Holy shit, you just described my past couple of months in a nutshell. My team consisted of me, another mid-level developer, and our manager, whose management style is basically controlled chaos with ADHD characteristics. I'm fairly new, and neither of them have any actual software engineering background -- they were just former backend Web guys who could "computer good" and somehow ended up handling integration development across some ungodly number of COTS software systems. I have to give the manager credit, he's at least willing to listen to suggestions and try things out, but holy hell is it irritating when we already have such a high break/fix workload that we can't get any new projects rolled out, and he's out there selling management on a massive new stream of incoming projects.

The whole codebase is full of rot, there is little to no semblance of a "process" or dev lifecycle, maintenance and testing are nonexistent, we're doing our own server admin and configuration management -- manually -- and every goddamned day for the past two weeks, there have been anywhere from three to seven meetings that for some reason I just had to be involved in. On top of this, ADHD boss (no offense intended toward any comrades here who actually have ADHD; I'm just saying the guy is easily distracted) keeps instituting new policies, like making us duplicate all of our payroll time tracking across multiple systems, or spitballing a pile of project deadlines with no basis in reality and pushing that as a schedule (complete with getting dinged on your performance review if something blows up), or suddenly having a half-cocked project requirements intake "procedure" that only fills maybe half of our actual needs, and just means more and more fucking meetings.

I've been on the verge of a mental breakdown for the past week and a half, and if not for COVID, I probably would be in the process of bailing for greener pastures. And then learning to hate wherever I end up after that. If I didn't have a mountain of debt and a family to support, I don't know that I'd stick with software dev anymore. Certainly not the platform that we're working with -- eugh.

I get that not every org is like this (shit, some are even worse), but I think the bottom line is that, if you enjoy programming and problem-solving and that little endorphin rush that trips in your brain when you run a unit test suite and get 100% passing tests and beautiful green code coverage bars, doing it for a living will eventually ruin it for you. When I started with these assholes, I would have considered myself an enthusiast. That's gone now. It's dead. And it's not coming back. I wanted to try my hand at mobile game dev, but I can't even bring myself to fire up an IDE on my off hours since about April or so, because my home PC is also my work PC, and I can't separate bad screen from good screen when they're the same fucking thing.

Anyway, if you're getting the hell out of the field, more power to you -- I understand where you're coming from, and would probably do the same if I could. It's not worth the constant stress, given how many shops have absolutely no process maturity and just want to make you work three developers' jobs for one developer's pay, and will say "fuck you" to any kind of maintenance reduction effort or codebase refactoring/cleanup that doesn't immediately reflect a return on capital value or increase profit margins.

...Sorry for the wall of text. I think I've been cooped up for too long.