I tried a job outside development to deal with burnout and it was a mistake

My name is Mat Gilbert and for the past ten years or so I’ve called myself anything from web programmer to software engineer… whatever words were required to articulate “the part of the website you don’t click on, you know the backend.” While I have always enjoyed programming, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the way the sausage is made; the absurd level of disrespect and dishonesty involved in the software projects I’ve been part of have caused me to have difficulty believing in in the good faith of others. This has led to an intensely deep period of depression, burnout, disillusionment and difficulty functioning as an adult.

After my second time being laid off in six months, to attempt to make a change I took a job doing low-pay manual labor in the hopes it would help me regain mental sanity and clarity. At first I was enjoying the details of it, but the financial realities of the job have made it untenable and now I feel myself trapped and unable to find ways to move forward that make sense to my stressed and exhausted mind. The feeling of being unable to enjoy things or see possibilities for positive outcomes is a pervasive thread that seems to have coated my entire life like a thick unpleasant blanket.

Tonight I decided to sit down and lay out a sketch of my career in an attempt to personally understand how I got here and explain to others what has molded me into the person I am today.

My career didn’t start this way. Fresh out of college in 2008 I landed a job at an online kayak fishing store in north NJ. I had the opportunity to use my freshly minted HTML / PSD skills to reskin a PHP bbs system, an e-commerce package and an install of Drupal to house the junk drawer collection of HTML files and content the site had accumulated over the years. While I answered the phones and took orders… and also I had to clean the toilets. It was an interesting experience akin to building a livable structure on a remote island and teaching the natives how to operate technology. I gained an appreciation for the details of kayaks and learned how to fly cast. I learned important lessons about visual contrast and how it impacts different demographics (old people literally revolted when we launched the new layout, IT HURTS OUR EYES!!!), and I also learned very hard and painful lessons about the limits on peoples willingness to tolerate my unconventional thinking and thought processes.

After this job I worked at a company in NYC called Yodle, I affectionately refer to what I did in this position as “flipping digital burgers”. While it was a real-deal NYC tech company, I was also on a non-technical team and while I was doing “web stuff” at work it was basically “cram as many logos as you can into the footer and fix all the broken CSS that our platform generates”. I at one point had a talking-to from my manager because I was focusing too much on the aesthetics of the sites, and I needed to produce more per day. To me it was an already difficult task working with the garbage content crammed into the system… It felt to me that nobody cared if what we did looked like crap, just that it got done asap. The breaking point for this job was when I figured out a way to automate some skull-numbing QA process and was thanked for my efforts with an email from my boss’s boss letting me know that my use of the company logo was unauthorized and not ok. I’m glad it got my feet wet with NYC tech jobs, and it started my on-again-off-again love affair with tech in Manhattan.

One of the worst parts of working at Yodle was that at the time, I was still living at my parents in NJ. Commuting into the city 4+hours of the day was unsustainable, so when a job at a local sporting goods manufacturer opened up I jumped on it. Sportcraft was an interesting job, I was a PHP developer working on a proprietary (i.e. home built) spec system used to maintain details and specifications for products produced overseas. I got to work on some interesting projects that basically alerted people when factories in china changed specs in their favor hoping nobody would notice (we did), and I also got my first real-deal exposure to an API, the MagicLogic CubeIQ service. I spent a bit of time getting their software running on a Windows system (ha, software as a LOCAL service!) and after a bit of UI hacking I’d added functionality to their system to automatically tell people how many of a product would fit on a pallet and generate cool looking renders. Also at this job I was reprimanded for not being productive enough and it was another experience where it felt like there was a disconnect between the work being done and the plans about what work should be done. In a large company-wide meeting about impending bankruptcy, when asked about what happens if the company doesn’t find a buyer the CEO confidently reassured the crowd that wouldn’t happen and we didn’t need to worry about it. Spoiler: they didn’t find a buyer… everyone lost their jobs. Thankfully I found out about all this after I’d left, but the implicit dishonesty and deception in the way the organization spoke to its employees during this meeting was a reminder to me that corporations are not the type of place I belong. Fun fact, the engineering managers actually asked me to use the CubeIQ software to figure out how many trucks it would take to empty the entire warehouse. This was a few weeks before the “we don’t need to worry about bankruptcy…” meeting and at the time I was completely clueless about what the real intent of that work was.

A few months later I started at one of the better and longest tenured jobs of my career, web developer at WeatherWorks in NJ. This was the first job where I did real meat and potatoes application development from the ground up, and it was also my first experience with a real framework: CakePHP. The idea that with a few lines of code fully functional apps could be scaffolded and tinkered on was cool, but making things people actually used was exhilarating. Over the next few years I’d go on to design and implement several fully functional apps that did things like send SMS / Voice notifications and METAR parsing. The double edged sword of this job is that I found a manager who worked very well with me, and seemed to understand my eccentricities and was able to channel my efforts into something useful. The job became immediately untenable when this person left, without their social buffer between software and management it was impossible for me to be effective working with non-technical folks who couldn’t be bothered about the details. There are some really great people I worked with at WeatherWorks and I’m appreciative of the time I spent there and the cool stuff I got to build with them.

After a few years of actual web app development I wanted to get back into a more technical organization and pursue more “high end” development in my eyes. I was hoping to work for a tech-driven organization, and so gain exposure to “better” ways of doing things. The systems I’d previously worked on were not particularly high load in users, and didn’t have to deal with things like testing or caching concerns. Taking a job with then Viacom International Networks in Manhattan, NYC seemed like the logical step to figure out how the big boys really did it.

I was in for a rude realization as 95% of my experience at Viacom was an anti-pattern top hits list of “how can things really be this insane”. On our first project our Project Manager was also our Technical Lead, which led to lots of misalignment in priorities and distrust in the team. We spent three months on a Wordpress site for a set of Latin America sites, of which the most complicated part was a custom jQuery widget to display data from a tv-guide API. We had access to push code and deploy to dev, but we had to send emails to departments to get things deployed live. Our team was sent to Drupalcon Amsterdam, which was awesome! We learned about Drupal 8 and then… were not able to use it or anything we learned at the conf. Our boss was in the process of attempting to wrest control of a centralized data platform from a team in the UK. While on our European Drupal trip, we spent a week with this team in the MTV UK offices trying to get things spun up and figure out the UK to NYC transition. The brits entertained us politely, smiled and said “no”. A few months later our boss was unceremoniously canned and I “had no boss” for about the last month or so. I cannot stress enough how unpleasant and difficult this time was for me professionally to be paid a lot, traveled around the world to fancy conferences only to sit idle at a desk confused and stressed about what I should be doing. I had contractors leave rotting food in a desk adjacent to mine, and other co-workers literally had yelling matches over my head while I was trying to work. I experienced some of the most disrespectfully ignorant project managers in the history of my career, their lack of concern for others and refusal to acknowledge the consequences of their actions are still to this day difficult for me to process and move on from. Instead of learning from the best I was subjected to lord of the flies on the 34rd floor of a building in Times Square.

After eight months of frantic job hunting, I finally landed a job at another NYC company, this time a startup called Bond.co. Despite the difficulties I had there, it was and might still be the best job I’ve ever had. It at a time was a fantastic learning environment where my skillset expanded massively and I did great work alongside people I enjoyed and whom mutually respected me. Like everything else in life, the only constant is change and what was at one point a nurturing and supportive environment became caustic and unforgiving. Looking back on the Bond experience, I still can’t believe that I got to tell people I worked at a company that “did handwriting robots”. I also cannot think of any other job (except for the kayak fishing thing) where I took things I learned and ran with them on my own, which in this case is www.robotdrawsyou.com (RDY) my personal project to create unique pen-drawn photo artwork with plotter robots.

At Bond I was hired to do backend / API work on their Laravel Monolith app. I got to implement some features that didn’t really work well or get adopted, but in the process I gained insight enough into the platform to make myself a go-to guy for when the system crashed or broke in many exciting and surprising ways. This was one of the first issues that cropped up at this job, as the person who had the knowledge to fix things when it broke I was personally invested in solutions to prevent the issues from occurring. This was in opposition with management / product wanting to either build new features or just straight up ignore the problems. When I talk about my difference in mindset or problem solving, this is a direct touchpoint for this issue. I felt very strongly that my ideas about why a system I was being paid to maintain was breaking were important. Management said “it’s not our ideas, so it’s not important”. This to me makes it difficult for me to maintain respect for management as it’s a “polite” way of saying “fuck off do what I say so and stop asking questions we don’t want to answer”.

The thing I am most proud of that I worked on at Bond was the system that took in CSV files of customer data and created all the dependent records downstream so that the robots could write them out. This is the system before that I mentioned I worked on, and at the time I was gaining my proficiency with the system two large competing things were pulling the companies priorities in two directions: B2B customers that used the system I worked on, and high-end luxury customers that used an exclusive concierge experience app. While I wasn’t able to fix the system in our existing legacy app, I was very happy to be able to work on the new version of the system as we rebuilt the entire infrastructure with Hapijs / Node / MongoDB. I was able to figure out the root causes of the issues, and this exposed downstream UX/UI issues that also caused friction. I lobbied for stricter validation on datasets being uploaded to the system, product wanted these stopgaps removed because it made it harder for people to do their jobs. One party understood the necessity for data validation and the other saw it as an unnecessary impediment.

A few things led to the downfall of this job. One was being used to evaluate a job test for a position management had no intention of offering to me. They had me take a test while I was on vacation, and then never directly followed up with me about the job. An exec of the company publicly promised (at a company event) to take myself and one other person on a trip to visit the head of a popular 3D printing manufacturer, and then two months later a day before this scheduled event cancelled on us without even a “sorry”. The true nail in the coffin of the Bond experience was our acquisition by Newell brands… a few months later when the axe was still falling someone who’s neck wasn’t on the block was able to let me know what was coming. My wife (then girlfriend) and I decided this was the moment to look for a way out of NJ, and UVM Medical Center provided our ticket to paradise, AKA Vermont.

My first gig in Vermont was a contract one, I was able to find a few months of work with a side-gig a friend was doing. She had created a front-end iPhone UI of the experience, and they had a JSON blob for a backend. I created a custom UI for non-technical folks to massage the data and added analytics tracking. I’m still very proud of how this came out, but ultimately it was a short-term engagement and I didn’t know how to find more of these type of jobs so I kept looking for something closer to home.

The first gig I was able to get in town was a teaching assistant for the first cohort of the Burlington Code Academy. I’m super grateful for the experience that Alex, Benny and Josh let me be a part of. It was the right job at the right time as it allowed me to share my enthusiasm for programming and get some much needed recognition of my skills after a few years of being second guessed by non-technical folks.

After the code academy experience, I decided that I wanted to try to find full time work again and it took me a few months of searching. During this time I got accepted into the LaunchVT / JumpStart program for my robot drawing project (RDY). The project was a shot of adrenaline for something I’d always wished to be a real business idea, but I’d had difficulty staying focused and getting work done on the side hustle while I did the full time job during the day. I started taking the project more seriously, considering costs and estimating sales. During the course my job hunt finally hit, and I was offered a position as a web developer for a small agency in Burlington VT. It was a difficult time as I felt my project was just on the cusp of legitimacy, but I had to leave it on the side to focus on paying full time work.

My time at the agency can best be described as “digital janitor” as I spent most of my time decommissioning sites for clients that were leaving the agency or fixing bugs that arose from upgrading / security patching client sites that hadn’t been touched in years. I am witholding the name of the agency here because to be blunt it was a an extreme mismatch of values and not a good fit at all for me in terms of career and expectations. It was a combination of management disinterest in any technical detail similar to what I experienced at viacom, except this time with zero margin on projects. Project managers would frequently blurt out requirements for different projects during meetings because they were unfocused and literally not paying attention to the conversation at hand. After the two senior architects the company had left for better jobs, I was left maintaining systems that nobody but myself cared about. When a newly launched site was brought down due to a DDoS attack… nobody cared and I was deeply concerned that all the extra effort required of me to deal with the outage and remedy the problem seemed to be “gratis” and not part of what the customer had paid for. No matter though, the “project manager” had did their job so whatever shit rolled downhill was my problem.

This agency work laid bare a few things for me, one just how low the bar really is. As long as you have a greased palm or other reputation based connections you can be paid handsomely just for showing up and doing the bare minimum. The other thing that was deeply distressing to me was the lengths that people would go to avoid speaking with me about legitimate technical concerns I brought up. The company was asked for ideas to reduce costs and make us more agile as financial troubles were looming. I made suggestions but management could not articulate why they didn’t like what I proposed… just that they didn’t like it. The lack of any real meaningful accountability and rampant favoritism made this company one of the most toxic environments I’ve ever been part of and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

The last job I had was a freelance gig with another VT tech startup. I had the opportunity to work with two of the students I’d met through the code academy, and honestly at the beginning of the project I felt that it had real possibility to be another situation like Bond or WeatherWorks where I could stay for a few years. Unfortunately a lack of transparency in decision making and priorities left myself and another developer unsure of how the project would continue or what kind of work was necessary to move the ball forward. A few weeks after voicing my concern about the week-by-week nature of the job and worry about project runway… I was let go unceremoniously and denied any explanation why other than “it’s not a good fit”.

This last experience was particularly difficult because I went in feeling like I had not one but two people whom I could trust and that I would work well with. I went in with battle tested patterns the team was able to use to rapidly prototype and show functional workflows to investors and clients. Once things worked enough, the project was pushed in unhelpful technical directions by a manager who was not actually contributing the the code, which in my opinion was extremely disrespectful and showed a lack of professional experience and maturity. It is one thing to articulate the way something should be done on the merits of facts, it’s another to tell the person who’s doing the work how to do it with “I don’t have time to explain it to you, just trust me” as a justification. This is an example of how parents treat children, not how coworkers collaborate.

A few jobs ago at WeatherWorks is where I truly think the burnout really started, because it also represents where I started doing really engaging and interesting work. The type of stuff that sucks me down the funnel and into the flow zone where I’ll come up four hours later with a grin on my face and a feature or two under my belt. It was also my first true exposure to extremely non-technical ego based folks who were more interested in chest pounding and posturing than you know… the details of actual work. I will never forget being yelled at by someone I didn’t report to about coming in late, after staying up all night trying to bring a troubled crashing system back online. One person was focused on an objective, the other only cared about appearances.

After being unceremoniously dumped from the last contract gig, it took me a few weeks to make a move on any other job due to sheer depression and burnout. I felt then, and still do now a disturbing and uncomfortable disconnect between the people figuring out what work to be done, and the people who actually do the work. My research has led me to articles on PTSD and burnout, and it makes a little more sense now how I have these intensely strong feelings of not wanting to “go back” or to be doing work that supports the type of people who have abused, neglected and mistreated me over the course of my career.

One consequential evening when I had finally mustered up the energy to go fishing with my wife (depression: difficulty enjoying hobbies), we came home to found that our well pump had died. A few days and a few hundred dollars later, we had a new well pump and I was even more fraught with anxiety about my job situation and inability to contribute. I went online to Craigslist, and found a gig that seemed interesting enough: assistant in a commercial kitchen making pizza dough and crusts.

The job itself has been interesting, and I’ve been able to engage in some food experiments that have been enjoyable and fun. Unfortunately after a few months the novelty has worn off and I find myself increasingly unhappy with the repetitive and strenuous nature of the work. I’ve put some efforts into trying to make a new website to dust off my skills and get back into things… but I am feeling increasingly out of touch and not able to perform to the level I used to. Even now looking back at everything I’ve typed about my career, it feels like a story about someone else and not something that I experienced as the main character.

I no longer understand where I fit in, I have a diverse set of technical skills but I am increasingly bad at representing myself. Because of this it’s really hard to find work where I’m paid to do the things I’m good at, usually people just want to pay me to be dumb hands for something they themselves don’t want to do. Basically people will only pay me to do inefficient things they can’t be bothered to understand, which is the opposite of what I’ve dedicated my career to doing.

Anybody who has read this far has hopefully started to understand why I no longer feel like I can just “get another job” and return to the industry I was once part of. I am met with a sense of overwhelming dread, guilt and anxiety about past failures and the inevitability of not measuring up to future expectations. I don’t feel like I can fit in, I don’t feel like people are able to understand the things that I’m trying to explain or advocate for. This is especially difficult for me to swallow because I enjoy teaching very much, and had a decent degree of success at the code academy with several students thanking me for helping them to see different ways of problem solving. Either I am skillful, experienced and capable of sharing knowledge… or I’m unskilled, inexperienced and incapable of communication. This causes me significant emotional pain as I cannot make sense of what I am doing right or wrong and feel that my ability to judge the character of people no longer works.

So this is me, my name is Mat Gilbert. I used to be a software engineer but lately I don’t know how to get back to the person I used to be. I’m told by peers and former co-workers that I’ve still got it, but my work being second guessed and outright sabotaged by non-technical team members has left me unable to trust my gut and unreasonably hard on myself and my perceived lack of sufficient credentials. I thought taking a break would help me, but now I feel out of practice and even further away from any hopes at making positive changes in my life. I don’t know if the kitchen job was a mistake per-se, but it does feel like a step in the wrong direction. My career feels like a failure and I feel like a true impostor who has been exposed and expelled from a place I didn’t belong in the first place.

If you have any suggestions hit me up mat@vtapi.co