A developer's candid account of depression, burnout, and learning to communicate

In a raw personal essay, a junior systems engineer traces how a persistent inability to stay motivated followed him from internships into two jobs that both ended in termination. The feedback was consistent: he started tasks without discussing them, delivered slowly and without communicating, and shipped work that broke acceptance environments and eroded colleagues’ trust. He initially blamed employers, inexperience, and bad bosses, but concluded the common denominator was himself — likely a discipline problem he lacks the mental bandwidth to address right now.

The author is candid about how AI tooling masked rather than fixed the underlying issue: LLMs let him scope a ticket and produce output without the discipline of a workflow that forces testing, yielding faster but sloppier code. Now diagnosed with severe depression and being evaluated for ADD, he is on medication and living on benefits to recover, stepping back from professional software work while continuing limited open-source contributions. Therapy is expected to take at least a year.

The piece’s core lesson is about communication. He argues that failing to tell friends, family, and clinicians how he was feeling let frustrations compound on top of his depression, and that reaching out was the first real step toward healing. It’s a useful counterweight to tech culture’s tendency to treat chronic underperformance as a personal failing rather than a symptom, and a reminder that many people quietly assume everyone struggles the same way they do — often wrongly.