9 ms·

I have a friend that is to damn good as a developer and allowed one of the big Canadian companies failed projects to burn him out thoroughly. He is looking int

I have a friend that is to damn good as a developer and allowed one of the big Canadian companies failed projects to burn him out thoroughly. He is looking into opening a bakery now, and by the look of it, no amount of convincing is going to change his mind. So no matter what you do, your mental robustness and coherency comes first. Don't let anybody every come close at touching that. Btw opening a bakery is an amazing prospect if you go into it full force ahead, with happy thoughts and planning. Opening one as a result of a burnout, well I guess it can be therapeutic, but not sure about the validity of the idea in that case. Taking half a year off everything can probably bring you more life force at your disposal.

Stauche 10y ago
Stressed and burned out so he is opening a food business? What?? I operate a restaurant and I know about 50 people who do. Believe me - there is no shortage of stress and your just as likely, if not more so, to get burned out. Tell your friend to seriously think twice...
- agumonkey 10y ago
  It's well known that food industry is stressful, but maybe the nature is different. It's more physical and less mental. Also more social (you interact with customers, kids, families, birthday cakes paint a different mindset) One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.
  - CocaKoala 10y ago
    There's plenty of mental stress working in a bakery. You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen). If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order? If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space? If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule? Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.
    - toast_coder 10y ago
      Point taken, but.... Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce. Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this). There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment. I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%. I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.
      - CocaKoala 10y ago
        >but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system. Has anybody here claimed the opposite? Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.
        agumonkey 10y ago
        I only worked at a satellite bakery[1], not the bread making part, which is not taxing mentally after 20 days. For the rest I honestly cannot speak. [1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.
  - Stauche 10y ago
    It's physical, it's mental, it'psychologial, it's emotional - it's everything. The social aspect is a double edge sword; dealing with customers, employees, 3rd parties is a bitch sometimes.
dig1 10y ago
As someone who's been there, it all depends how hard it was. You can recover from light burnouts quickly (by traveling, taking sports), however, hard burnouts change you for life - you'll be lucky to not end up as alcoholic or drug addict. For me, it took couple of years and few failed jobs until I got on track. Today, I'm more than happy to be my own boss as freelancer.
- freelancezombie 10y ago
  Good to hear you found your way. I'm getting burned out on freelance.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - manmal 10y ago
    What is it that burns you out most? (fellow freelancer here)
    - reflexive 10y ago
      The thing that burns me out about freelance is the client just views you as a cost center. Always want more work in less time. I start to fantasize about the "camaraderie" of being on a team. Maybe there needs to be a Freelancer's Local Union.
      - jdswain 10y ago
        Try joining a meetup or two, they are really good for meeting people in similar situations to yourself and having conversations about work.
      - samsonradu 10y ago
        I second this. Every time I drive by a big corporate building and I see groups of employees joking while having a smoke or coffee, it makes me envious. I joke about it saying that I m something like Batman who always works alone. Lately I ve been doing short trips to the client's offices, about 2000km away (on my expense) just to get the teamwork feeling.
agumonkey 10y ago
That's odd, an ex cs classmate went into bakery. Some HS friend in chemistry speaks about leaving all this to open a restaurant. I, too, am thinking about bakery or coffee place. There's something about serving food to people that seems to be the emotional counterpoint of mad tech.
- skybrian 10y ago
  Most restaurants fail. It doesn't seem like a way to avoid stress?
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    You know sometime even a failure in something you like can be healthier and more motivating than safe thing you ended up dreading deeply.
    - myth_drannon 10y ago
      Unless you drain your life savings, end up divorces... etc.
      - reflexive 10y ago
        You're doing it wrong
      - shawn-furyan 10y ago
        Professional gamblers* have something to teach everyone about managing risk. In this case, the primacy of establishing a separate fund as your bank roll, and protecting it by not letting too much of it ride on any single bet (no matter how great the bet seems), is very appropriate to self-funding your own businesses. If you lose your bank roll, then you have to stop gambling, which is bad if you are convinced you have an edge. *I'm not a gambler of any type, unless you count investing 401k/IRA savings in index oriented ETFs and mutual funds gambling (not an unfair position).
j1vms 10y ago
> Don't let anybody every come close at touching that. Another way to look at it is, nobody can tell you what to do unless you're willing to hear it from them -- so always be mindful and reasonably opinionated about who you have at your "ear".
CocaKoala 10y ago
God please do everything you can to convince him not to open a bakery. The hours are brutal, the money is poor, the margins are slim, and the people are terrible. Customers, employees, vendors, they're all terrible. Baking for friends is a fun way to pass the time. Baking for money is a quick road to a second burn out; it was literally years before I was able to stomach the thought of baking cookies or bread for my wife after I left the bakery I worked at.
- big_youth 10y ago
  My father was a baker for a large portion of his life. It really is difficult work, with insane hours, for low pay. Maybe it's because I grew up in a working class mexican neighborhood where trades and unskilled work are the majority of occupations, but sitting in an office chair for 7hrs a day is paradise compared to baking, mechanics, or any type of manual labor.
  - sheepmullet 10y ago
    > for low pay. This is the real problem with manual labor, low-skilled labor, and jobs like baking. The real stress isn't the day to day work, it's knowing that you are slowly wearing down your body but not earning enough to "get out of the game". It's lack of financial security. If as a baker you could buy a nice home and pay it off in 7-10 years it wouldn't be such a tough gig.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "Baking for friends is a fun way to pass the time. Baking for money is a quick road to a second burn out" 8+ hours a day, 5-7 days a week, nearly every week for years on end is liable to turn any hobby in to a slog eventually. Except for some people and some hobbies it doesn't. Somehow some people make it work, and enjoy it in the long run, without burning out. Don't ask me how. I haven't found that magic job myself, and always tend to burn out on anything eventually. I need variety. I can't do any one thing for the long run without getting sick of it. Unfortunately, making career changes is difficult and stressful. So I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe someone who's made it work for themselves can chime in.
pasbesoin 10y ago
Growing up, I was "taught" / conditioned to "endure" severe, chronic stress. This led to an accumulation of adverse events I was too stressed to effectively manage. Including especially physical injuries that had lasting negative effects. I "hung in there" until my early 40's, when a career blow knocked the last pin out from under me. I knew what I needed and wanted to do next. But I was frozen. Physical health issues have continued to accumulate and to paint me into a corner. Guard your physical health! Without it, life is much harder, and one problem tends to become two, become three... Your physical health is the basis of your mental health and well-being. When you are physically unhealthy, it is much harder to be positive and productive. Especially when symptoms weigh on you persistently and take away your ability to focus and think effectively and to be comfortably social. There is precious little in life that is worth the sacrifice of your physical health. And beware of scenarios that suggest or demand a trade-off against some future promise. Those reassurances most often simply serve the person or system demanding the sacrifice. And it is a sacrifice -- don't expect to "get it back."

Stauche 10y ago

Stressed and burned out so he is opening a food business? What?? I operate a restaurant and I know about 50 people who do. Believe me - there is no shortage of stress and your just as likely, if not more so, to get burned out. Tell your friend to seriously think twice...

agumonkey 10y ago
It's well known that food industry is stressful, but maybe the nature is different. It's more physical and less mental. Also more social (you interact with customers, kids, families, birthday cakes paint a different mindset) One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.
- CocaKoala 10y ago
  There's plenty of mental stress working in a bakery. You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen). If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order? If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space? If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule? Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.
  - toast_coder 10y ago
    Point taken, but.... Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce. Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this). There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment. I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%. I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.
    - CocaKoala 10y ago
      >but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system. Has anybody here claimed the opposite? Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.
      - agumonkey 10y ago
        I only worked at a satellite bakery[1], not the bread making part, which is not taxing mentally after 20 days. For the rest I honestly cannot speak. [1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.
- Stauche 10y ago
  It's physical, it's mental, it'psychologial, it's emotional - it's everything. The social aspect is a double edge sword; dealing with customers, employees, 3rd parties is a bitch sometimes.

dig1 10y ago

As someone who's been there, it all depends how hard it was. You can recover from light burnouts quickly (by traveling, taking sports), however, hard burnouts change you for life - you'll be lucky to not end up as alcoholic or drug addict. For me, it took couple of years and few failed jobs until I got on track. Today, I'm more than happy to be my own boss as freelancer.

freelancezombie 10y ago
Good to hear you found your way. I'm getting burned out on freelance.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- manmal 10y ago
  What is it that burns you out most? (fellow freelancer here)
  - reflexive 10y ago
    The thing that burns me out about freelance is the client just views you as a cost center. Always want more work in less time. I start to fantasize about the "camaraderie" of being on a team. Maybe there needs to be a Freelancer's Local Union.
    - jdswain 10y ago
      Try joining a meetup or two, they are really good for meeting people in similar situations to yourself and having conversations about work.
    - samsonradu 10y ago
      I second this. Every time I drive by a big corporate building and I see groups of employees joking while having a smoke or coffee, it makes me envious. I joke about it saying that I m something like Batman who always works alone. Lately I ve been doing short trips to the client's offices, about 2000km away (on my expense) just to get the teamwork feeling.

agumonkey 10y ago

That's odd, an ex cs classmate went into bakery. Some HS friend in chemistry speaks about leaving all this to open a restaurant. I, too, am thinking about bakery or coffee place. There's something about serving food to people that seems to be the emotional counterpoint of mad tech.

skybrian 10y ago
Most restaurants fail. It doesn't seem like a way to avoid stress?
- agumonkey 10y ago
  You know sometime even a failure in something you like can be healthier and more motivating than safe thing you ended up dreading deeply.
  - myth_drannon 10y ago
    Unless you drain your life savings, end up divorces... etc.
    - reflexive 10y ago
      You're doing it wrong
    - shawn-furyan 10y ago
      Professional gamblers* have something to teach everyone about managing risk. In this case, the primacy of establishing a separate fund as your bank roll, and protecting it by not letting too much of it ride on any single bet (no matter how great the bet seems), is very appropriate to self-funding your own businesses. If you lose your bank roll, then you have to stop gambling, which is bad if you are convinced you have an edge. *I'm not a gambler of any type, unless you count investing 401k/IRA savings in index oriented ETFs and mutual funds gambling (not an unfair position).

j1vms 10y ago

> Don't let anybody every come close at touching that. Another way to look at it is, nobody can tell you what to do unless you're willing to hear it from them -- so always be mindful and reasonably opinionated about who you have at your "ear".

CocaKoala 10y ago

God please do everything you can to convince him not to open a bakery. The hours are brutal, the money is poor, the margins are slim, and the people are terrible. Customers, employees, vendors, they're all terrible. Baking for friends is a fun way to pass the time. Baking for money is a quick road to a second burn out; it was literally years before I was able to stomach the thought of baking cookies or bread for my wife after I left the bakery I worked at.

big_youth 10y ago
My father was a baker for a large portion of his life. It really is difficult work, with insane hours, for low pay. Maybe it's because I grew up in a working class mexican neighborhood where trades and unskilled work are the majority of occupations, but sitting in an office chair for 7hrs a day is paradise compared to baking, mechanics, or any type of manual labor.
- sheepmullet 10y ago
  > for low pay. This is the real problem with manual labor, low-skilled labor, and jobs like baking. The real stress isn't the day to day work, it's knowing that you are slowly wearing down your body but not earning enough to "get out of the game". It's lack of financial security. If as a baker you could buy a nice home and pay it off in 7-10 years it wouldn't be such a tough gig.
pmoriarty 10y ago
"Baking for friends is a fun way to pass the time. Baking for money is a quick road to a second burn out" 8+ hours a day, 5-7 days a week, nearly every week for years on end is liable to turn any hobby in to a slog eventually. Except for some people and some hobbies it doesn't. Somehow some people make it work, and enjoy it in the long run, without burning out. Don't ask me how. I haven't found that magic job myself, and always tend to burn out on anything eventually. I need variety. I can't do any one thing for the long run without getting sick of it. Unfortunately, making career changes is difficult and stressful. So I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe someone who's made it work for themselves can chime in.

pasbesoin 10y ago

Growing up, I was "taught" / conditioned to "endure" severe, chronic stress. This led to an accumulation of adverse events I was too stressed to effectively manage. Including especially physical injuries that had lasting negative effects. I "hung in there" until my early 40's, when a career blow knocked the last pin out from under me. I knew what I needed and wanted to do next. But I was frozen. Physical health issues have continued to accumulate and to paint me into a corner. Guard your physical health! Without it, life is much harder, and one problem tends to become two, become three... Your physical health is the basis of your mental health and well-being. When you are physically unhealthy, it is much harder to be positive and productive. Especially when symptoms weigh on you persistently and take away your ability to focus and think effectively and to be comfortably social. There is precious little in life that is worth the sacrifice of your physical health. And beware of scenarios that suggest or demand a trade-off against some future promise. Those reassurances most often simply serve the person or system demanding the sacrifice. And it is a sacrifice -- don't expect to "get it back."