Yesterday I had a small breakdown at my cube.
I'm not 100% sure what caused it--probably just a bit of everything. My desk has been moved so I don't sit next to anyone anymore; I'm on a new team and I'm not sure if I like them. They keep gawking at me when they walk by; I'm getting piled on with work and being told "don't worry about it"; I was supposed to work on a critical project a month ago and my manager only told me about it yesterday, meaning my holidays might be full of crunching to get this in.
I had a meeting with my manager where I told him what was stressing me, about the deadlines coming up, and he told me "don't worry about it." Obviously I'm gonna worry about it dude, because I'm one of the dumbasses who cares about my work.
He told me a few weeks ago he was going to talk to another manager about getting us some extra days off--literally like two days because of some overtime we did earlier in the year. Keep in mind it's nearly November, so we're running out of months to use it. I'm burnt out, I'm tired, I'm crying at work, I need some kind of break, but it's really been out of the frying pan and into the fucking sun. Anyways, I asked him today about those days, because he had told me: "don't worry about it, I'll handle it, let me ask blah blah and I'll get back to you," well, shockingly /s, he forgot. I felt so defeated in that moment, I work so hard and I was promised these days, can't he see how badly I need a break? And he just doesn't care at all. I just want to know if I'm getting them so I can start putting them into my calendar and give people a head's up that I'll be out. He actually asked me why I was asking about them, if I was wanting to use them for something specific. Yeah, dude, I wanted to use them next week. Now I can't because you can't do the one thing I wanted your help on.
He told me again to just "try not to worry about it." If I can't cover my workload, then my teammates will come in. My teammates who almost exclusively (maybe completely) use AI. One of them was showing me a change they made, and they were literally showing the app and saying, "I believe it used to show this, but now I think it's showing this, so that's the change." DUDE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW HIS OWN CHANGES? Imagine using AI to do it and not even validating what you're changing with it. So no, please do not threaten me by saying we can bring these guys onto my application. Yucky.
Not to fucking mention that I'm working on another team who does limited knowledge sharing and expects me to prioritize their backlog over my own. I have... something like five deadlines coming up in Nov/Dec, in addition to half of my PTO being use it or lose it for 2026. Oh, but don't worry about it, don't worry about it. I spent almost all day testing user stories that my AI fanatic teammates wrote on an application that I barely understand. And guess what? I found a LOT of problems, because it's AI-written code they made for an application they don't understand! I don't know if they even really understand how to test their code--you have to validate, you have to check edge cases, you can connect to your endpoints directly to check them without needing a UI, you can log into the database to validate, you need to check dev environment after deploying to it. I don't think they know any of that because they didn't actually develop before AI, and now that AI is here, what's the point in trying, or caring, or learning? All of that is a waste of the time that AI supposedly saves. Of course, don't worry about the fact that AI written code is going to be wrong out of the box unless what you're doing is very basic--and even if it is, you still need to check it.
It's pretty stereotypical humor to be like "I hate my job", but that's not really me. There are elements about my job I don't like but I've never hated it. I sound like a corporate brown-noser when I say it but I genuinely mean it: I like learning new things everyday. I like working with my team. I like the opportunities, patterns, experiences I've formed so far at my job.
But lately I feel bereft of those things. My team is gone. I don't learn things anymore, and if I do, it's in spite of the AI I'm mandated to use. Being told "don't worry about it" is like pointing a squirt gun at a fire; it's almost insulting to the type of person I actually am that my manager would think a platitude like that would do anything to ease my mind.
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