That's the exact question that came to me 2 years back when I was also going to go to sleep early tonight

!dev !rant - only very sad

I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.

I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.

In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.

The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.

As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.

It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.

Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.

What a damn fuckin' week.

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

I don't understand how my managers suddenly forgot that my "down weeks" we're due to technical debt I inherited. The whole on boarding hasn't been in my favor. I've stayed at work everyday til long after work hours, digging through code, trying to get JIRA tickets done, encountering issues specific to our code base that no one would ever discover on their own without docs/help from the original dev. The whole time, I was told that they know what's going on and apologize. I constantly expressed that plenty of what we were doing was building on antipatterns. They acknowledged. When a ticket wasn't done, they always knew the very specific reason and I wasn't faulted. 6 months in, I receive a great annual review. 7 months in? I receive an email titled "Performance Discussion," detailing 4 of those incidents where a ticket was pushed back -- with inaccurate depictions of what actually went down. They actually wrote that I didn't communicate. One part of the report expressed that there were "bugs found in production due to inadequate test coverage." WTF!! Everything made it past code review and QA. What are you talking about?? In fact, the person who wrote that merged my code in each time!!!! Insane!! Anyway, Q2 is partly about cleaning up technical debt, which is a responsibility I have been vested (fantastic). I've deleted about 800 lines of code in the last 2 weeks and added plenty of doc strings. Two of the most important modules our application works from are about 1000 lines of JavaScript each without any comments/docs. I'm changing that, but I don't know if my managers truly know the significance. Someone was recently promoted to my position but manually wrote out a sorting algorithm (specified numeric indexes and all); didn't do shit to earn it but breathe. And while they get more and more praise and responsibility, I'm over here stuck trying to prove myself and live up to why I assume they hired me. It's ridiculous. I love the company, but I'm not getting any sleep and I'm stressed out. It's only been about 7 months and I've been doing everything I can. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? I've been developing a recurring (physical) headache and ticks. My heart/chest area sometimes feels like it's lifting weights. I sound like an idiot, pushing so hard for a company that isn't mine, but I take so much pride in being in this position, and I'm so set on proving myself this early in my career (I'm 25).

Boubas: adjusting their sleep schedule by forcing themselves to go to bed early. Result: bouba turns all over the bed for three hours straight trying to find a comfortable position, sweats, stands up to adjust windows and AC, now it’s too cold... ends up actually falling asleep later than usual, wakes up fucked, as always.

Boubas who think they’re kikis: take melatonin pills. Result: bouba can’t sleep without their bouba pills.

Me (the kiki): wear blue light blocking glasses from five o’clock on. No blue light = no melatonin burned, go to bed at 11pm, sleep like a teen girl after a rough teen sex with her teen boyfriend.

Yes I sometimes wake up at 3am but that’s because my brain is too kiki to sleep. I feel refreshed, TOO refreshed in fact.

So Im still a college student but my worst burnout happened a week before finals this year as a sophomore at DigiPen

On the same week, I had to conduct and submit 10 playtests for my competitive Unity game by Friday, submit said game polished and completed on Sunday, finish and submit my team game project that I've been working on the whole year with 10 other people also on Sunday (which we would discover so many TCR submission issues we ended up finally resubmitting on Thursday the following week).

On top of this I had to write a memory manager for my operating systems class due Thursday, a water retainment assignment involving recursive queues for my Data Structures class due Saturday, and to top it all off that class also had a final Thursday when that memory manager was due :'). I don't know how I managed to get OK sleep.

All stuff was due that week so all game teams could have next week before finals to work on submitting, so some CS teachers also move their finals to before that to theoretically distribute the load (which sucks for people in my major because we're almost a double major for CS and Game Design) However my team wanted to submit early to snatch some bonus points but we ended up having to resubmit late anyways :(. Due to the week of hell we were already burned out when trying fix our resubmission.

I love the school and the people in it but there's a reason why our most heard phrase is "I want to die" and no its not just a millenial thing I swear.

!tech i don't understand how people makes any place a home?

I have an experience of living with my parents and that is a place where i feel belonging and safe, but i wonder why? like , in your home, you could be awake till 4 am and still sleep like a log. you won't have thoughts of strangers trying to murder you or rob you when you hear the slightest noise. (atleast not occasionally)

but this is not the case when you try to live alone. for eg , i would often call/text someone before sleep when i am staying in a hotel room. and if the hotel isn't a superior one (imagine those close, small rooms w in a broken up 2 star hotel in a quiet and unpopulated area), i would be sleeping with my eyes open, praying the night to get over

So an early conclusion can be this : a person would feel safe and carefree wherever they are with known people. in my home i got my parents. although its weird since they are neither physically nor financially powerful to deal with any stranger situation. But still, a home feels home. and a home feels safe.

maybe it's because of the the people around the home? so most people have neighbours, shops, parks, efc around their homes. some even have forests, police stations or other places in vicinity. so does that make an area safe to breathe ?

For our family, i don't know if that thing applies. our neighbours are crappy dummies who would rather have someone's home burning than coming for rescue, but fight to death if someone parks in their spot or ask them to fix something. If their is a robbery in our area, i would rather suspect one of those assheads to be the culprits than someone from outside.

however, knowing the fact that they know us makes me think that this is a considerable factor that add to the sense of safeness in an environment . i guess that's why even the verbal quarrels among neighbours are done in such a noisy manner.

So if someone is shifting to another location, say in a different city or even a different state, they should spend first few days befriending every neighborhood person? that would be a weird approach. i have seen a few shiftings in my area and the new people rarely try to come into attention. even the people who get shifter on temporary basis (i.e the rent based pg/tenents etc), are always silent.

so how exactly does anyone make a new house, their comfortable and safe 'home' ?