Burnout because of failed project
Posted by Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 30 comments
I was a webdev for a government project. I can’t say I liked it much but IT in our county is not wide enough and I couldn‘t find remote.
We had a project to replace existing expensive ready system. Our project stayed for 2 years at dev env. I told management multiple times to do Agile, MVP, go production. There were some changes like - put this button here or there but some backend ones too. They‘ve postponed deadlines for 3 month for multiple times. After all my manager and his boss were fired and I was laid off.
How to overcome this? I‘ve seen two times that management is replaced and project fails, even don’t go prod. I love engineering but now it’s hard to me to hear ”let’s do this change” because I sometimes see no sense there.
How can I overcome this feeling?
morswinb@reddit
Not my monkey not my circuis.
You feed that monkey well, good job. Not your responsibility they wanted a monkey do sing and dance.
Take a break and find something else to work on.
Bauerprime@reddit
I’m also a developer like you and experienced the same thing as you. In my experience, situations like that mess with your head more than the actual work does. When you spend months building something that never ships and decisions keep changing for no real reason, it’s hard not to start questioning everything. What helped me was realizing that it wasn’t really about engineering — it was about the environment. Bad leadership, no clear direction, no ownership… even good engineers will feel stuck there. Once I got into a place where things actually move and get shipped, even if imperfect, that feeling slowly went away. You’re probably not losing your passion for engineering, you’re just tired of putting effort into something that goes nowhere. I’d be happy to talk more about it if you’re up for it.
CombinationNearby308@reddit
OP, you need to separate business decisions from technical decisions. As devs, we take technical decisions and we influence business decisions. In large teams, even technical decisions are influenced and then there are also teams where business takes technical decisions, which is the worst.
Whatever happens, learn from it and don't let it affect you. In my country, where this is rampant corruption, I could have told you that upper management would go for the expensive available solution because they get kickbacks when they buy it and then every year after that for license renewal and maintenance. The 2 year in-house run is just paper work proving in-house dev "does not work" and the project was doomed from the start. Your bosses likely knew it from the beginning and played along anyway.
Either way, dust it off, write down your technical learnings and learn to distance yourself from the outcomes and work towards increasing your influence if you wish to influence outcomes.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
I understand you, my country is the same. We supposed our boss wanted to remove expensive solution, but was removed himself. Not for humanity I think but for some political reasons, maybe getting better position. He explained about state budget - the more you spend the more yo get next year.
And this is tedius itself - you should figure out if a new feature is suggested for technical or political reasons. To postpone the deadlines and make us fail.
United_Reaction35@reddit
Great illustration of why corruption is so corrosive. One social and economic distortion after another. So discouraging...
markedasreddit@reddit
Maybe it helps to understand that this is not the case in most organisations. Most will always try to push to prod. Any decent gov entities as well. Cheer up OP, there are better companies out there.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
Maybe I had bad luck facing this twice in 6 years.
markedasreddit@reddit
Yes you are probably unlucky. Many organisations will always try to push at least something to prod so business users will get what they need. Or else it would be just a waste of budget.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
It was government, kinda monopoly. They’ve pushed us to work faster but not so much. Business QA part was the bottleneck. This manager should test then agree with other one for state regulations etc. And they also had a ready expensive solution paid from state budget. They were trying to replace it.
I don’t blame them because if they lose these politic games in office they are replaced too.
Strict-Protection434@reddit
I always find it is in regulated industries, and you can't really fix it as a developer. if the pipeline isn't working there isn't much you can do besides either sit and collect a paycheck and/or find a new job.
as a developer I always try to work around these resource constraints and do my best, but it's inevitable that you're going to eventually have years of work that feel worthless or wasted in retrospect.
as for the feeling, I don't know. I always try to do better in the future.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
At least I know it’s not my issue but business logic that lives in the heads of different people. Bringing it all together is a challenge itself.
markedasreddit@reddit
Aah ok I have been in this situation where in-house solution competes with off-the-shelf solution. It's really hard if leadership cannot decide whether they want to build or buy from day one.
Oh well, again I agree with suggestions from others: take your time to rest and upskill, and then try to find a new job.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
Thank you!
Melodic_Crow_3409@reddit
I’ve been through more than one failed project. A failed project that nearly broke me professionally. This was 2014 to 2015. It was a smart home device. Well, the company actually did ship a product, the development was so incredibly chaotic that the product really was never very good.
The problem is it involves a dozen teams scattered throughout the world that weren’t working with any set of requirements. They also weren’t working together well. The top management just showed us PDFs and said “make that”.
The top management had a design firm create these really cool proof of concepts, but it was nothing that we could really use to build a final product from.
The development culture was so coward by the top management that any issue that I tried to bring up got buried.
I recovered by finding another job. One that was way better than where I left.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
Thank you for sharing this! PDF or doc files for technical requirements are so familiar.
General-Jaguar-8164@reddit
Take a break. Skill up in AI. Find a niche where you want to build something.
Bderken@reddit
This is the best advice for almost any software dev stuck in any funk right now
General-Jaguar-8164@reddit
I had a chat with a former colleague from a company I work for 5 years ago
He saw what I was publishing and he wanted advice
Basically he haven’t played with any coding agent. Did a LLM-based project 2 years ago. Still writes code by hand in vim and all this time was very skeptical AI could write code and his main push back was token costs
New CTO came into the company this year and basically said “you have to improve productivity using AI, I don’t care how”
I was very early ChatGPT user, went all in code generation since 2023, I convinced my company to give copilot subscriptions to everyone and told them “we are late by 6 months”, they were skeptical
First week of January I showed my manager and colleagues how I one shotted a 5k lines features with GitHub copilot with cloud agents (I put enough context in the repo and built a proper plan as GH issue, then assign to copilot)
On 2025, 90% my code was AI-generated
They were skeptical: “it’s scary to run AI code in production”. My reply: “we already run AI code in production”
Engineers are trained to think about pitfalls, edge cases and worst case scenarios. That doesn’t help for innovation and when you have to move fast (and break things)
Now I’m joining a public fintech company that’s is going all in for using AI in all business processes, I told them they are 1 year late
Time and changing fast. From my interview to when I’m joining the landscape changed a lot, companies that can’t shift strategies fast enough with lag behind and be outcompeted
Bderken@reddit
I agree but man Reddit isn’t going to like this because they are genuinely hating change
General-Jaguar-8164@reddit
I can’t believe Reddit users are so anti AI
Reddit communities used to be about disruption of the status quo, or maybe I’m too old
Bderken@reddit
The young ones have a political identity to it now. And the old ones are afraid of change.
I saw some Reddit user say he doesn’t update software because he’s afraid of change.. lots of mentally deranged people on this site
General-Jaguar-8164@reddit
Right. It's like people who are into tech are there because now it's a big industry, not because it's cool to play with new software
Bderken@reddit
Yup, people have made it their identity and now their identity is changing.
It boggles my mind. We used to celebrate technical achievements like nuclear and AI. Not everyone’s just crying about it and tearing it down
mipscc@reddit
What a crap take.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
I do. No problem in coding, the problem now is in working with people 😕
General-Jaguar-8164@reddit
There are good managers and teams, but they are picky
Amidstmist@reddit
government / enterprise projects failing to reach production is unfortunately common. too many layers of approval, no ownership, no real urgency.
Intrepid-Ostrich2226@reddit (OP)
Thank you! Now I will know in advance.
sdwvit@reddit
It almost feels like the project was made failing deliberately. I bet no-one returned any money. Team was used as a scapegoat.
Oakw00dy@reddit
You don't tell which country, but there's a good chance that a government project funding is usually tied at least as much into politics as to actual need. My guess is that you hit a pork project where the goal wasn't actually produce anything but to spend money. Eventually funding runs out and the project gets shitcanned. Rinse and repeat. So the upshot of it is, don't take it as a personal failure. Go with the flow or you'll burn out.