (if not all) of my so-called friendships with coworkers at other jobs faded quickly after one of us left the company. That's pretty normal, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's also nothing wrong with having a vibrant social life outside of your colleagues, and not really being interested in those colleagues beyond acquaintance level.

Imagine your manager asking you to share something at 10%, you share something modest like "sometimes I really feel anxiety over my work / deadlines / performance" and then the next person shares a deeply personal, super serious story about their almost collapsed marriage. They either set the tone for the whole conversation, forcing everybody else to follow along, or they hijack the conversation since what they shared is more serious.

There is no way to know before hand what someone is going to share, so there is no way to know before hand that everyone is going to feel comfortable.

"Human connection" could be discussing your hobbies with your coworkers, doesn't have to be a round table where everyone is sharing difficult experiences.

Reduces people to output. And if that output can be done cheaper by someone in another country or automated away, why even hesitate to change out the things that generate the output anymore than a lightbulb?

If you don't get that, then you are probably out their making life 5% hell for half the people around you, in blissful ignorance thanks to the effort they all put in to catering to your inconsiderate interactions.

And the power imbalance compounds the problem. Good on you for feeling comfortable and confident enough in yourself and your position that you'd be fine telling the boss that you're not interested in participating. I think most people wouldn't be able to do that, and some would feel pressured to participate ("because the boss asked") even if they were uncomfortable doing so, even if it's presented as "if you're willing to..."

I wouldn't be comfortable with that kind of sharing in a work setting either, but my approach would probably be to share a "vulnerable" professional situation, or, if I wasn't even feeling up for that, to just share a situation that I was fully comfortable talking about.

And being a teammate I'd also be uncomfortable if someone I didn't know on a close personal basis started talking about how their marriage almost fell apart during a team meeting. This stuff isn't any of my business, and I'm not at work for this!

(Re: your "showing your age" comment, FWIW, I'm in my 40s; not sure if that's old or young by your standards when it comes to this sort of thing.)