Ask HN: I am spent and exhausted, I don't know what to do

[ycskyspeak]

Hello folks of HN

As pretty much the only source of info and help on burnout, I turn to you. It has been a year in this company and I am pretty exhausted. I keep going from one burnout to the other in the name of release cycles. The love for the product is gone. I try talking to folks about a change in terms of jobs and I have had a barrage of rejections. Google in the final round rejected me. Companies looking to hire their first PM dont want to talk beyond the initial phone call. It is not hopelessly depressing yet but is very soon going to be. Couple this with barbaric hours at the startup and I dont even know if there is light at the end of the tunnel. I have done all the sane things like reach out for feedback etc etc but I get the canned "Not a fit" because relevant domain experience/we found someone better.

So, HN, How did you guys/gals handle rejection? Happy to PM my resume and talk to folks if there are any takers.

For clarity, I am not a developer/SDET. I am a PM and based on these rejections, not a good one at that :)

[brucehart]

I've fallen into this trap myself and understand where you are coming from. You get so burnt out on your current job that you start to treat every job interview as a potential relief from this burden in your life. What happens though is that you start to sound desperate when interviewing. No one wants to hire a desperate person. Even if you are the most qualified candidate, if you give off the wrong vibe it is difficult to get hired.

My advice is to stop focusing on the outcome of interviews and just focus on what you can control in the process. Try to do a few things each week that will make you seem like a better candidate than you were last week. Treat it like a game where you are leveling up during each round. Go back and review interview questions that you didn't answer well and rehearse what you would say the next time. Put together some material that you can show to someone interviewing you that helps guide the conversation towards your strong points. Keep an open mind and talk to people in your industry. Making it trough several rounds with Google means you are a strong candidate. If you keep up with the process, you'll start getting job offers.

[ycskyspeak]

Thanks for the advice.

I have started doing some work with ruby on rails to make sure that I do not lose touch with programming. I have also enrolled in a bunch of coursera classes which have helped out. Thanks for the words of encouragement. It is people like you who make this forum worth coming to time and again.

[zck]

>I am a PM and based on these rejections, not a good one at that

Everyone goes through this. But note! You got to the final round of Google interviews. That doesn't scream "awful PM" to me. How many people make it that far? No, it's not what you want -- but then, you didn't get weeded out in the resume screen.

[ycskyspeak]

Thanks man! its very encouraging, hope to dig myself out soon

[Litost]

I'm not sure how qualified i am to answer this post, when i got approached by google i didn't actually reply because i'm 99% sure i wouldn't even have got to a first phone interview so your way ahead of me in employability already.

But i've had enough canned responses and no responses to job applications or redundancies from startups going tits up, failed promotions or the right thing said at the wrong time and vice versa to suggest the following: a) Never ever take rejection personally, learn what you can from it but definitely don't beat yourself up over it. I know it's easy to say but in the first place it's obviously downright unhelpful, in the second, there's just so many ways from the apparently sensible, to the outright stupid, people come up with to reject you it's unfunny. There's probably a good reason half the time you get no feedback at all. A number of factors are out of your control. A number of them involve prejudice and herdthink. A number of them involve people making mistakes, politics, or having bad days, asking the wrong questions or just not happening to ask the right question that would make you shine over the other person. A lot of them, e.g. they found someone better, don't even involve you not being good enough to do the job anyway or are just luck, taking a path through domain A rather than domain B, not having buzzword X on your CV when your otherwise excellent CV got binned by someone non-technical in HR.

b) At the risk of getting too metaphysical, quite often it's very difficult to know what the job's actually like until you've started it anyway. So the fact you didn't get it might not be as big a deal as you think (putting to one side your current one sounds far from ideal).

Obviously a lot of these are mistakes you wouldn't expect a decent employer, e.g. Google to make, so the fact you got to a final stage interview with them must put you in the top small fraction of the population anyway so don't take that for granted. And on the flip side, given the fact Google have just come to the conclusion that great exam grades don't necessarily mean great people [sure this popped up on HN recently] just shows how random it can be.

c) Obviously farm your cv around as much as possible to friends, other people in the industry on here etc. for feedback. Hone your technique. Don't give up on google, i gather a lot of people fail on first attempt but get jobs after reapplying later on.

d) Applying for jobs, always reminds me of going through school/college/university. Loads of my friends dropped out at various points, got labelled stupid, unemployable etc. etc. but have since gone on to get one (or more) degrees, MBAs, very highly paid and/or very technical jobs or possibly average jobs that they are just really happy in. The one thing that unites them is that they didn't give up even if when things seemed pretty hopeless and then took one (sometimes very small) step at a time.

Good Luck.

As an aside, obviously your current work situation with long hours isn't helping. I'm assume you have to be aware of the general consensus (mythical man month, agile/xp, amongst many) about how counterproductive repeatedly working long hours is. I'm not sure i'd necessarily go as far as quitting if it's possible to salvage the current job with more sensible hours, a break, go part time etc. or even just work contracted or sensible hours and make them fire you. Though often in these cases it can be the person themselves contributing to the pressure, through fear of failure, perfectionism or just taking onboard other people's monkeys (One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey) and they find kicking back and just letting some stuff fail actually works out better in the long run.

[servowire]

If you have the financial assets please take some time off. Disconnect from your work and relax.

Rejection happens if you are misunderstood - if you are close to burnout you are not 100% yourself.

Hope this helps you.

[ycskyspeak]

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

This, more than anything, is what I wish I could do. Unfortunately with a work visa, that is not an option. Closest thing to a vacation might be to find a behemoth of a company and work a fraction of the hours that I am now working. It will probably be immensely unsatisfying, but it will give me a chance to recharge.

[cpncrunch]

I think servowire is correct - you need time off. It can get to the point where you simply cannot work.

My advice would be to just quit. Your mental and physical health is more important than anything else. There are always other opportunities out there. You could even work at a non-computer job for a while, and possibly work on your own projects in your spare time (once you get your motivation back).

Having suffered from burnout myself, I think it was actually a useful experience, as it forced me to make changes to my life and I am now living a much more fulfilling lifestyle.

I'm happy to chat more privately.

[idoh]

Getting burned out sucks. I'm a PM and I've been there. What helped drag me out was to focus on the process and not the results so much. I spent some time soul searching and landed on what I think is a philosophically sound way to do things, and sticking with it in the ups and downs helped my well being. That being said hitting your numbers / getting results is super important, but you can only impact how you play the game and winning or losing can be (biased) randomness on top of that.

Anyway, happy to look at your resume if you want.

[ycskyspeak]

Thanks Idoh! This focus on the process seems to be a good way of mending the havoc that comes with reliance on results. It at least makes for a good story and something tangible to take from one job to the other.

[guiambros]

Keep in mind that the rejections may have nothing to do with your profile or skillset, but simply to how you're presenting yourself during the interviews.

If you're dealing with burnout, low energy, low self-esteem, this will clearly show up during the interview or even a phone screening. You may not even notice it, but it's usually very evident.

The other recommendations here are all valid: invest in yourself. Take some time off. Learn something new. Start a new Coursera (or eDX, or Udacity). Start exercising, if not already. Give yourself a few months to heal, and then start applying again and move on.

Happy to take a look at your resume and give you some honest feedback, if desired.

[chewxy]

There were plenty of implicit rejections for me in the last two weeks. I decided to vent my frustration by learning how to write Android apps. Ultimately, it didn't do anything for me. But I did learn something new, and wrote something I think is quite cool.

In fact, I just wrote a new blog post talking about how I handled rejection and what I did to make me feel better

Then I rediscovered the joys of running. That made me feel a lot better.

TL;DR - Learn something new, and then do some exercises.

[vijucat]

For a start, next time, you can avoid startups which go, "You should be prepared to make X a major priority in your life" in their job ad. If you pass by that red flag, next up is the huge blinking red light in the form of the idiot founder who goes, "I work 100 hours a week on my startup". If you pass by even that, you have other issues to deal with.

[Mz]

Try to get some rest, eat better, take your vitamins, hydrate. All that stuff makes a difference. At some point, you will solve this. It will go better if you keep yourself together in the mean time.

((hugs)) if you want them.

[ycskyspeak]

Thanks! Hugs back :)

[wellboy]

It's just a numebers game brother. Apply to 100 companies and you will have a couple of offers.

[icu]

Yes I agree with this, however my take would be to think of it as a statistic... how many nos you need to get to a yes. Right now you don't know your base 'conversion' stats so you don't know how many nos give you a yes. Of course you feel lost but you don't have a base case to compare to. Until you do, you need to keep plugging away and just keep track of your stats.

Say you find and you need 80 job applications to a job offer, well then that's great because then you need to know how many nos you need to brush off to get to the yes. Say you cut it down to 40 job applications to a job offer... well clearly you are getting better at the process.

I think playing these sorts of mind games with yourself is really helpful for keeping your ego intact and handling the rejection productively.

[jesusmichael]

Dude... relax... you're in a bad spot have a beer, eat some pizza and get laid...

You'll find a job. Only about 1 in ten people that want jobs don't find them and only about 1 in 100 end up eating out of a garbage can. You sound pretty smart... get your portfolio together and start going to networking events. You'd be surprised how many people want smart people working for them. You have to go looking thru the haystack... the haystack ain't coming to you.