I(M23) am getting stressed and getting emotionally unstable for few weeks because of my work.Working as electrical engineer in japan has gotten me really experienced but work load is just too much,and working 11 hours everyday is just enough to make me burnout. And it’s not just only me everybody in my department has so much work that most of them are working 13 hours a day.
what should i do? am i just whining ?
9 comments
Start looking for another job immediately!
Have you discussed with your boss?
Pace yourself
EE is notoriously difficult, and in the case of Japan, notoriously undervalued.
fortunately, people with your credentials can go basically anywhere they want (especially when you have a few solid years of experience one of these days).
you owe it to yourself to look after and take care of yourself, and you owe it to your boss to communicate your troubles and concerns and give them a chance. it is their job as a manager to support you and your development at 23 years of age. if this can’t happen for whatever reason, don’t be afraid to go.
engineers don’t quit jobs; they fire their bosses.
You aren’t just whining. Fellow EE here working in battery tech. Trying to tough it out when you are miserable is not going to improve your situation. The most likely scenario is that your mental health slowly degrades into an anxiety/ depression and you will start becoming a different person that you don’t like in the workplace. That’s what happened to me. I ignored and pushed through years of “I can’t stand this, I don’t want to do this anymore!”, but I trapped myself into thinking maybe it would get better and “ah but this job is good enough” and I only got more miserable and the negativity that cultivated affected everything in my life poorly.
If you don’t like the job, and your coworkers aren’t interested in helping the situation improve, you’ve got one option to keep your sanity : get out and look for a company that cares about making the job sustainable for its employees.
The classy way to handle this is to have a 1:1 with your boss and say “seriously, I can’t stand working overtime every day so consistently. The peer pressure of everyone else doing it like it’s nothing only makes it worse. Is there any way for me to work here and not have to do 11 hour days every day?” And if the answer is no and/or they don’t take the request seriously then you just made a nice segway for putting in your notice of resignation.
It is just a fact of life if you want above average pay job position.
When you get promoted in the future and pay goes over 10M not only will you be pulling 12-16 hour days, but usually have to work at least 1 weekend day as well.
It is pretty much a trade off which everyone need to decide.
Just quit now then look for a job while you’re temporarily unemployed. Nobody should have to work like that and have the life squeezed out of them
What type of EE? That will determine your value. If you’re doing circuit design and running a lot of verification, synthesis and analysis then this is the norm as you probably don’t have enough compute resources to do your job in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re just running jobs all day and waiting for results then that is slight different from doing actual design. If you’re doing electro-mechanical then that involves a whole different set of parameters. The bottom line is that a lot of EE work is being outsourced to Vietnam and other cheap labor countries where educated engineers are so that is what you are competing with.
Document your overtime.
Find likeminded colleagues and get them to document their overtime.
Take them to court, battle the system for a while, win big, never work again…
[https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14556706](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14556706)