Ask HN: New job but feel burnout and disappointed
Hello everyone,

I wanted to pose this question here as I know lots of people have probably experienced the same situation as I'm doing now and many others have success stories after having been stuck in a rut.

I'm 30, embedded sw engineer by trade, have been working for 4-ish year in this field and some more in my spare time; I've switched industry from consulting to flight software engineering for satellites, though I don't have an aerospace background, and I've just switched companies from a small startup to a bigger-but-still-startupish company. The switch has been done for several reasons, including high employee turnover, toxic workplace, relentless workloads at times that left me severely burnout for a while (I would feel sick at my stomach just looking at code in the morning) and worst of all a complete lack of sense of accomplishment and organization within the company.

Unfortunately I could not take a short sabbatical between my leave and the start of the new employment since I have to support some relatives and cannot afford risking to be unemployed right now, so I jumped ship as soon as I got an offer from this other satellite company.

Though it was described by some to be a more congenial environment, the new workplace has _some_ of the problems the old one had, in that it is very frantic and unorganized, documentation is sparse, turnover not quite so high but still there, and sometimes lack of communication that severely impairs advancement of projects. I've been there for only a month now, but the onboarding has basically been to leave me to my own devices to figure out stuff to do and basically reverse engineer horridly written (as said by OG devs themselves) firmware to simply gain a basic understanding on how things are supposed to work, even though the frantic nature of management is such that whatever thing I might do or any insight I might gain may prove completely useless in a short while as soon as all prototypes that have been done to this day could be scratched for [reasons].

Honestly I'm feeling extremely let down and fed up with this and feel no small amount of disappointment in my own choices; though I love working in embedded I'm questioning a lot of my life decisions up to this point and I can feel symptoms of the past burnout bubbling up again. I try my hardest to be useful everyday and to actually understand what's going on (though the hardware stack and ISA is very alien to me (though alluring i must admit) and extremely badly documented even by the OEM), but there are days in which I feel like I really can't do anything and basically idle until it's time to go home, and this last part is really killing me with guilt.

I've noticed it's mostly when I'm reading or trying to implement stuff that I halfheartedly know it's gonna mean jack shit in a short while and would rather do in my spare time and concentrate on something of more immediate usefulness, like an actual working prototype instead of just idle work, but I can't help it.

It may not seem much but I've also had some other personal issues that exacerbated this whole let-down sentiment and there are evenings like I feel at my wits end and don't know where to turn. Worse of all, I feel like that if I don't find a way to solve this, I might end up really badly burnout and be unable to work, which would be a disaster for my own family.

So after all this rant, I would like to know your honest opinions on this: am I just a whiny asshole? Should I simply quit and go somewhere else (though I'm horrified at the thought of it going from "bad" to worse), or grit my teeth and go on? How would you handle this situation?

Note: sorry for the linkedin-ish way of ranting and offering engagement questions at the end; I want to know your opinions, I really do, I've nowhere to ask or turn around.

Thanks a million.