Coding burnout: AI code, capitalism & relentless CEOs

I'm SO burnt out. I've been working on my boss's massive project, we keep getting crunches by his boss. As a result? He can't keep up, neither can I, and he resorts to using LLMs to do some of his coding for him. This grows the technical debt, because the code it outputs is terrible and doesn't make much sense. It causes problems, and then I'm tasked with fixing it.

Whenever I try to tell my boss that we need to dedicate more time and resources to refactoring? He agrees, but ultimately is resigned to the fact that the CEO has all these other big, unrealistic plans. Then? We get dragged into these big, unrealistic plans and shoe horn them into the code base, growing the technical debt further.

Each time the debt grows, the context switching increases. You have a task to do, but first you have to reverse engineer this LLM generated bullshit so you can figure out what it actually does to fix this weird bug that no one understands. You try to follow the chain of logic for this code. None of it makes any sense. Its verbose, needlessly complicated and deeply confusing. Worse yet? They don't want to dedicate time or money to refactoring it, so you're forced to work with it.

You spend maybe 5 hours on this, hitting wall after wall before finally getting it working... Until next time, when you have to fix the next bug or add another feature on top of that LLM coded monstrosity. The CEO complained about how slow you were fixing it, but at least its fixed.

😪 And so the burnout begins...

The code base grows further. You keep hitting targets, you keep pulling off miracles. Hell, you even meet those ridiculous deadlines that the CEO has given you, like a good little cog in the self destructing machine. Each time, ever more aware that the foundations that this house is built on is due to implode on itself. It begins to dawn on you: does this ever end? The CEO has fuck all of an idea how to code. The product doesn't matter to him, all that matters is the money, increasing the revenue year on year. He's always out there chasing new ideas before the ones he gave you last week are even complete. Worse yet... He's the one who gets pissed at you when the servers go down because there's a bug caused by vibe coding.

You ask yourself: "does the growth ever end?". The answer is simply: No. No it doesn't. Because for these people, no amount of growth is enough. Their product could be earning 1bn a year, and they'd want to 10x it. It's never enough to be self sustaining, making a healthy profit with healthy workers and happy customers. Much better to have a vibe coded app littered with bugs that will collapse in on itself by next year, than to spend time sustainably and mindfully developing the product.

This sinking feeling grows inside you. This vicious cycle you're trapped in has you writing awful code. It's code you know for a fact will worsen the technical debt. You're not being given the room to write it well. All you have time for is to get it out the door, and once its out? You slam that door shut, lock it and throw away the key. Then you have to hope that the beast behind it never bursts through that door.

Eventually, even the most simple of tasks feels exhausting. You've spent every last cell in your brain reverse engineering and working with all these weird little quirks and details caused by LLMs or by lack of refactoring. To the extent where the most simple of tasks feels like climbing a mountain. It feels like you don't know how to code anymore, anddddd queue the imposters syndrome to boot! You get overwhelmed, frustrated and upset with yourself that you can't do something as simple as getting this graph to work in a certain way. You kick yourself for not being able to do better... When the reality is? The environment you're working in is inhuman by design: it's designed exclusively around profit, not the product and certainly not the developers making the product.

This relentless drive for profit is destroying not only the product, but your soul too. It's making you a part of the problem, whether you want to be or not. Worse yet? It's also taking away opportunities for you to learn how you manage and maintain good code bases. How can you ever hope to write agile and elegant code if the environment you're working in has no regard for your craft?

💼 The job market...

So you look for other jobs... Only to find that there's barely anything out there. And what is out there is heavily laden with AI usage, asking you to go above and beyond with more skills than they can reasonably ask anyone to have. All for their bullshit product to "help boost business revenue". Exhausting. You persevere and keep searching. You begin to realise that a vast majority of the jobs out there are for products that contribute no real value to humanity (though this isn't a unique problem to programming).

You need to work from home, but a majority of the roles are 4 days a week in office... Listing themselves as "hybrid". Perfect.

With each application you send a cover letter detailing all the reasons you're a good fit: how perfectly exploitable you are, how you'll mask yourself perfectly into "company culture" and ruin your health for their "fast paced environment". Backing all this up with evidence of previous work and its business outcomes to demonstrate your value. And yet? Crickets. By now it's been over 2 months and still nothing. You begin to question whether or not you can actually build a stable life or livelihood on the back of software engineering. Obviously, applying for more jobs would help, but all the other jobs out there are fully in person or mostly in person.

The job hunt becomes a job in and of itself. Relentlessly polishing your CV, dutifully writing these cover letters for jobs that you know will eventually burn you out. It's so tiring in the midst of your job and burnout, you're exhausted and you've not even got an interview yet. 14 years of experience, 5 of it with multiple multi-national corporations, and a wide range of soft skills, dev ops skills and sys admin skills... Despite all the FOSS contributions and projects... Nothing to show for any of it, feeling nothing but unemployable.

The interview

So after 12 weeks of applying you finally get somewhere. Its a decent enough job, but the pay is awful, though at this point you're just happy to have even the potential of work. At least its for a good cause, unlike the others. So you start the interview process. You have a 1 to 1 interview with the hiring manager for an hour, putting all that interview prep and notes you wrote in the days prior to good use. As luck would have it? You make it to the second round of interviews. Finally getting somewhere!

The second round gives you 2 technical tasks to perform over the period of a week. One that involves doing a hypothetical redesign of their frontend, another demonstrating your Javascript skills with their API. Every single day of that week, while burning yourself out at your current job, you drag yourself into the technical tasks after work with your rotting brain and you get to work: 996 style. You put every last drop of your battered soul into it. The week comes to a close and you collapse past the finish line, submitting the tasks the night before the deadline hoping and praying you'll get somewhere.

After all that work? You find that someone else was just a tiny bit better than you and got the job. They wanted to hire you both, but they couldn't. You're thrown back into the fire that is recruiting hell, hopes crushed and morale destroyed. How many coding jobs are out there for a good cause? A vast majority of them are for making CEOs richer, boiling the planet, abetting genocide or creating brain rotting algorithms.

🙏 Is there hope?

I know that I have value to offer somewhere. The problem is finding these places. Its also an issue finding places that are fully remote, ones that won't burn me out and ones that aren't completely morally bankrupt. These jobs are so far and few between, its so frustrating and disheartening. It makes the stakes SO high. I will keep applying, I will keep trying. But I'd be lying if I said that my reasons for leaving programming 10 years ago haven't been vindicated. This is exactly what I was trying to escape.

It's for this reason that I'm planning my escape route once again. I'm thinking of entering nursing school next year. The money is worse, so are the work place conditions. But it's at least something I'm passionate about. Something I can build a stable-ish life off the back of. Even if I'm "lucky" enough to get the chance to have yet another burnout job, how can I build a life on the back of it if I'm staring down the barrel at unemployment for months on end if I lose my job?

At least in nursing there's no shortage of jobs or demand. And there's so many different areas I can work in that don't involve making the world a worse place. The only issue is? I'm not ready yet. I'm still really sick. I've likely got POTS and it feels like jumping straight into nursing before I'm ready is a terrible idea. But then, so is working a job that I hate which is actively burning me out and making me ill anyway. If I'm going to get more disabled either way, I'd rather be making myself sicker doing something I love. Gotta love the barbarity of capitalism!

Lots to think about.