I had a testers meeting last week. It was a bit impromtu, but such meetings usually are. My little team of testers is only three people these days, and while we do have an obvious senior tester who should be in charge, he’s not really the commanding sort. The next most senior tester, who has a few years in the job at the company on me (but I might have more total years testing thanks to my job before this one) and is the same “rank” as me tends to be the one to call the meetings. Usually because he’s got a lot of work coming up and knows he’ll need some help from someone else because our lab assistant (who usually helps him) won’t be available or because it takes a degree of expertise the lab assistant lacks. It helps him to sit down and talk through all this stuff when he needs more than just one-off help, which is why he calls most of these meetings. My other coworker and I just call on each other as needed and talk through that kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis, but we share a great deal of expertise and can ask each other to do things without worrying about how well it’ll get done. Which, unfortunately, is not something we can expect from this other guy since he has done his best to avoid learning anything about the deeper aspects of our testing over the years whereas all three of us are fairly proficient in most of his testing. Beyond that, we also have status update meetings from time to time, just to get together and talk about what’s going on and what’s coming up, but we haven’t done any of those meetings in a while because it has been pretty much the same stuff going on for over a year at this point.

So we come into this meeting on a Wednesday afternoon after having not gathering to talk through things for about a year (we’ve had shorter impromptu meetings as we’ve stood around the lab together, but this one had a calendar invite and involved us sitting down at a table to talk) and I learned two things immediately. The first was that this meeting was happening because both of them were under the impression that my project, that I’ve been working on since late 2023, was done and that I was just spinning my wheels without jumping in to help them. The second was that absolutely nothing was going to come from this meeting. Given that I’d been taking a break from working my usual overtime and taking a bunch of days off during the month prior to that meeting, I can see why they’d think that since neither of them is involved in my project or ever thinks to ask how my workload is and I’m not the sort to burden them with how overwhelmed I’m feeling after I’ve already asked for help and either gotten brushed off or legimiately told they don’t have time to help. It absolutely isn’t true, if you can’t guess from the context I just provided, but they’re more interested in what appears to be me taking it easy than doing the work to ask me what is going on or how I’m doing or guess that I’m resting from the incredibly physically demanding testing I did for three solid months on the tail-end of the most painful nine months of my life.

After I had this frustrating realization, that I was going to be lectured at while my coworkers indirectly explained how busy they were and how I needed to step it up to solve that problem for them, I put away my notes and turned to malicious compliance. I did exactly what they asked me to do and didn’t bite at any of the subtext they were trying (poorly) to shoehorn into the coversation. I answered the questions I was asked, spoke up on my own behalf when it came to the future and how I’m going to be incredibly busy again any day now, and didn’t reach for work I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle without doing even more overtime than my usual ten hours a week. I met the explicit, stated goal of the meeting and watched as we all wasted an hour of our time spinning our wheels rather than do what I used to do in these meetings. You see, we actually started doing these meetings years ago because of me, because we went down from four to three testers and I knew we needed to coordinate better than we ever did before if we were going to stay on top of the work we were doing. I set things up such that my coworkers knew to call a meeting when they needed help and then I’d take it over so we got something productive, clear, and actionable from everyone. I turned conversations about what we had to do into actually productive meetings about our workloads and how to rebalance them from one week to another so that everything got done. This time, I just let them spin their wheels.

I am in my thirties. I have over a decade of testing experience. I helped a project finish on time and safely despite having to completely invent a testing process as I went that, unfortunately, demanded that I put my body on the line to get the testing done in time in a way that has repercussions I’m still dealing with, even after a month of rest. I asked for help that I never received despite promises of getting all the help I’d need for months prior (including the weeks prior when I warned my coworkers that I’d need their help shortly) and now that I’m resting so I can actually keep up with the demands of the job when it starts getting busy again, they see me as being lazy, inactive, and wasting my time rather than actually getting things done. Why would I want to help them after all this? Why would I want to help any of them when, just to days prior, I went in for my yearly review and find out that people are apparently suggesting to my manager that it seems like I’m abusing my ability to work from home some days or that I’m showing up to the office and doing nothing all day long, all in such a way that makes it feel obvious that at least one of them was the person talking to my manager this way when they start trying to get me to take on part of their work? All I thought about all meeting long was how exhausted and burned out I still was, and how all I wanted to do was get up and leave because this meeting was going to be a waste of our time since my coworker would inevitably come ask for my help no matter how our conversation went.

It is incredibly frustrating and more than a little defeating to see that the two people who should understand the work I’ve been doing more than literally anyone else in the world just don’t see it happening at all. That they notice only that I show up late in the morning and not that I’ve never left the office before them. That they notice the days I spend standing at my desk in my office and not the days I spent in the lab, sweating my ass off as I did repetitive physical labor one of them refused to do and the other could barely do at even a fraction of my pace. That they’d rather speak to each other and my boss about what they think are problems rather than ask me about what is going on or even directly speak to me about it. It shouldn’t be surprising. This isn’t the first time something like this happened, after all. Two years ago, I got a note in my review that my coworkers thought I wasn’t doing enough to help them and I told my boss that literally none of them had ever asked me for help, which prompted a mediated conversation from my boss between the three of us that resulted in the two of them saying they’ll work harder at asking me for help or letting me know that they needed help rather than expecting me to be able to guess that they needed it. It just makes it all the more frustrating.

Stuff like this makes me want to leave this job despite the security it provides in this relatively uncertain market. I’m not sure running the risk of getting laid off from some new tech job somewhere else would be better than this, but at least it wouldn’t feel as personally disappointing as this does. At least this wouldn’t be hitting me right in the pet peeve born from decades of bullshit subtext-only communication in my biological family. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but for now it’s all I can do to keep my day-to-day life chugging along because of how constantly tired and exhausted I am. I do not have the energy for a job hunt right now and all I can hope is that things aren’t going to get worse before I’ve got the time and energy to try making changes to my situation. This isn’t sustainable in the long run. I can’t keep working in an environment where no one seems to understand the amount of work I’m doing despite all my attempts to make it visible. I can’t make them acknowledge something they’re refusing to see because it would ruin their narrative that I’m lazy and all their problems would be solved if I just worked harder and did part of their jobs for them. Believe me, I’ve already tried. My only consolation is that my boss sees it when I point it out to him. It sucks that I basically have to draw it all out for him every time something like this comes up, but at least he acknowledges it when it does. Small comfort, that, given the frustrating pattern this is starting to form.