Really interesting. Sorry for your experience but I'm glad I read this. At my last job I became overwhelmed and now in retrospect I can see I developed attentio

Really interesting. Sorry for your experience but I'm glad I read this. At my last job I became overwhelmed and now in retrospect I can see I developed attention issues. I just could not focus. I have had great focus over decades long career but it got worn away. Some of that is that my manager actually sabotaged me. I think the problem is that I am a terrific coder and he is not. He had driven away 3 engineers (from the company, not the project) before me in a little over a year, so believe me. I could actually not get a paid copy of the debugger tool although I was the highest ranked engineer on the project!! I was working on the free version where I had to make a new account or something every few hours!! Wow, I cannot believe I didn't understand the signal there. (He later got demoted from people management.) The other thing that I intensely dislike in the current tech world is the constant interrupt mode from the tools, slack and teams. I think that causes focus to deteriorate over time although I am not aware of any studies. It causes anxiety to flow freely through organizations and I don't think people are aware of the downsides to that. I also had major stresses in my personal life. Family issues. I just could not focus anymore and took early retirement. What I have been doing is Machine Learning courses. I think I want to do my own research projects. The good news is my focus problems, a year later, are GONE. The stock market dive may force me back to work but I hope not, not right away. I was a principal at one of the biggies so I did very well for awhile and with a little luck it could last the rest of my life and then some (for the kid).