Quarter Life Crisis

My experience with corporate life, burnout and reflecting on my pre-chosen career path.

Beginnings are hard.

I struggled to start writing my first actual post (this one). Knowing how important beginnings can be to a story I waited for inspiration to hit me with the perfect one. But when nothing magically appeared, I was forced to give up on that approach and start writing. Piggy-backing off of a typical story arc, I will start with the biggest problem I have had to deal with in life - my professional one that is. 

I broke down this post chronologically, i.e, according to average time since the day I started a full-time role. For reference, S = Start of my professional career.

1. S + Six Months

I am one of the “lucky” millennials who worked less than a year in a typical 9-5 setup. Six months into my first job, Covid-19 happened and I was forced to go remote. I say forced lightly, as when the management first made the announcement I was trying hard to hold back a smile and look worried. Inside, I was happy as a kid being let out of school early. In hindsight, the fact that I was delighted at any interruption to the job, which I had worked so hard to land and had gone through grad school for, seems like a giant missed RED flag.

At the time, I was working in a Self driving start-up. It was a dream job for any robotics grad student and I was thrilled when I first got the offer. For the first few months, I was a good corporate bot. I woke up, took the T to work, tapped at my desk for 8 hours, returned home tired and crashed in front of the TV. The weekends too became an endless rigmarole of chores and meal-prep. Occasionally, my partner and I would go out for dinner or do something fun. 

Balancing work and maintaining a life was not easy. So for those six months, I didn’t balance. I chose work and only intermittently spent time doing the things that I truly enjoyed. Hence, when my boss announced that we can work from home for the next few weeks (yes, we thought it was that temporary) I was secretly thrilled. I thought not having to commute and meal prep would save hours of time. And I wouldn’t have to sit at my desk even after completing all my work to satisfy some archaic time quota. I could read more, eat better and explore more of the outside world. All of these predictions did come true and remain solid points in favour of remote work according to me. 

Besides the corporate grind side of things, I was discovering other un-enchanting things about my job during my traditional six-month stint. From the very beginning, I was startled by how different working in a robotics company was to doing research for a robotics Lab in school. Work was more about software architecture, bug fixes, and sitting through long meetings which did not seem to have any real purpose. I rarely got to develop algorithms, test out new ideas or even put into practice the “cutting-edge” technical knowledge I had acquired through my Master’s. 

Curious if this was happening only to me, I asked around and found out that my experience was not unique. Most of my friends were going through the very same thing! I felt a little better and told myself that this was probably normal. No one actually got to use what they learnt in school. More importantly, there were student loans to be paid back and no other way out, so I stayed put and continued working at my job through the pandemic until I almost forgot about my misgivings. 

2. S + 1 Year

An unexpected consequence of working in a job that became increasingly more mechanical happened - I stopped thinking critically or too deeply about anything. When I think back to the first year of the pandemic, I can’t believe how numb my mind was. My days were spent the same way - reading / watching the news, working and watching lots of TV. In a way, I think I let myself get distracted because it was easier. I was stuck in a country that was not my own. I couldn’t risk thinking too deeply about what the hell I was doing with my life as I had student loans to pay back and the dread surrounding them was very real. 

All this fed back into my job and made it harder to stay motivated. I started taking less initiative and kept a distance from my colleagues’ projects. I tuned out during meetings and found it hard to focus on discussions that did not concern me. For the most part, I stuck to my preferred domain where things were easy and did just enough. Nothing above or beyond. Little did I know that I was experiencing tell-tale signs of burnout.

3. S + 1.5 Years

After 1.5 years in, I completed work on a big project that I was a principal contributor for. This was the project I had been hired to do and once it was over I got the feeling that they didn’t know what to do with me. I was asked to support one of the other developers and slowly she began handing off her project to me. I didn’t mind because now I got to work with the non-technical staff and collaborate with different kinds of people. BUT, it was even less challenging. The coding was straightforward and required very little technical thinking. 

By this time, I was able to recognize and acknowledge the fact that my professional life was suboptimal at best. I diagnosed rashly that I just needed to switch to a role more algorithmic in nature. I clung to the idea of moving into Computer Vision, a domain I was interested in. To enable this transition, I started looking up and doing projects on the side. Inevitably though, they too would fizzle out after a few days. At first, I wondered if I was just being lazy. But further reflection helped me realize that I simply didn’t want to work on it, even if I thought I did. 

The final stage of my burnout involved facing a moral dilemma. What was my role actually doing? Were self-driving cars even needed? What about all the drivers who would be put out of work? These were all questions I had grappled with since the beginning but I would shut them down with various excuses: I was just working on shuttles, safer deployment zones, we still need safety drivers, etc. Even now I don’t believe that Autonomous Shuttles are ethically wrong (unlike some other tech) but I am not so sure if they are the need of the decade.

4. S + 2 Years

Financially I was now doing better and prepared to reconsider my career strategy. That’s when the second wave of Covid-19 hit India and instead, I was back to being an anxious wreck scrolling through every possible news app. I lost family members to the virus and I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. I grew extremely frustrated with the US immigration system and the rigid Visa stamping requirements. When it did become possible to fly back to India, in reality I still couldn’t as the Visa offices remained closed. I was in a state where I wasn’t happy with my job, living in the US or with my chosen career path.

And so, I went ahead and did something both callous and monumentally idiotic. 

I quit.

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Next week, I will go into how I decided to give up on being a techie and what a much needed break did for me. Plus lots of cute kittens!