Career Burnout? WWCRD

[mrhobbz]

I figured I'd post here since I know there are quite a few people in the IT world here.

 

How often do you guys experience burnout? To give you some background before I go into a spiel/rant; I worked at Chase doing Application Support (R1RETRTS) and then later as an Application Developer (RSI) for 4 years in total. Management started leaving and so did the other developers/support folk due to reorgs and mostly work life balance issues and all the red tape we had to jump through to do our daily jobs.

 

So I left Chase and picked up a telecommute job doing Application Support (mostly Java and proprietary C++ applications) it was all gravy. Loved it, moved to Myrtle Beach since we had an office there and my parents had retired here.

 

Fast forwarded to the present and we've adopted Googles SRE model which is in short where they take a bunch of different jobs, jam them together and cross train all of those separate teams to do each of those individual jobs including Application support, development, QE and performance testing.

 

I've been here three years and this reorg into the SRE model just started about 1.5 years ago. Everything was good and I was all for it until it came to cross training the QE/Perf testing portion. There is no official training, it's just a hodge podge of asking people who were already doing it pre-reorg and that causes a plethora of problems.

 

The developers are also the ones who did QE/Perf testing so when I try to get training on the testing side 90% of the time they are too busy working on development items and when they do have time to help with training I get very specific pieces of information, usually based solely around what they are developing at the time. So weeks go by before I get another piece of that training and now I am stuck trying to piece together information that I've likely already forgotten about because there is no consistency.

 

My performance review for raises/bonuses/etc are tied to this training around QE/perf testing and I feel like I've been setup for failure because there is no structure to the cross training and it's really starting to create a lot of stress and burn out and personal bouts of depression for me. I've spoken to management already about my concerns and it's like they don't understand what I'm saying. So now my objectives have changed from learning ALL of testing to learning one tool in testing which I haven't been able to get any training on yet anyway.

 

I don't think I've ever had issues like this in the workplace, I've busted my ass to get where I'm at (especially being a high school dropout), I'm making good money for a 29 year old with no formal education but this whole predicament is making me feel like a failure and I don't have the slightest clue how to get around it at this point.

 

Anyone have any tips? I suspect a lot of you guys may have experienced the whole "hey do 14 jobs with no training" thing in other industries as well but I know its becoming extremely common in the IT world.