Edit : I appreciate all the PoVs and I will reply to everyone. This is important to me. Just going to go rest a bit and I’ll be back.
Edit : Leaving the self-insulting language in, but yeah… Point taken, I should stop being so mean to myself. And to add another FYI, I’ve been on this codebase for about 3 months, which I probably should have mentioned.
I have no idea what is wrong with me. I get tasks, I work on them, they NEVER seem to close. Meanwhile everyone around me is left and right solving their issues. I reach out for a second opinion because I must just be stupid, and every time I reach out the person is never able to assist in any meaningful way.
It’s like my tasks always have blockers that everyone around me seems perplexed by, I get a lot of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” or, “Yeah your job does seem to have a lot of unusual blockers.”
I’m at the point where I’m in a daily meeting where I explain what I’m working on to a senior dev because obviously they noticed I’m a person on the team with sometimes zero points in a whole month. It’s so discouraging to have to go to a daily meeting because apparently I’m stupid? The thing is, when I explain what I’m blocked by, every person has said, “Oh weird, this seems like a really confusing task.” Or, “Damn I’ve never seen anything like that.”
So obviously I look at other peoples’ tasks… what are they working on? And their tasks are SO simple and straightforward, yet I’ve NEVER had a task like that, all my tasks were opened years ago, remained open for months or years, then were assigned to me. And they’re all fucky. Wth.
Tbh I’m running out of things to write because I don’t want to justify it, because I feel like I should be doing better. What the hell is wrong with me?
I have wanted to change jobs for close to two years now… but you’ve all interacted with recruiters… they never help, and job search is impossible as a person with anxiety and possibly autism?
I love coding, I hate my coding environment… Anyone else ever have this type of issue in programming?
Yeah, we all do, all the time. I swear the only reason therapists can earn so much is because of all the programmers are racing to afford them.
I would actually go talk to your manager about this. I feel you are unsure about whether the problem is:
If it’s the first, then your manager should help ease the load, or at least you could get recognized for your efforts for doing the heavy lifting for the team. If it’s the second, your manager will still be able to tell you that, and then at least you know you actually need to git gud.
That says to me, it’s the first. I’d ask people when something like that gets assigned to me; what changed that makes it possible to close this that wasn’t true in the past years? Or why don’t we close it with a “won’t fix”, since nobody seems to have missed the thing for years?
That said, there are three things I’d like to say to that:
First, story points are not for you to obsess over on how many you can complete in a sprint. They are also not there to compare people to each other. They are solely to try to guesstimate how long something is going to take, so that the PM is not flying completely blind. If a task really was estimated at some points, then the team agrees you were justified in taking a lot longer, then the team fucked up with estimating. If that’s consistent, then the team should have a conversation about why their estimates are off.
Second, yeah, the job market sucks now, that’s also not on you. Try to obsess less about your work. I know it’s really hard to do so, and I’ve gone through a bunch of experiences myself where I got closer and closer to burning out. Try to find something other than work to obsess over, that helped me a bit. I know it’s hard. I’ve failed to do so many times already. If you are worried about your career, just know that every day you spend biding your time at the current place makes you worth more in a better market to come.
Lastly, it will get easier later on. I sucked a lot during my first few years. You learn through the suckitude. That’s what you’re there for. You will be able to solve these later in your career. These issues, not the code or the tricky bugs are the ones that need experience.
Thank you for you PoV. I may respond more thoroughly when I’m less moody / exhausted. I feel like I’d just be a crybaby right now, and I am really trying to avoid that.
People need to be crybabies at times. We all have feelings. Bottling them up will only leave you burnt out and with more mental problems than you went in with.
Take your time, we’ve all been there, and this does not make you a bad engineer. It only makes you human.