Is it me or do you also get put on numerous projects simultaneously?

I don't know why companies do this. To save money, probably. What were they thinking? It's not efficient to put a developer on several different projects at once, much less projects that are not in their field.

What do you get when you put an employee on 5-10 different projects simultaneously? A nerve-wracked, stressed out, easily-burnt-out employee. I've seen it myself.

Option A: Take new job for immediate 10% salary increase, but have to start at the bottom again, being just a programmer and having to clean up messy code (almost no career growth), which I am a bit burned out from TBH. People seem nice.

OptionB: Stay at current place with no immediate salary increase, but get assigned to Front End Lead and have decision-making powers (good career growth and leadership opportunities) and make them conform to a more standardised way of working so the team becomes more efficient.

So there I was, maintaining our rock-solid Java 7 codebase, older than this Gen Z intern who still thinks floppy disks are 3D-printed save icons.

First day in, he’s like, “Bro, let’s rewrite this in Next.js! Microservices! Serverless! AI!”

Son, this code has been running longer than your TikTok attention span. It doesn’t need scaling, it needs to keep working.

But nooo, he wants TypeScript. He wants to Dockerize a Hello World. He saw a YouTube tutorial and now thinks Java is dead.

I asked, "Why do we need microservices?"

Silence. Blank stare. You could hear a single thread in our monolith peacefully executing a transaction.

Then he mumbled something about "scalability" and "modern architecture"—like we’re running a billion-dollar SaaS, not a POS that’s been happily running since the Nokia ringtone era.

Microservices? Buddy, our biggest spike is the Sunday brunch buffet reservations when the retirees remember they have grandkids. Sit down.

Do you enjoy pain? Love being mistreated while paying $100 a year for it? Welcome to Apple Developer Enrollment!
You'd think for a company that claims to provide "seamless" experiences, their enrollment process would be super straightforward, but no, get ready to waste incredible time with generic error messages.
"Enrollment through the developer app is not possible for this account".
Great! Just great. My peasant app wasn't worthy of being on the almight App Store anyway. Forgive me for trying, my lord.

WTF.

First, they make you prove your existence with endless verifications. Need a D-U-N-S number? Good luck because it's a nightmare. Support? Barely helpful. And if anything goes wrong? Expect weeks of waiting with zero urgency from Apple.

And that $100? You pay it every single year, just to keep your apps measly alive. Meanwhile, Google charges a one-time $25. Fair? Not in Apple land.

And if they randomly decide your app has an issue? Boom, it'll be gone. No warning, no clear answers, just frustration.

So yeah, if you're a masochist who adores pain, jumping through hoops and paying for the privilege, Apple’s got you covered!

Took a chance at telling my bosses how burned out I am and had a really great discussion with them.

Turns out they want me to lead the front end team, because I'm good at it and can make them do higher quality work. Agreed with me that there's something wrong with the code if you have to use a different IDE lmao.

And I can use my 30+ days of sick leave (which I've never used because I don't get sick) to take time off when I need to. Burn out is a disease.

Not all bosses are shitty.

An important lesson I learned:

When upskilling yourself and taking notes, make sure you do it on your personal laptop because when the time of contract termination arises, you will have to sign a waiver that you can't keep any of the data you saved on company infrastructure (including cloud). And then you lose all your notes and possibly knowledge. lol.

I find this concept so annoying. Even in college they said that anything you write down is property of the university.