I burnt out; I burnt out hard. I haven't worked in a couple of years (the most positive thing I can say about my state of mind is that - after a very large dos

I burnt out; I burnt out hard. I haven't worked in a couple of years (the most positive thing I can say about my state of mind is that - after a very large dose of black market mushrooms - I'm no longer suicidal. The one thing that was the primary contributing factor in my spiraling downfall is not mentioned here. Listen to your fucking developers - the one's at the coalface (either they know what they're doing or you've got far deeper problems). I was the primary developer on the non-DB functionality of the company's deployment tooling. I took the most cobbled together piece of unmaintainable shit and converted it into something stable and maintainable. There were times that I needed to make significant changes in order to move towards something sane. And every time the boss would bring in his pet architect who would veto every effort I made with no feedback what-so-ever. Just a no. I want to modularise the project - no, it's not justified by the scope of the project. I want to move to hierarchical configuration files - no, just keep using blah.properties, despite the fact that that we were using dynamically generated keys to force that which would be cleanly implementable with XML or JSON. I want a robust solution for dependency injection, I'm thinking Spring. No, too heavy for the project - just use META-INF/services. Yada, yada, yada. Every damned time. I ended up running the development of a critical utility as a god-damned skunk-works project. It was soul destroying, but I believed for a long time that the results I produced (the stable releases, tasks that took a fraction of the time they used to) would lead to my input being considered. It never was.