Let me start off by thanking everyone in this thread. Collectively, you have helped me to progress closer to my goals. I hope the remainder of this post is coherent. Sleep has been a commodity for the last few years.
Long story short, for financial and other reasons (husband with minimal income and an associates degree) I took the first embedded job I could get as a technician (technically engineer but they wanted to make sure the hardware and code I brought in to the interview was actually something I made... thank you Dave for telling me to bring something for show and tell
). A few weeks later I was excitedly promoted to engineer. I was more than happy to do 60-70 hr/week since I was so excited to have control and autonomy of my own project.
Sounds great/decent for someone in my position right? Well lets just say that things were about to take a turn.
It turns out our engineering department is grossly understaffed (who would have guessed?). While I have managed to keep my head above the water with my own projects, my boss has regularly pushed me into other's projects to help meet minimal requirements and/or fix issues at the last hour. Excited with the prospect of getting involved with the interesting things my colleges are working on I've always obliged my boss. About two years later I was promoted to CTO.
As CTO I am expected to continue doing everything I was doing before while also managing our engineering and testing department. Needless to say, I am extremely close to being burnt out. Is all of this normal? Did I sign up for a life of not getting a good nights sleep until I retire? I feel like I need to get out and find something else...
BTW in addition to my groaning/complaining, there is a bit of good news here. Since we last spoke, I now have two beautiful daughters, a house that puts the shack I was living in to shame, and a wife has not left me (yet). I blame you all for these wonderful things!