Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?

I started a new job a little less than a year ago as a product owner/manager for a legacy enterprise system. Unfortunately the job has not at all been what I expected and what was sold to me in the interview process for a number of reasons.

I don't want to get too much into it, but the main reason is that my job was supposed to be leading a modernization project to expand our legacy enterprise system with modern API-based integrations, but our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult. Things I was used to taking a week or two max at other companies take many months to ship and aren't really built with the quality I would expect. This makes it really awkward for me when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...

I could go on and on, but honestly I just strongly dislike this job. I'm trying my best to find another role, but the market is really competitive right now where I live (Sweden). I would say I have a quite decent CV, with a masters from an excellent university and around a decade of work experience in tech, but Sweden currently has the third highest unemployment rate in the EU so there is a huge amount of competition for each role. But of course, all I can do is do my best.

My main concern is that this job is slowly making me sick. I have started to have really concerning mental health symptoms, specifically severe anxiety, due to this job. I've also had some really dark thoughts which has scared me a lot. My doctor started me on some antidepressants and I am receiving therapy, but it's too early to say if it has helped or not.

I don't know how much more I can take before I end up on some kind of sick leave. But I'm trying to take it day by day and I am trying to stay positive. Hopefully I can find another job soon, but until then I am stuck in this job.

For those of you who have been stuck in jobs you strongly dislike, how did you manage to separate your work from your life so that you could survive the situation? Did you find something that worked for you to ease the situation until you could find another job?

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I really appreciate any feedback or advice.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533073

Points: 10

# Comments: 7