Last fall, after a few years of working for a department of the federal government, I found myself dealing with what I now understand to be the typical symptoms of burnout -- no motivation, aversion to work, cynicism, and depression. To me, the problem felt like it was the work. I had a manager who paid no attention to me, repetitive and dull work maintaining legacy database applications, and zero support from colleagues. I did the things I thought I was supposed to do: found a therapist to talk it over with, took six weeks short-term disability on a doctors' recommendation, started exercising, journaling, meditating. By the end of the six weeks off I was beginning to feel like myself again.

When I went back to work, it wasn't long -- maybe a couple of weeks -- before the old feelings of hopelessness started to surface again. By February of this year, only a few months after my medical leave ended, it had grown once more to be too much for me to handle on my own -- I was crying every day before and after work (and sometimes at my desk) from the mental exhaustion of doing even simple little feature requests or bug fixes, the kind of thing that I used to be able to do quite happily for hours at a time earlier in my career. When I looked at my colleagues' code during review, all I could see was the flaws, and I grew bitter and distant from my team. After a last-ditch request for transferring departments was denied by my manager, I decided to pack it up and just quit.

I was rapidly headhunted with what seemed like a golden ticket -- fully remote, working on a product in the field I studied in university (NLP), 20% more pay, working with a team of people that seemed during the interviews to be passionate and interesting. I told them I would need two months off before starting the gig to recover from my last job, and they readily agreed. At the end of those two months, once again, I felt so much better: I was exercising, eating well, seeing friends and family, and generally open to what life had to offer. Now I've been in the new job for only a month, and my mental health has never been worse. All I can see is mountains of technical debt, a culture of mostly freshly-graduated devs who seem happy to work 12 hour days six days a week, and managers who are beholden to sales and unable (or unwilling) to push back for saner deadlines or better working conditions for their teams. At the end of each day I am too exhausted mentally and emotionally to do anything other than order take out and sit in front of the television until I fall asleep. I can barely recognize myself as the person I was a month ago.

I've been a professional SWE for ten years now, and a hobby programmer for another ten years before that. I'm "only" 36, but I'm afraid that my career may already be over, and I'm still paying off the student loans from my CS degree.

So: to those devs who have experienced burnout before, and recovered: is there light at the end of the tunnel? If you took time off to recover, how much time did you need before you felt genuinely ready to work again? What can I do to rediscover the ability to do this job I used to love so well? Or is it time to "simply" change careers?

Edit: Thank you all for your compassionate & thoughtful replies -- what a wonderfully kind community. Reading what you have written and seeing that I'm not at all alone in this struggle has been a comfort on a hard day. Many Zoom 1:1s and "pairing sessions" on my schedule for today, but I will come back in the evening to absorb more of what you've said and leave some replies in the comments.