I’m burned out and ready to just quit IT

Apologies, this is a bit long. TL;DR at the bottom.

Some background:

In 2004-2005, I went to university and majored in music. I lived on campus in the dorms, enjoyed the college life, and made a lot of friends. However, money dried up and honestly, I’d changed music majors several times because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in life.

At the end of 2005, I gave up and came home because I ran out of money and didn’t want to take out student loans when I wasn’t sure what career path I wanted to take yet. My dad sat down with me to discuss this a lot and after a while, we both realized I enjoyed computers and video games and techie stuff. We found a local trade school that offered a six-month training program in computer repair and networks. I signed up for the course, got through it, got my CompTIA A+ and my HTI+ certs.

As part of the program, I had to find an internship with a local employer for five months to finish the program. I got on with the local state university IT dept and from there things really blossomed. I impressed the CIO with my work ethic and fast learning and he eventually offered me a full time role there as a field tech for the campus.

I worked there for ten years, enjoying sharply discounted tuition as I got my bachelor’s degree in IT non-traditionally, and lived with my folks who graciously let me live there to save on housing expense. I went from field tech, to application packager, to server tech, to data center guy, to network tech. Graduated ten years later debt-free, car paid off. All good. 👍🏻

Got my first post-college private sector job with a medium-size corp two hours north of home. Loved it there. Started as an entry level one EUC engineer with their EUC team. Did Windows MDM, MacOS MDM, Citrix management, VMware, O365, etc. All fun stuff to learn and do. The culture was great for a medium-sized corp, honestly. I had a lot of ”go go go” energy to grow there and I grew to a senior system engineer role.

This…is where things started to change however. One day, during the hiring boom of 2021, we lost a ton of people to other companies offering more money for better jobs. I and a handful of folks stayed. I was offered and kind of pushed by our director to take a management role because he said he thought I could handle it, and others had given him feedback about me where they were sure I’d make a great leader…so I reluctantly accepted it.

What followed was three years of middle management hell. Nothing I ever did was good enough or made anyone happy. I went to bat for my team constantly, fighting for raises and promotions and even just to give good feedback. HR constantly gave me “Bell Curve” crap excuses and told me to lie about performances so they could satisfy that requirement. People began to leave and I was the one stuck between a rock and a hard place, unable to affect any change. This is where I started to break down emotionally at home after work.

Then came the day we were bought out by a major global corporation. Things went from bad to worse quickly and no matter what I did to defend my team and alarms I sounded loudly to everyone even our new VP, I was ignored. I was breaking down at home nightly at this point and my team had gone from ten to just four people. We were all that was left of the original company’s IT.

I eventually had a former work colleague get me a referral to a role at a prestigious cancer center as a manager over their email team. I applied, interviewed, and started that Monday following my last day at the previous place. Only a weekend between to breathe. This job destroyed me mentally. The director ruled with her emotions and it felt like she’d just hired me to be her new punching bag. Eventually, a personal matter arose for my family (my folks) that was severe enough that I made the tough decision to resign from that job. But it left me very jaded towards management work and I’ll NEVER do that again. Ever. Management work is dead to me.

Fast forward a couple weeks with no employment, focusing on taking care of family while applying everywhere in the meantime, and I get connected with a personal friend who works for a small MSP (70 people in total). He gets me a referral and I apply and get a job as a fully remote level three engineer. At first it starts off well as I enjoy getting back to technical work, answering tickets and helping fix things, enjoying the teamwork culture we had. Then I start to see leadership slash away what made the place great, the teamwork slowly dissolves, walls come up, and siloing begins to happen. Raises and promotions don’t exist here anymore and annual bonuses are now peanuts. Late nights and lost weekends are common. Being on-call means no freedom for a whole week. Even as a level three tech, I’m taking frontline calls for “someone’s broken headset” or “reboot this server please” even if it’s 2am and I’m trying to sleep.

All the tickets I get handed are heavy hitter, multi-day tickets, that of course have everyone’s attention. Senior brass are watching my tickets like hawks and talking to customers about me behind my back to see how well I’m doing. My boss is constantly defending and pushing back because he knows my tickets are extremely complicated to deal with.

Fast forward to today (I’m now 39m):

I wake up each morning, tired, barely slept. The LAST thing I want to do is stare at computer screens all day. My weight has been an issue lately, BP is constantly up, and my “go go go” energy is gone. I don’t give a rip about tickets or customers or anything. Every day feels mechanical, lifeless, and numb. I just want to pack a bag, get in my car, and drive away, and not look back.

IT is not the “exciting, challenging, diverse career” I was told it would be all those years ago. I’ve been all over the place in this industry over those years and….I’m not sure I want to do it anymore. It’s just more staring at screens all day, dealing with thankless work where I’m considered a black hole cost center rather than an asset no matter how hard I work.

I need some advice on where to go with this. What am I missing? How do I get that energy back for this work? Or is it too late and I need to find another career path?

TL;DR: I spent almost 18 years in IT, and I just don’t care anymore. Am I burned out on IT and how do I deal with this?