100% you are burnt out. That was me a couple of years ago in a very similar position and problems.

Find a new job while you keep working there then leave as soon as you can. If it’s legal where you are, then leave them stranded with no notice. Even if they counter-offer with a pay rise, the problems will still be there (like, why didn’t they pay you that to start with!?) as well the expectation of 150% - probably more if they’re paying you more!

Look for something completely different outside help desk/operations to give yourself a mental break and after a couple of years you may find your passion for IT comes back. Even moving to another area of IT might be enough of a change.

Good on your for recognizing it but that sort of environment can kill you and your passion if you try to push through it. Get out of there and things will get immeasurably better!

You only have 100% to give.

If you regularly are expected to give more, that is the new norm, which is a symptoms of poor scheduling and bad management.

I’ve been trying to land an IT job for over 20 years now, to no success.

Count your blessings; you’re living my dream. I rather be as burnt out as you and have a half decent income in a stable position, than continue working the same shitty fast food and retail gigs I’ve been stuck with since 2003. I’m tired of job hopping; quit yours and give it to me.

I hit that in year 6.

I was hired with the mandate “make Linux suck less here” and it was a mighty mandate. It was a stuffy shell organization that recently discovered it had a lot to protect and its IT was guided by Finance people without the first clue why even updating systems is valuable. And they built an IT exec who itself built an IT team. I was the only full-time Linux guy, like so many times before, but I got to choose which part of the goal pie I could eat next.

The team was understaffed, carefully-funded and had huge goals. And they did it very well: if your PoC was good, you could get funding to roll it out. Every new development needed to survive a figurative shark-tank pitch to the 3-person exec. And like a start-up group protected under an umbrella by- and from bureaucracy, it was magical. I took Linux from “patching? huh?” to “98% of matchines update automatically on the schedule we’ve set without interaction; new machines are ready in 7 minutes if we need something.”

Then, in a financial coup, the leadership of IT was deposed one by one and replaced by Financial twats with the same lack of clue. And they hired a shit team of micromanagers not used to dealing with Union IT staff who actually put the tools down at 4:49 if they didn’t have anything exciting on the go. It was comical, and then it was sad; for the financial group wanted the excellent new digs that IT got after IT lived in basements until the new building was ready, and the basements were also no good now so IT had to move to some (short-)cube wasteland like it’s The (US) Office with such noise and nowhere to stare and nowhere to debate and nowhere to talk about “needing to shut off Dave’s access tomorrow becau-- oh, Hi Dave.”

I stopped working on new stuff and just kept the lights on. I usually give it a year to unfuck itself when it’s happened in the past, and this one took 18 months because #covid changed how we interview and there was less job churn going on.

And on a Monday I came in with my company gear to leave behind (secured) and I peaced out. They had no dedicated linux staff to speak of after that moment. I trained one guy how to patch HANA - the 2% that was just too snowflakey to patch automatically - the day before, and that was the last thing on my list. Turned my badge into HR and all but walked onto a bus. And got covid; probably from that ride home. (Don’t worry, kids; I was vaxed to the gills, so all good)

So here’s my recommendation:

1. punch the clock and live by it. “It’s been recommended by a professional,” and never elaborate. You need your rest now anyway.
2. start looking for another job. TLDR, your dismissal will be constructed, you want to be ready with another job, and the only way that happens is if you get one first.
3. present your issues. Give them a few weeks to think they can make statements to keep you. They won’t change, they won’t keep you, but let them make statements for others to ask about later.
4. go. Try to make them sever you for the severance, but some constructions are not worth fighting, so call that severance a write-off if, for example, you’re in America. And go.
5. I hope your next post is a good one. I’m proud to tell my story of warning my boss for 18 months that the current situation was still untenable and unsustainable before I left, and I’m okay telling my new boss that I quit the old place with the same warning that they fired their staff so it’s only fair.

Strong case of anhedonia, misght have to consider a lifestyle change or slowing way down

Been there, thankfully for only four years (if I remember right) I unfortunately hit burnout right after I signed a contract for a house, so I was stuck. Internal IT support. Due to turnover and company acquisitions I went from the second newest member of my team to the third most senior in two months. The userbase we supported quadrupled while we shrunk to 1/4 of the department size when I was initially hired. Then we had over a year where no new hires lasted longer than 6 months. They didn’t add new slots for additional headcount until after I left.

Things that helped (but to be abundantly clear they did not solve the problems):

• Most companies have something somewhere in their employee handbook or company cult-ure stuff about being honest. So start being more honest than they want you to be. Don’t name names, don’t be an ass, but set expectations. “I understand your frustration, but we are severely understaffed. We have not had an increase in headcount for the last five years. I will handle this as soon as possible, but it will take at least [amount of time].” "I apologize for the delay. We only have three people on the team who have been here more than a month. We handle all internal IT support calls, routing tickets in the ticketing system, and manually handle almost every access change request for the company. If you are unsatisfied with the speed of our service, please contact [manager or hiring person].” If you make them have to listen to all the shit you’re responsible for, some people will stop treating you like the only thing on your plate is their problem.

• Never ever ever go above and beyond. If your shift is over you are out. If that means something doesn’t get done “on time”, you make that shit the responsibility of the next person up your management chain and let them know. “What is more important, taking calls, properly logging the ones I took, or setting up accounts and access for new hires?” that sort of shit. That means being very outspoken about the amount of time things take, and proactively warning management as soon as it is obvious that you can’t accomplish everything. Remember the magic phrase “How do you want me to prioritize this?” if they give you some wishwashy “it all has to be done” bullshit? “I appreciate your trust in my abilities to prioritize my workload. As previously stated, there are not enough man hours to meet every deadline. I will let you know what deadlines will need to be adjusted.”

• Lack of staff to meet business needs is never the fault of the staff trying to meet the needs. It is always the fault of the people not properly staffing. Chances of change are slim, but change will never happen unless you allow the people responsible for the mess to feel the pain of their poor decisions.

• Heroic efforts to get something done never go unpunished.

• Get everything in writing. If they won’t put it in text, then you do it. “To confirm our verbal discussion: [shit they said out loud that they know would make legal’s head spin, like telling you to stop logging the overtime hours]”

Beyond all that, like others have said, do the bare minimum and start planning your exit. Do not take any of the stress home with you. You’ve already said they do everything to avoid paying severance, so turn it into a game of chicken so you can keep your pay while you apply elsewhere. With ten years experience, you have them by the balls.

Extra points if you can align things to put yourself on some project where you have an excuse to stay off answering the hotline. That was the biggest contribution to my bad mental state: taking calls from people who are always mad and see you as a safe outlet.

None of the anger of the users you support is your fault. If they have complaints, it’s management’s fault for not properly hiring enough manpower, and not setting proper priorities for the team. Just keep track of what you’re doing and when so they can’t claim you weren’t working.

checked out a decade ago and still not fired?

Check out even harder

I checked out of my IT job of 15 years. I was throughly depressed with it all. I had a fair amount of website experience and got a few clients who pay regularly for their website and support. I sold all my crap, bought a great laptop and I travel full time now and sometimes I use trustedhousesitters in between just traveling. I’ve never looked back and I’ve been doing this for over 6.5 years… I’m 51 now.

Perhaps what I’m saying is it’s never too late to follow your dream, mine was travel, yours might be something else. Just go for it.

This sounds like me a few years ago.

I loved IT work when I started but the job, the positions, the customers, and my bosses sucked it out of me. I couldn’t see myself staying in the job. As each day passed I got more and more depressed and miserable. The only plus side was I was earning a bit of money.

I was also at the age (late 40s) where it was probably too late to change careers. Even if I did, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

I decided to take a risk and open my own business - a pinball arcade. Huge risk, but if it worked it would probably be fun.

I spent 3 years collecting machines and learning how to repair them. I worked to reduce my personal overhead so I could get by earning less (which is freeing on it’s own). I was still working the horrible IT jobs, but since I had a new direction it didn’t seem to bother me as much. There was a light at the end of the tunnel.

3 years ago we opened the arcade and luckily it’s been working out. I love coming to work now. I love 99% of my customers. Some days I spend half the day playing games with people in the arcade. I’m earning a living and our sales keep going up as we add more things to the arcade.

My only advice is to find something that will make you happy and work towards it. You don’t have to stay in a job you hate.

If your miserable in whatever situation you’re in. Leave.

What was your exit strategy if you where unable to work?

It’s usually possible to walk away. There are exceptions, like if your sainted mother is disabled and needs your income for her supply of oxygen tank, but I walked away and usually recommend walking away.

Hey, what’s up. I usually just lurk because I can’t keep myself from getting into stupid discussions and wasting all of my time getting angry, but I feel like you do when it comes to work and I thought I’d share. I’ll be deleting my credentials after responding, because of a lack of discipline on my end, FYI.

So I’m in a type of system administration. Not your run-of-the-mill IT shop, it’s sort of in the direction of devops and provisioning classic on prem environments. There’s also other stuff, some of it challenging because of technical complexity, some of it challenging due to brain dead QA procedures and corporate inflexibility.

I also feel like I ‘did my time in the trenches’ in the past when I worked IT help desk, but having seen the other side, advancing your career into more technical roles will not offer any salvation. It’s the same bland, corporate controlled, big tech dominated horse shit patch and pray dance. You learn a new thing only for it to be superseded or abandoned, or worse, rolled over from a permanently licensed product to a subscription. In this field there is no such thing as perennial knowledge. The only place experience has any hope of sticking are the soft skills. It’s building on quick sand.

That’s why life feels like a treadmill. Even a bigger pay check won’t offer much in the way of contentment. It’s fun for a while but you get used to it. If you can make due with what you’ve got now, more money won’t offer a way out.

If you ask me, which you kind of did by way of this post, modern life fades into meaninglessness easily. There is not much connection between the actions you take and the results unless you perform manual labor or better yet, a craft. That’s why a lot of people in the IT field have hobbies like woodworking. Personally I like motorcycle riding and maintenance. At least when I’m done reassembling a carburetor the result is a running engine.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you have a job that pays the bills, you should be fine not giving a flying fuck about your job, your employer or the efficiency of your coworkers. Do the bare minimum you need to do in order not to get fired. Your job is just a means to an end; you are employed in the service of yourself and your loved ones. If the CEO of your company could generate a quarter point on the NYSE by stabbing your grandma to death, then they will. If you’re anything like me, you define work as anything you do solely for the economic incentive. Treat it as such. Behave like the Homo Economicus every institution expects you to; take what you can, give nothing back. Let go of the idea that work should be fulfilling; our current economic system simply isn’t built for anything but ruthless extraction of value. Anything you do consider fulfilling is almost by definition a cost. That’s okay. Really.

Build the mental fortitude to accept your lot, which considering human history is not actually that bad. We have easy access to high quality food, shelter and leisure time. Slack as hard as you can get away with; read books on company time, work on personal projects, play games or just stare off into the clouds. When you clock out, slam that door behind you and pretend like your employer does not exist. Don’t lose your job or give it up until you have a solid plan to switch into something else, but always remember that a job is by definition something nobody would have done unless there were economic rewards.

I recommend starting with some (e-)books about Stoicism (e-books are easy to hide in a window on your work display); there’s ancient wisdom in there that makes it easier to stop giving a shit about the things that don’t matter, in this case the meaninglessness of what you do for a living. It will help you focus on the things you can control; how you view the world being one of them.

I mean you’re parents weren’t wrong that archeology wasn’t a realistic life path. Maybe start watching YT videos about archeology while you are on the clock?

You get severance and a pension?!