Quitting At Work, and Normalizing Burnout Conversations

I Quit A Work Project... And I Felt like Sh*t

Several months ago, I took on a large project at work. In summary, my task was to:

• Migrate the data within ~25 columns from one table, and split them between 2 new tables. There were over 650,000 discrete records that would be affected.
• Update all related business logic within dozens of files in the backend, so that they read from the 2 new tables, no longer the old.
• Update all related tests.

Huge task. But I was excited; I had several team members available to help if I got stuck, so I believed I would just advance systematically through each part of the project.

Things Get Messy

I was wrong. Even though I divided the work into parts and sections that made sense implementation-wise, I ended up with an enormous pull-request that had over 100 commits, 77 changed files and 60+ comments.

So many parts of the app were broken. So I put my head down and fixed each break, only to have other parts break in turn. I kept going, but by this time, I was not enjoying the process anymore. I ran out of bandwidth for my other responsibilities (like reviewing my teammates’ work, or fulfilling open source duty). This one project consumed me.