I found this website for the first time last night (all I did was type “developer depression” in to Google). I felt instantly better about my situation. I have been so depressed for so long now… and I was convinced I was all alone. So firstly I’m grateful for this website.
I have always been a pretty stressed out, unhappy guy in general. I’m not really in to coding that much. It was just a job to me. But I worked really hard within my company and I want to be good at something that’s difficult. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I first discovered (almost by accident) that there was this whole wider open-source community and that they were really passionate about adopting OOP. I didn’t even know what OOP was! Since then, I have been franticly trying to keep up and adapt to this new way of working. It is killing me.
I have been going for job interviews recently and here is what one Chief Architect had to say;
You have 7 years experience at the [your company], but unfortunately most of that experience is in technology and methodology that is deprecated. I would estimate that this equates to 1 or maybe at a push 2 years of transferable experience that [our company] could harness.
That really upset me. Mostly because it’s so damn accurate. I feel so foolish having spent all those years thinking I was doing a good job… But actually, was completely ignorant to the fact that I was rubbish.
To make matters worse, I am being bullied and harassed by my management at work… But it’s extremely subtle. They are doing this because I am striving to get better and am (unintentionally) making the more senior programmers (who don’t use OOP at all) look bad… Like asking my Sys Admin team to install Git for example.
I have got to the point where I can’t enjoy anything. I can’t go out with my girlfriend to places because I just sit there, thinking about OOP and how much it’s kicking my ass. I think about how useless I am and how I’m going to be stuck in this job until the day I die. It’s a Government job so the skills are not transferrable at all. We don’t use APIs, eCommerce, we don’t even have to consider web traffic because they are all silly little internal applications.
I’m just totally gutted all the time. I look at myself and think “You total loser”. “Look at what you have acheived… NOTHING!”. I’ve put all this effort in my free time in to trying to be better at programming that I’ve never bothered to learn stuff that might actually have use. Ie installing a dishwasher, maintaining my bicycle, knowing where certain countries are, how to cook a decent meal etc.
I went to my doctor this morning and have a number to call to arrange a councillor. I don’t know what else to say really (I think I’ve said a lot already, more than I intended). I just wanted to get it out there. Thanks for reading.