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sdcfgy 13 minutes ago [-]
Sounds exactly like my place.
Never take your primary source of personal worth from a job. Get out of that mindset as soon as you can. In most companies like that you’re fungible in a moment’s notice even if they tell you they value you. As for non delivery, everything we build loses money because it’s built on a guess and doesn’t work properly because it’s designed and built by idiots. Do not listen to the people here doing 90 hour weeks on a startup. That’s insane. I manage about 6 hours a week :)
What they do provide you with is income. Save money so you can afford to lose a job first. Security helps. Find meaning outside work with that income. That is your purpose. And it probably shouldn’t be another let’s just do a side project at home and do another day of work. It should be social in some way.
teroshan 9 minutes ago [-]
Thank you for writing this.
Muromec 24 minutes ago [-]
>when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.
karol 21 seconds ago [-]
Wow, what a story. I'd say part of it is either you are not communicating with enough clarity or there a people in your team or above who are actively trying to not make it happen.
reeredfdfdf 1 hours ago [-]
As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control.
I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.
Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.
_override 36 minutes ago [-]
I agree that I care too much. I've always had a very challenging time decoupling my life from my job. It works the other way around too though, where when things are going well at work and I enjoy the work I do, I feel excellent even outside of the office. But when it doesn't, I don't feel well at all. I really need to learn how to leave work at the office because to be honest this will probably not be my last job that sucks.
yitchelle 5 minutes ago [-]
Sorry to hear about your situation. I had a couple of times been in similar situation. It sounds like you are getting burned out.
The only way to cope is to only deliver the minimum, and not care too much about it. This is risky as there is a chance that the minimum delivery and no care attitude could filter into other areas of your life.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a job soon after.
genezeta 1 hours ago [-]
If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation.
In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be.
From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated.
So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job.
But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to:
1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing.
1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving.
1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead.
2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals.
3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure. Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related to the project's technologies.
The team may need some rearranging too, but try to keep this at minimum so that they can be confident that all of this is strictly related to a technology and skill update, and will not imply any sort of job insecurity or competition.
You may have noticed that all of this is mostly people management. If this is not something you'd like to do, then the only option is leaving. The job you're in right now is clearly one of people managing and not so much a technological one -though is still requires knowing and choosing the technological goals to seek, obviously-.
If you do follow, then who knows what will happen. But if things go well, you might expect to see some results in around 6 months or so, depending on how large/small the team and project are.
_override 24 minutes ago [-]
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
genezeta 15 minutes ago [-]
Ah, then I'd say this is definitely not a good job for you.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your piece of mind.
jraph 33 minutes ago [-]
> My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick. I have started to have really concerning mental health symptoms, specifically severe anxiety, due to this job. I've also had some really dark thoughts which has scared me a lot.
Leave before burning out. In the meantime, maybe take sick leaves if you can.
Consider many people don't notice they are burning out as well.
Leaving even if you don't yet have another plan could lead to a better outcome even considering that leaving your job creates financial difficulties right now because burnouts can take years to heal, some never manage to fully heal as well.
jaggederest 6 minutes ago [-]
Seconded. No job is worth damaging yourself permanently like that, even if it's "just" a temporary burnout, pull the ejection handle. It's a life safety issue.
Start looking before you leave, preferably, but at the very least scale back your commitment so you don't burn out in the mean time. If it's bad, quit. This is why you need to have savings and spend less than you earn.
plumefar 8 minutes ago [-]
I empathize. Deeply. I’ve experienced severe anxiety as well, and very high stress due an environment where I felt powerless.
What saved me (in no particular order)
1. Sport. I felt I was “burning” my stress and anxiety by doing 1h of sport a day, in nature.
2. Therapy
3. Family and friends, quality time
4. Find another job
5. Stop social media
6. Fixed sleep schedule
toyg 29 minutes ago [-]
This sort of thing is why I'm not in that kind of job at the moment. One can have the best product knowledge and perfect instincts about roadmaps and features, and still struggle massively to be a PM in a large enterprise - because most of the job is actually people-related:
* getting buy-in from stakeholders, developers, and testers
* dealing with low performers
* protecting yourself from backstabbing attempts
* deflecting the barrage of scattered requests coming from the top brass
* appeasing customers angered by actions that someone else took
* reacting to big shifts from other parts of the organization
etc etc.
That sort of thing worn me down so much, I had to move sideways to regain some self-respect. Even though I was eventually vindicated by most of the calls I made (which someone else shipped and got credit for, another frustration of the job), I just accepted I am currently not in the right headspace to be a PM/PO in a big company.
So my only suggestion is to keep looking for another job, or even better create your own: with AI getting incredibly good, there has never been a better time for PMs to build their own prototypes, which can then be used to hunt for the job you really want. Otherwise, take the Serenity Prayer to heart and find more meaning away from the job.
dude250711 26 minutes ago [-]
And when growing from the bottom, compensation never seems to scale in line with responsibility. We need to be asking for way more.
sph 1 hours ago [-]
You don't survive a thing that's making you sick. You quit.
No job is worth your health.
CoastalCoder 9 minutes ago [-]
In the US, the equation isn't quite so simple. Being unemployed can mean poor or no health insurance, which is also a health risk.
The economy is not in good shape right now.
hugodan 26 minutes ago [-]
Wake up earlier and do sports outside before starting to work
oumua_don17 23 minutes ago [-]
This definitely helps and honestly should be done even the job isn't toxic! If for any reason sports is not possible, brisk walking is very effective as well.
austin-cheney 12 minutes ago [-]
My last job was API integration related on a government contract. I was the team lead for one of two prime vendors. The lead for the other prime vendor was also the projects project manager. That PM was super toxic.
So the clients wanted me to do one thing (run operations), my supervisors wanted me to focus less on technical contributions and more on administration and leadership, the PM wanted me to be a junior developer. The PM knew I was a supervisor as nd knew of the client expectations and still wanted me to do something else. He even thought he was my supervisor even though my bosses were meeting with him every two weeks and told him the reality. The dude lied to the clients and withheld client communications until I was fired. I think he is autistic because he perceptions of reality were frequently wrong, his only management style was hazing people, and he confused lots of things between various people and work assignments.
I really miss my team because they were awesome people and I kind of miss the income. I really loathed that I was leaving my people behind in such a toxic environment. I was super relieved to not have to do that job anymore though. I had been considering walking away from it two months prior to termination.
Tade0 15 minutes ago [-]
If the job market is so competitive, then surely there's someone out there with experience building APIs?
_override 9 minutes ago [-]
There definitely are people out there. A lot of skilled individuals in Sweden are currently unemployed. But whether or not companies have the budget to hire them is a different story.
altern8 28 minutes ago [-]
Even with LLMs, they can't ship a GET endpoint..?
I feel like there are a lot of people nowadays that are just pretending to be devs and ship things to prod using LLMs
_override 15 minutes ago [-]
I wish I were joking that I literally haven't received a delivery of four GET endpoints I wrote requirements for six months ago. The problem is that nobody seems to understand why this is an issue. We are constantly advertising to our customers that we are moving to API-based integrations and that the future of our product is being able effectively use our product without a user interface, and yet the management team is okay with four GET endpoints not being shipped in six months.
The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.
OP said in a comment that the devs are approaching retirement and their expertise is in COBOL and other really really legacy systems. I doubt they’re inclined at all to start using LLMs, or anything that changes how they work.
GianFabien 2 hours ago [-]
After I read the first paragraph, I could guess the rest. It is typical for the legacy enterprise system space.
My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba.
Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production.
... and keep sending out resumes, etc.
No job is worth jeopardising your mental health.
tdeck 27 minutes ago [-]
> My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
This was my first reaction as well. But it's relatable. I've held myself to similar expectations and caused a lot of stress in the past.
You think the customer is thinking you'll be done in six months? Only if they've never bought enterprise software before. Their expectations are dramatically lower than what you might be holding yourself to. In fact, the expectations may even be lower than what is in the contract.
Even if you moved heaven and earth and shipped an API tomorrow, they likely aren't going to be able to start integrating it right away. That requires work on their end that needs to be planned into a quarter etc...
iamflimflam1 1 hours ago [-]
What support do you have in your job - are you in a team of product managers/owners.
Is there a tech/team lead on the project - what’s their opinion of the progress the team is making?
It sounds like you are taking all the delivery responsibility on your own shoulders.
Is this project really top priority with your management? It sounds like it might not be.
amelius 40 minutes ago [-]
What does your boss say? Do they think the company is doing fine?
snyena 45 minutes ago [-]
Just wanted to say - hope things ease up soon. I'm a PM/PO too (7 years in), and my first 15 months in my current job also felt like total shit, for different reasons. Got better mostly because some good people joined the team. Not sure that's replicable for you, but honestly - do what's within your power, within reasonable limits, and try to switch off from work once you're home. Easier said than done, but try.
Also, being told to sell a modernization roadmap to customers while the team can't actually ship it isn't really a you problem. That's just a bad setup.
I'm in Slovakia but have a bit of a Swedish connection myself - studied there, speak alright Swedish, even made it to the last round for a PM job in Skövde once (didn't get it). Market's rough right now but your CV sounds solid, that'll turn.
Hope you find something better soon. Lycka till!
lifestyleguru 34 minutes ago [-]
Having had an experience with legacy enterprise software from Sweden once, I just passed out in the the workplace mentally, was absent few times, then they fired me. Hope it helps.
lain98 20 minutes ago [-]
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"
I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described.
Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes.
I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something like - these are just thoughts and I acknowledge them and let them pass.
Few of my friends did not have good results with medication.
I am also detached from my job, its only purpose is to make enough money to no longer need doing the job. Today I work to live and see tomorrow and the same thing tomorrow again.
I suggest talking to someone elder and with a more positive outlook on life, not from work. Preferably retired.
In summation-
You are not your job friend. Not should it give meaning to your life. Live to fight another day. It helps to detach oneself.
lain98 6 minutes ago [-]
It also might help if you are a praying man.
lain98 18 minutes ago [-]
Finding hobbies and working out didnt work for me. People say it works. It doesnt for me and sounds cliched.
But dont let it fool you in the manner that these things work for others but not for me, I must be doomed then.
Again detach yourself and wait for better times.
nobodyandproud 24 minutes ago [-]
This is why I was always happier as a worker bee, over being responsible for an entire team or org.
You outlined the root cause: “our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult.”
Do you have any authority or influence to change this, either through training, bringing in consultants (be very careful with this one), or worst case via hiring/firing?
thiago_fm 2 hours ago [-]
Make less your life about your work. It's so hard for some people, myself included to do that. But you need to do that!
Some people don't even want to work at all or work in a successful product or whatever. We created all those silly expectations for ourselves, often they aren't even our expectations but the expectations of others.
Those expectations, our desires often make us very miserable.
For instance, 90%+ of the people in the world would dream of living in Sweden, despite your bad outlook of the job market. It's all about perspective.
Of course, if you can afford, pay a psychologist. They may help you better to deal with your emotions and help you find out what you need.
Maybe try building something... if you want, hit me up, see my profile. But maybe first try to chill down and enjoy life a bit.
burnt-resistor 28 minutes ago [-]
Take a sabbatical without going into details, if at all possible. It's unfair to expect someone to perform at a high level while suffering. When not depressed, work becomes a whole lot easier and many things aren't as seemingly insurmountable.
It can also take steadfastly trying dozens+ of antidepressants to find one that works best with least side-effects. Don't have anything important to do when changing medications because some side-effects are difficult. It can take around days to a week to stabilize to titrate on and about the same off, depending on the medication.
deadbabe 15 minutes ago [-]
tbh I envy your position, you have a real opportunity to blow people away showing them what real modernization looks like. Like Prometheus bringing fire to humans.
I don’t understand why you haven’t just let an AI agent do all the tasks your incompetent coworkers take months to do.
cbg0 37 seconds ago [-]
Making all of your coworkers look bad so you can be "Prometheus"? Sounds like a great way to become unemployed.
kya 10 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
MichaelRo 54 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
tremon 44 minutes ago [-]
You're advocating for self-medicating with an over the counter drug over doctor-prescribed (and presumably monitored) drugs? I agree with your stance on SSRIs and don't think they should be used to address situational anxiety, but your suggestion is not an improvement.
To the OP: if you're at a point where you're taking medication to cope with your job, maybe you would be better off taking long term sick leave.
Planktonne 47 minutes ago [-]
This is not good advice. It can take a while to find medication or therapy that works for you, but developing a drinking problem is not the answer.
Never take your primary source of personal worth from a job. Get out of that mindset as soon as you can. In most companies like that you’re fungible in a moment’s notice even if they tell you they value you. As for non delivery, everything we build loses money because it’s built on a guess and doesn’t work properly because it’s designed and built by idiots. Do not listen to the people here doing 90 hour weeks on a startup. That’s insane. I manage about 6 hours a week :)
What they do provide you with is income. Save money so you can afford to lose a job first. Security helps. Find meaning outside work with that income. That is your purpose. And it probably shouldn’t be another let’s just do a side project at home and do another day of work. It should be social in some way.
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.
I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.
Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.
The only way to cope is to only deliver the minimum, and not care too much about it. This is risky as there is a chance that the minimum delivery and no care attitude could filter into other areas of your life.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a job soon after.
In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be.
From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at all so frequent. If the project is legacy, most often is because the team also is outdated.
So, obviously you can just switch jobs. And if you're getting sick from it, then you should by all means leave this job.
But then again, if what you actually want is to make this job work, then my suggestion is to:
1. Get the whole team together and evaluate their situation. Make a list of the skills the team is lacking and the knowledge updates needed. Make them participate in this so that, at the same time, you can evaluate their attitude towards the whole thing.
1.a. If the team does not want to update, then there's no successful path and I would suggest leaving.
1.b. If the team is receptive, then go ahead.
2. Meet with whoever needs to authorise it and get them to commit to providing both time and resources for re-training the team. You will need a plan, a timeline, and achievable goals.
3. Start as soon as you can. Focus first on basic infrastructure. Any tools, processes, skills, that are generic and widely applicable. Then go for more specific ones directly related to the project's technologies.
The team may need some rearranging too, but try to keep this at minimum so that they can be confident that all of this is strictly related to a technology and skill update, and will not imply any sort of job insecurity or competition.
You may have noticed that all of this is mostly people management. If this is not something you'd like to do, then the only option is leaving. The job you're in right now is clearly one of people managing and not so much a technological one -though is still requires knowing and choosing the technological goals to seek, obviously-.
If you do follow, then who knows what will happen. But if things go well, you might expect to see some results in around 6 months or so, depending on how large/small the team and project are.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your piece of mind.
Leave before burning out. In the meantime, maybe take sick leaves if you can.
Consider many people don't notice they are burning out as well.
Leaving even if you don't yet have another plan could lead to a better outcome even considering that leaving your job creates financial difficulties right now because burnouts can take years to heal, some never manage to fully heal as well.
Start looking before you leave, preferably, but at the very least scale back your commitment so you don't burn out in the mean time. If it's bad, quit. This is why you need to have savings and spend less than you earn.
What saved me (in no particular order)
1. Sport. I felt I was “burning” my stress and anxiety by doing 1h of sport a day, in nature.
2. Therapy
3. Family and friends, quality time
4. Find another job
5. Stop social media
6. Fixed sleep schedule
* getting buy-in from stakeholders, developers, and testers
* dealing with low performers
* protecting yourself from backstabbing attempts
* deflecting the barrage of scattered requests coming from the top brass
* appeasing customers angered by actions that someone else took
* reacting to big shifts from other parts of the organization
etc etc.
That sort of thing worn me down so much, I had to move sideways to regain some self-respect. Even though I was eventually vindicated by most of the calls I made (which someone else shipped and got credit for, another frustration of the job), I just accepted I am currently not in the right headspace to be a PM/PO in a big company.
So my only suggestion is to keep looking for another job, or even better create your own: with AI getting incredibly good, there has never been a better time for PMs to build their own prototypes, which can then be used to hunt for the job you really want. Otherwise, take the Serenity Prayer to heart and find more meaning away from the job.
No job is worth your health.
The economy is not in good shape right now.
So the clients wanted me to do one thing (run operations), my supervisors wanted me to focus less on technical contributions and more on administration and leadership, the PM wanted me to be a junior developer. The PM knew I was a supervisor as nd knew of the client expectations and still wanted me to do something else. He even thought he was my supervisor even though my bosses were meeting with him every two weeks and told him the reality. The dude lied to the clients and withheld client communications until I was fired. I think he is autistic because he perceptions of reality were frequently wrong, his only management style was hazing people, and he confused lots of things between various people and work assignments.
I really miss my team because they were awesome people and I kind of miss the income. I really loathed that I was leaving my people behind in such a toxic environment. I was super relieved to not have to do that job anymore though. I had been considering walking away from it two months prior to termination.
I feel like there are a lot of people nowadays that are just pretending to be devs and ship things to prod using LLMs
The next set of API endpoints we have in our backlog are write operations based on the Strangler Fig design pattern [1] using our existing stored procedures with a thin API wrapper around them. I can only imagine that if four GET endpoints have taken over six months to ship, that this is going to take an order of magnitude longer time, especially since our development team hasn't had to deal with things like concurrency and idempotency before.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/pattern...
My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba.
Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production.
... and keep sending out resumes, etc.
No job is worth jeopardising your mental health.
This was my first reaction as well. But it's relatable. I've held myself to similar expectations and caused a lot of stress in the past.
You think the customer is thinking you'll be done in six months? Only if they've never bought enterprise software before. Their expectations are dramatically lower than what you might be holding yourself to. In fact, the expectations may even be lower than what is in the contract.
Even if you moved heaven and earth and shipped an API tomorrow, they likely aren't going to be able to start integrating it right away. That requires work on their end that needs to be planned into a quarter etc...
Is there a tech/team lead on the project - what’s their opinion of the progress the team is making?
It sounds like you are taking all the delivery responsibility on your own shoulders.
Is this project really top priority with your management? It sounds like it might not be.
Also, being told to sell a modernization roadmap to customers while the team can't actually ship it isn't really a you problem. That's just a bad setup.
I'm in Slovakia but have a bit of a Swedish connection myself - studied there, speak alright Swedish, even made it to the last round for a PM job in Skövde once (didn't get it). Market's rough right now but your CV sounds solid, that'll turn.
Hope you find something better soon. Lycka till!
I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described.
Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes. I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something like - these are just thoughts and I acknowledge them and let them pass.
Few of my friends did not have good results with medication.
I am also detached from my job, its only purpose is to make enough money to no longer need doing the job. Today I work to live and see tomorrow and the same thing tomorrow again.
I suggest talking to someone elder and with a more positive outlook on life, not from work. Preferably retired.
In summation- You are not your job friend. Not should it give meaning to your life. Live to fight another day. It helps to detach oneself.
Again detach yourself and wait for better times.
You outlined the root cause: “our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult.”
Do you have any authority or influence to change this, either through training, bringing in consultants (be very careful with this one), or worst case via hiring/firing?
Some people don't even want to work at all or work in a successful product or whatever. We created all those silly expectations for ourselves, often they aren't even our expectations but the expectations of others.
Those expectations, our desires often make us very miserable.
For instance, 90%+ of the people in the world would dream of living in Sweden, despite your bad outlook of the job market. It's all about perspective.
Of course, if you can afford, pay a psychologist. They may help you better to deal with your emotions and help you find out what you need.
Maybe try building something... if you want, hit me up, see my profile. But maybe first try to chill down and enjoy life a bit.
It can also take steadfastly trying dozens+ of antidepressants to find one that works best with least side-effects. Don't have anything important to do when changing medications because some side-effects are difficult. It can take around days to a week to stabilize to titrate on and about the same off, depending on the medication.
I don’t understand why you haven’t just let an AI agent do all the tasks your incompetent coworkers take months to do.
To the OP: if you're at a point where you're taking medication to cope with your job, maybe you would be better off taking long term sick leave.