Daily one-hour standups for two devs have burned me out, I quit.
I just want to share my current work situation and my future plans. Feel free to discuss it with me.
Currently, I'm a developer within a team of three: two developers and one manager. I've been in this position for four years. During the first year, we had a really nice, experienced manager who encouraged us to grow and be independent, making it the most enjoyable time in the company. This gave me the feeling that I could maintain my mental health and eventually climb the career ladder to become a good manager/director of engineering just as they.
However, when our experienced manager was about to retire, we got a new, young manager with no experience. This manager conducts a daily one-hour standup with me and the other developers, which is extremely exhausting. They scrutinize each line of code during standup, sometimes spending five minutes straight sharing the screen and Googling something, leaving us waiting. The manager also instructed us not to contact other teams directly; instead, we must report any issues to him first, which isolates us from other teams. Moreover, he suggests we don't attend social gatherings with other teams to save time for actual work.
Under this new manager, I've started experiencing mental health issues. I often feel diffculty to breath, and feel close to burnout, and have even had suicidal thoughts once or twice (This is too silly). I've realized that there's no career progression under this manager.
I'm not sure if having such a toxic manager is normal in this field. For my mental health, I've decided to quit in quarter. Thankfully, I have some no tech related side hustles, so income won't be a huge problem.
I plan to focus on my side hustles and take a break to recover from mental issues. I'm too exhausted to start interviewing for a new job and go through probation again. Additionally, I plan to contribute to open source projects as a free developer.
I want to take some time to reconsider if the tech industry is conducive to my mental and physical health. I've realized that I can still pursue tech as a hobby without being in a toxic tech company. I reached my breakpoint. Enough!
What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading.
TL;DR: Daily one-hour standups for three years have burned me out, so I've decided to quit for the sake of my mental health.
Edited: I forgot to mention that one senior dev is leaving, and the PM has already left, so we don't have a PM in the standup. Both of them have more work experience than I do. I was too insensitive, and I realize this only now until I got severe mental health issue. I lacked experience and naively believed things would improve magically.