Ask HN: My job is burning me out. Any near term options other than unemployment?
A couple of years ago I joined a team with a product that I was excited about. Two years later and multiple management re-orgs and code rewrites behind, I&#x27;m finding myself in a difficult spot. My job has turned into a big source of stress and unhappiness. The team is highly disorganized, understaffed, and in a constant state of chaos. It seems like we&#x27;re always moving from one crisis to the next. In addition to that, with the constant rewrites, the product hasn&#x27;t progressed much. I&#x27;m not growing my technical skills like I should be. I&#x27;ve talked to my manager about this repeatedly, and he agrees things need to improve, but nothing changes.<p>Six weeks ago, I decided the situation wouldn&#x27;t get better and I needed to move to a different team. I figured I&#x27;d start interviewing, but that hasn&#x27;t worked out so well. For one, I feel like my resume is a little weak because the past two years haven&#x27;t added much to my skillset. I thought I could make up for that by doing really well in the coding interviews or doing side projects. The thing is, there&#x27;s been extra chaos at work recently. I come home physically and mentally drained. I&#x27;m finding it very difficult to muster the energy to do more programming at night.<p>I&#x27;d like to get out of this situation as soon as possible, but finding a good next position might take me a couple of months in this environment. My question is: is there anything I can do in the short term to get out of this toxic environment while I find my next job?<p>I could take off a couple of months and live off of savings while I work on side projects and prepare for interviews, but I&#x27;m afraid a gap in my resume will be red flag for recruiters. I&#x27;d also like to avoid having zero income if possible. I figured there might be other options I&#x27;m not thinking about and thought this would be a good place to ask for ideas. Is there something I can do in the next 3-6 months while I find something more permanent, but doesn&#x27;t look bad on my resume?