I burned out hard at my last gig. It was the first time I’d experienced burnout like that and even though I knew what was happening, it felt entirely out of my control. Now that I’ve had a substantial amount of time off and have started a new gig, it has given me the opportunity to reflect on my experiences and come up with a an idea of what would have helped me come back from that burnout.
For my spring 2025 review I was given negative feedback for the first time at this job. This was completely surprising to me. I had been a consistent high performer, worked hard, delivered on large projects. This seemingly came out of nowhere.
What actually was happening (to the best of my knowledge from conversations with peers and managers) was that my manager was not passing along feedback that should have been reaching me and was not coming up with plans to help me address feedback. Rather I was being told that everything was fine while my manager was being told that things were not fine.
I panicked and tried to come up with a plan to address the feedback. I talked to every manager between me and our director to gather as much information as I could. I came up with a game plan and started to execute.
My feeling of psychological safety had been shattered and I recognize that I was in a reactive mode, trying to repair damage.
A quarter later my manager was reassigned to a different group and I was put on a different team with a new manager. If my previous manager was conflict avoidant, this manager was uniquely different.
Over the next quarter I worked really hard to prove myself to this manager as a bit of a blank slate. I delivered consistently on the project, demo’d work every week, delivered above & beyond on the PoC we were working on with a very limited team.
The only feedback I heard from this manager over the quarter that we worked together was negative. Any time they felt I was missing the mark or not speaking up enough, they were more than happy to let me know. And only once during our tenure together did they express any positive feedback to me.
So my anxiety built and eventually I decided that it wasn’t work sticking around anymore.
I interviewed a few different places and had a lot of interesting conversations with different managers. I took a position at a company that felt like a good fit. I enjoyed talking to the manager, to my teammates, and to my coworkers. It was a company in a field I knew absolutely nothing about.
In hindsight, that has always been my happy place. When I joined my first software development team it was a completely new experience. I brought some DevOps knowledge and they trained me up as a software engineer. And here it has been very similar. I brought some knowledge and have had the opportunity to jump into a completely new world full of wonderful newness.
And my manager has been entirely supportive of this. I have been repeatedly encouraged to let me curiosity guide me. I have been digging into entire new ecosystems of knowledge & data and trying to understand the domain along with the requirements of my new job.
And it occurred to me, as I ran over the apex of the Bybee Bridge that that was a key thing missing from my last position.
Had someone guided me through the negative feedback, maybe it could have ended differently. Told me that they saw the burnout. To go take a month off. Come back. And be curious.
Instead I doubled down, ground my nose all the way to the grindstone until there was nothing left.
Perhaps what I needed was unrealistic. A company might not be comfortable telling someone identified as needing improvement to go take a substantial amount of time off. They might not feel comfortable letting someone have that amount of free reign. But if companies and managers want to retain talent and truly have employees who can work across team boundaries in novel ways then there has to be some amount of self direction.
Curiosity is what got many of us into this industry and is the thing that drives many of us to excel. Nurture and nourish that curiosity and see where it takes us.