Reddit Experience · 2026 Q2 · Paris

Burnt out from dev work or just my current job?

Frontend Manager Intern
17 upvotes 10 replies

Interview Experience

**tl;dr: first dev job out of college is overwhelming to me, wanting to jump ship for my mental health but scared I might ruin my future. have an offer at another company but need to await clearance**

Full Details

**tl;dr: first dev job out of college is overwhelming to me, wanting to jump ship for my mental health but scared I might ruin my future. have an offer at another company but need to await clearance** I graduated last year and didn't immediately jump into dev-related work, just enjoyed my summer and then did another job for a few months (substitute teaching) to hold down the fort and learn something new. I got hired earlier this year as a software developer, specifically in B2B EDI development, onto a team of less than 5 people (myself and the manager included). It was a departure from my previous experience in more frontend design-oriented roles at my university as a student worker and at Fortune 500 internships. Originally I was excited because this is a decent-paying hybrid role and in a specialization I didn't know much about (so I was eager to learn), but that excitement faded pretty quickly. There is little to no documentation about the existing processes; there are hundreds of programs/services that are being maintained by our tiny team, many of them legacy code; there is no testing environment at all; and I have to be very fast to troubleshoot errors as they are often extremely time-sensitive, but with no documentation and having to dig through thousands of lines of code per program to troubleshoot while being on a time crunch, I get stressed out very quickly in the role. In addition to working on my projects, troubleshooting errors that appear throughout the day, and day-to-day tickets, I also must maintain constant direct communication with the external clients on my projects. This is fine, I really enjoy working with people, but it feels like another thing on the plate every day which can make me feel spread out a lot. Coupled with some other environment-related concerns (only non-male in the group and I've heard... interesting things in the office about women), I just feel very intimidated and burnt out. I try to ask questions to my manager (as the other devs are either extremely busy or sometimes just as confused as I am about an error/task) and am often told "just figure it out" without any guidance. This environment combined with the fast-paced nature of the work makes me feel very stressed, that anxiety bleeding outside of work and making me think about work nonstop. I'm always trying to teach myself to be better, faster, or more efficient as a programmer outside of work almost to an obsessive point. Before this role and my other development experience, I worked several years in a help desk environment where, alongside the repair/troubleshooting tasks and tickets, I specialized in technical writing and some scripting to automate certain tasks for the techs. It also got hectic in this environment as well of course (Internet outages during student testing hours, entire computer labs malfunctioning, etc.), but it felt manageable and the anxiety never stretched beyond the time that I clocked out. I felt like I could reach out to my manager/superiors for help here a lot more easily, and since I spearheaded a lot of the efforts to document our less-obvious solutions, it was easier to find that documentation and solve a task quickly based on those documents. In comparison, my current role has me feeling burnt out almost daily and feeling inadequate as a programmer for not completing tasks fast enough (even for a new hire, as my manager often criticizes my pace), and this anxiety makes me feel exhausted outside of work. I try to document things as I go here as well. I honestly really enjoyed working in IT support and have considered applying to level 2 roles, but I am worried about shooting myself in the foot career-wise if I bounce around jobs and career fields this early. Another thing with this is that I don't know if it's just the environment in this role that's making me feel bad about the situation or if I'm simply not cut out to be a developer. I have a pending-clearance software engineer offer at another company, so I'm waiting out a security clearance right now. Part of me wants to experiment with other jobs that won't make me feel exhausted and anxious every single day, or even temporarily transition back to help desk until I get my clearance, but part of me is also afraid of the worst-case scenario - being stuck in a not-so-great job if I end up not getting approved for my clearance for whatever reason. That's a whole lot of words to expand on the tl;dr up top, but I guess the real question is: how bad would it hurt if I jumped ship? How much exhaustion/burnout is worth tolerating just to have that "Software Engineer" title on the resume?
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