Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
I started a new job as a product owner/manager for a legacy enterprise system, but it's not what was promised. My team lacks experience in building and shipping APIs, so projects that used to take weeks now take months and lack quality. This has led to severe anxiety and dark thoughts, and I'm on medication and therapy. I'm trying to find another job, but the market in Sweden is very competitive. How can I separate work from life and survive until I find something else?
I've been in a similar situation. The key is to set strict boundaries: leave work at work, don't check emails after hours, and find a hobby that fully engages your mind. Also, talk to your manager about your concerns and ask for support. If that doesn't help, consider taking a sick leave to protect your health.
One thing that helped me was to focus on what I could control. I started documenting all the blockers and delays, and used that to push back on unrealistic expectations. I also made a plan to leave, even if it took a year, and that gave me a sense of purpose.
I would suggest you to think about your health first. If the job is making you sick, it's not worth it. Look into taking a leave of absence or even quitting if you have savings. Your mental health is more important than any job.
Have you tried talking to your team about the skill gaps? Maybe you can arrange for training or bring in a consultant to help. Also, consider adjusting the scope of your project to match the team's capabilities, and communicate that to management.
I survived a toxic job by creating a 'work persona' - I would mentally switch off when I left the office. I also made sure to exercise and meditate daily. It's not easy, but you can build resilience.
It might be worth exploring internal mobility within your company. Sometimes there are other roles that are a better fit. If not, use your network and consider remote jobs in other countries, as the market might be better.
- reeredfdfdf
As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control.
I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.
Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.
- sdcfgy
Sounds exactly like my place.
Never take your primary source of personal worth from a job. Get out of that mindset as soon as you can. In most companies like that you’re fungible in a moment’s notice even if they tell you they value you. As for non delivery, everything we build loses money because it’s built on a guess and doesn’t work properly because it’s designed and built by idiots. Do not listen to the people here doing 90 hour weeks on a startup. That’s insane. I manage about 6 hours a week :)
What they do provide you with is income. Save money so you can afford to lose a job first. Security helps. Find meaning outside work with that income. That is your purpose. And it probably shouldn’t be another let’s just do a side project at home and do another day of work. It should be social in some way.
- Muromec
>when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.
- ChoGGi
Life is too short to worry about stuff you can't change; don't make your bosses problem into your problem.
Find a hobby, gardening is fun.
- genezeta
If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation.
In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be.
From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated.
So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job.
But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to:
1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing.
1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving.
1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead.
2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals.
3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure. Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related […]