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How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out
- annon23 9y agoI am burn out ... sleeping 3 hours a day... if I stop working I lose my visa
- wusatiuk 9y agoStop it, now! You'll always have a second chance but please don't destroy your body.
- expertentipp 9y agoWish more emphasis was on this. The posture, back, legs, sight, digestion... these all deteriorate from extended sitting in front of the monitor and a bad diet.
- ryu2k2 9y agoare you working in japan?
- Moru 9y agoIf you don't stop you might loose any chance of a meaningful life and job for the rest of your life. A burnout is not always possible to recover from.
- ryuuseijin 9y agoI was in a similar situation, although I got more than 3 hours of sleep. I don't think 3 hours of sleep per day is sustainable, you have to find another solution. Any work you do on 3 hours of sleep is probably not great anyway. I don't know your specific circumstances, but I used low dosage Armodafinil and Melatonin before with with success to get by with little sleep (didn't keep track, but I think at least 6 hours per day). If you are in the US you will need a prescription for Armodafinil, but if you explain your situtation to the doctor it is easy to get one. Armodafinil can be imported cheaply from India. Melatonin is over-the-counter. Hang in there and good luck!
- saiya-jin 9y agofind a place which appreciates your skills without destroying you. if you are at least semi-competent, there are always plenty of options. don't be afraid of change, first step is mentally hard, but then it goes ok. your health is one of your greatest assets, it's easy to lose it and hard/impossible to get it back once lost. you will thank yourself when looking back, which is always the best way to judge one's actions and choices made.
- lawn 9y agoHow are you only getting 3 hours of sleep per day? Genuinely curious. Why does your visa matter so much you're willing to harm yourself in a possibly very serious way? I suggest you take a step back and seriously weigh your options.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blowski 9y agoIf only managers could understand that putting the screws on workers leads to worse results. More bugs, more staff turnover, more absences, more arguments.
- OscarTheGrinch 9y agoYes. In agile development we have one "sprint" cycle followed by another. When do we stop sprinting?
- expertentipp 9y agoWe don't want do disappoint Scrum master, do we? If one doesn't like daily standups one can always change the job, right? /s
- arkh 9y agoIf your team was really agile it would be the case. Retrospective should be used to discuss and adapt the way you handle your iteration (not sprint). If your daily stand-up are a problem, remove them. But agile is like communism or free market: it does not exist.
- _pmf_ 9y agoObligatory quote from Rich Hickey (from his talk "Simple Made Easy"): "Who can run at the top of their ability? Right. A short distance runner. You can’t run far at that speed. We programmers have figured out how to fix that, though. We just fire the start pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint!"
- UK-AL 9y agoIf your using sprints to put pressure on people, tell your manager he's doing it wrong. Work out your velocity at which you can do work at consistent pace without pressuring people. I think one of biggest mistakes in scrum was calling sprints, sprints. The goal out of scrum is being able to release at predictable and sane pace. Not to maximise output
- Swizec 9y agoOne of the earliest signs usually goes like this: Hmmm I wonder if I’m burned out. I should Google about it. By the time you’re thinking you might be across the line, you’re already past it. Your subconscious is trying to tell you things. That’s how this subconscious health stuff usually works. If you think you might need a break, you do. If you think you might be tired, you are. If you’re thinking whether your job is a drudge, it is. If you’re thinking about food, you’re hungry.
- monsieurbanana 9y agoBut you're so good at tricking yourself that in practice it can be very, very hard to know whether it's your "subconscious" "talking" or your gluttony/lust/greed/pride/envy/laziness/anger.
- k3liutZu 9y agoThis.
- simongray 9y agoI think I would call that one of the latest signs. The signs mentioned in the article are much earlier indicators of chronic stress conditions, since they also work on someone who is somewhat in denial about their condition. Speaking from personal experience, the biggest problem is that you really don't want to admit to yourself or to others that you're suffering from chronic stress. Indigestion, lack of sleep, headaches, frequent colds, etc. are all symptoms, but people will get several these and still treat them as if they were separate issues, rather than being caused by a continuous release of cortisol and other stress hormones: "Oh I can't sleep, better start using melatonin!" "Oh I'm constipated, better eat more fibre and start the day with yoghurt!" "Oh I have a headache again, better take some paracetamol and drink lots of water!"
- Gigablah 9y agoWell, on the extreme end, there's hypochondria.
- expertentipp 9y ago> A trusted mentor at work with whom you can discuss and strategize other ways to deal with work-related issues. Sorry but this never works. Once one starts "sharing the concerns" one have couple of months left in the workplace.
- raawa001 9y agoThis is not true. I have several friends who got good help through their workplace.
- freddie_mercury 9y agoIt has worked fine for me, so I guess that disproves your sweeping claim? I had mentors (at various times) who were the VP of Engineering, the GM of a $300 million product line, and the CFO of a $6 billion company. I was able to share concerns and still get promoted, get raises, get extra equity, and so on. Just because your experiences have been different doesn't make your experiences universal.
- expertentipp 9y agoIt never works in outsourcing centers, doesn't have to be a sweatshop - includes product development centers i.e. places where decisions and strategies are simply "broadcast downward". Basically most of southern Asia, most of EU which is not Germany/UK/France/Scandinavia, Russia, etc.
- user5994461 9y agoDon't work more than your 40h a week in an outsourcing centers. They have a different economy than software companies, noone should do overtime.
- minipci1321 9y agoHmm... > I had mentors [...] who were the VP of Engineering, the GM of a $300 million product line, and the CFO of a $6 billion company. > Just because your experiences have been different doesn't make your experiences universal. You probably should also tell us what was your career position at the company at these times. VP/GM/C-level people certainly won't mentor a random Joe?
- jondubois 9y agoI feel desperately burned out every night when I go to sleep at 2am or 3am but when I wake up the next morning at 7am, I feel completely refreshed and I want to keep going. I think that having an open source side project can be rewarding in that way. Financially, I'm broke as a camel's back but open source work does give me a sense of satisfaction. At least for now. I think it's vitally important to have some social recognition for your work otherwise it's very easy to feel burned out.
- kbart 9y ago4-5 hours of sleep is definitely not enough. 6 hours is a recommended minimum in nearly every related study I've ever seen. Even though it might not look like a problem immediately, but it's a serious burden on your body (heart, especially) and on the long it will take it's toll (heart attacks in 30' are common as never before). Get some sleep.
- tamrix 9y agoProtip, he's actually trying to brag. Anyone who actually has been burnt out will know it happens after many months or even a year or more of tireless work. If you're burning out and recovering ever next day. That's just being exhausted after a hard day's work.
- harryf 9y agoAh the two malaises of our age... - "OMG! I'm so busy. Stressed. Burnout!" - "Oh no! AI is taking our jobs" There's a certain irony in that some of the most overworked people in the world are those bringing AI to the market.
- nnd 9y agoThis whole situation will only get worse until a more efficient income distribution system (i.e. not wage-based) would be implemented.
- drcross 9y agoIt's not irony from the point of the programmers perspective, it's logic: "If I don't work this hard I will will be replaced by one of the thousands of people who have been already replaced by automation".
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoNo irony there. Job stress and unemployment rate go together - and this is completely unsurprising.
- thriftwy 9y agoMy whole life I was a boredom-driven person. This means that, for every productive action I'm taking, I have to "roll a morale check" and I fail that one more often than not, and stop doing whatever I wanted to accomplish. I consider myself talented but my output thus is inherently constrained. It was very shocking for me to discover that many many people don't work like that: instead they need to roll a check to ever stop working, otherwise they don't, eventually burning out (but in process, earning e.g. good grades which was always unreachable to me).
- acrynx 9y agoIt's the same with me and this might be the first time I notice someone else actually talking about it and assessing their situation so well, so thanks for that. Do you think that it's just a normal degree of variation found in different people? In the past I've occasionally been wondering if there is something wrong with my health that drains my motivation, or if actually I'm just lazy, or care too little about what i can give to other people, or whatever. At that time it has also caused problems at work for me and kept my self-esteem low for quite some time. Since then I have been a lot better and I'd say it's fine now. But I still wonder about what causes such wildly differing forms of motivation in different people.
- nolok 9y agoDid/do you by any chance have what I can only describe as a "fear of failure / of being ashamed of your result" ? I infer that from your "low self esteem" remark. I used to be very very similar, and with some help I identified that it was a combination of people around me expecting me to succeed a lot more than others, which lead to a fear of failing. Which then slowly creeped into a lot of aspect of my life. I really caught on it and decided to do something about it when it started going against what I actually wanted, making me decline events I wanted to get into and had the motivation but my brain just wouldn't let me hop in.
- thriftwy 9y agoI, for one, never have fear of failure. What I have is the opposite. In seconds I can think of this grandiose accomplishment in all its beauty if it was finished, and then I'm confronted with a white slate and tedium of doing even first steps in that direction. What discourages me from smaller tasks is impossibility of failure. Why do a barely challenging exercise if i'm not the first to do it and not the best at that?
- _pmf_ 9y agoThankfully, SV has solved the issue of having both a demanding job and little children by offering egg freezing as a perk. (Phenomenally disruptive! Uber for asynchronous human reproduction!)
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe future is here! Except it's not a perk for interplanetary travel, but for working on adtech...
- dredmorbius 9y ago... it's just not evenly incubated.
- minipci1321 9y agoI couldn't make sense out of the "Common Work Stressors" chapter -- who is the target population which served as a base to establish this list? People lifting heavy things usually have predictable schedules. Also, that, as well as exposure to the weather, becomes more problematic with age, exactly when interacting with people becomes easier... Etc. If this is rather an open-ended list -- why not a word about how companies lay off people based on age? Isn't that a common source of stress to many?
- container 9y agoAs a side note, it should be "Ms. Seppälä". As a Finn, I always find it a little weird how most media can't be bothered to handle Nordic characters.
- unixhero 9y agoThose characters aren't reachable on a US keyboard. Thät's why :) Maybe.
- Freak_NL 9y agoCould it be that this person of Finnish descent who works in the US uses an anglicized version of her name on purpose? I'm usually quite pedantic about diacritic character neglect, but in this case this might be correct; the CCARE (her employer) website does this too.
- pamqzl 9y agoAnd as an English speaker I always find it weird how everybody wants to speak our language but nobody wants to conform to our alphabet. If I was writing in Finnish then I'd chuck in some umlaauts. But right now we're speaking English, and we Englishmen did away with that kind of baloney about eight hundred years ago. Maybe if the Finnish Empire had conquered the world we could be speaking Finnish, but you didn't, so we're not.
- sctb 9y agoCould you please not be so gratuitously disrespectful? It's not civil and it doesn't belong here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Aeolun 9y agoBut even given that I'm burned out. What am I going to do about it? I can't just up and quit my job. There's no other jobs that won't have me just as burned out in a few months, and the idea of searching for one is tiresome already. How do you get out of that funk?
- therealdrag0 9y agoWhat about your job burns you out? I've seen in different jobs a range of stress levels depending on the type of project and the team culture. It IS possible that another job would be a better fit for you.
- gt2 9y agoLive for something else. Music, startup, reading, whatever you like. Pay yourself first (work on that thing first thing in the morning), or whenever you can give it attention. Work to get your paycheck. You can still do a great job -- this doesn't mean you need to slog through it. Just make your own life your priority.
- expertentipp 9y ago> Pay yourself first (work on that thing first thing in the morning) What if there is obligatory daily standup early in the morning eating up the entire morning energy? Well obviously it's not explicitly obligatory but the "we are the second family", "be a good team player" stuff.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoTheoretically? Get up even earlier. In practice, it doesn't work for everyone. Some of us are night owls, and I don't mean the "likes to stay up late" kind, but "can't possibly get up in the morning without being kicked out of bed by someone else" kind.
- skate22 9y agoMy team does standups on slack, it works very well for us.
- nnd 9y agoThe article appears to point out that work-related stress is the main reason for burnout, which might be the case for some, but personally, I found that the lack of challenge and meaningfulness in my work were the main predictors for burnout. In short, be more selective in the projects/jobs you take, and focus on the ones you actually care about. I do realize that it's easier being said than done of course.
- lawn 9y agoSame here. This also applies to my hobbies, when I'm not invested in challenging and meaningful hobbies I'm much more probable to burn out.
- whipoodle 9y agoGreat point, I'm unfortunately living on the wrong side of that right now. Not too much work, not too little pay, but too little to be proud of.
- altotrees 9y agoFor me: writing code is my job, writing code is my hobby, writing code is what drives and comforts me. I hear about a great new tool or language, I just have to try it out - usually on my own time. Doing this has served me well in some cases, but there have been times I have woken up in the morning not caring if I ever use a piece of tech again. This has been a pattern throughout my life: to focus on something to the point where I may be a bit obsessed, start to get really good at it and then burnout hard and transition to a new focus. Luckily with tech I have learned moderation to a point. I still almost hit that wall sometimes, but recognize pretty quickly when I am about to and take a short break from the tools or issue at hand.
- pixelmonkey 9y agoI used to think I occasionally suffered from work burnout, but then my SO became a medical resident, and I realized "oh, that's what burnout is." What I used to "suffer" as a programmer was the ebb and flow of productivity. As described by books like "Drive" and "Flow". This state-of-mind was perhaps best described for me by my colleague (also a programmer) in this public essay, "Find the right routine to surf productivity"[1]. What my SO suffers as a medical resident is true work burnout. They work 6 days per week, nearly 80 hours per week, for weeks (or months) on end. Their work is not only challenging intellectually, it's challenging physically and emotionally. Their work also buckles under the weight of administrative bureaucracy, which removes their sense of agency. Recently, after my SO got off a 5-week "night float" block (where she worked 6 days per week on an inverted 6pm-6am night-time schedule), she finally got a day off. It was really a day to re-adjust her schedule back to working "normal" daytime 6am-6pm hours. During that day, she said to me, "Can we look up Maslow's hierarchy of needs?"[2] Looking over that diagram, we realized her work had her floating around in the first couple levels of that pyramid, whereas in my work, I was very much at the top. My "burnout" feelings were really "not feeling perfectly self-actualized". Her "burnout" feelings were actually "not having access to basic physical needs (e.g. sleep) and emotional support (e.g. daylight, friends, family)." I am very much in favor of Jason Fried style "Calm Companies"[3], and I think in software/tech, we actually have the ability to "work hard" without burning out, usually hovering around the "self-actualization" level in the pyramid. One of the wonderful things about software engineering, in particular, is that since it is the art of automation, we can actually save ourselves labor, and think carefully about the notion of employee leverage. That is, one employee's code can do the labor of hundreds or thousands. It's really sad to me that the medical profession, at least during its training period for new medical school graduates, there is an epic contrast: the near-guarantee of burnout, with basically no recourse for residents except to "suck it up and power through". For those of you who feel your are in jobs in tech where managers "put the screws on you", you should recognize that you have all the power in the world to change job. Employers in tech should be fighting over you, ensuring you feel fulfilled, productive, and balanced. "All of the above" is possible; this isn't a "pick two" engineering trade-off. If you don't feel that way, it's bad management or bad culture -- period. In medical residency, it's "pick zero", and even worse, there is no way for those folks to change jobs (at least, not without derailing their entire career). [1]: http://lifehacker.com/5955115/find-the-right-routine-to-surf-productivity http://lifehacker.com/5955115/find-the-right-routine-to-surf... [2]: http://timvandevall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Needs.jpg http://timvandevall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Maslows-H... [3]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-calm-company-our-next-book-d0ed917cc457 https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-calm-company-our-next-book-d0...
- unixhero 9y agoI was close to being severely burned out. Changed my role at work Now everything is great.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yosito 9y ago> five-minute breaks for every 20 minutes spent on a single task, or sitting at your desk As a software developer, yeah right! In 20 minutes, I've barely even gotten a problem into my head, and a five minute break would mean starting over. Also, working remotely is not necessarily a cure for burnout. I've been burned out while working remotely and it had a lot to do with the additional stress of having to be self disciplined, the lack of boundaries between leisure and work, and the lack of emotional support from co-workers. Other than those two points, there was some good stuff in this article.
- kenning 9y ago> As a software developer, yeah right! In 20 minutes, I've barely even gotten a problem into my head, and a five minute break would mean starting over. My strategy for this has been to take a long break and treat myself after finishing a big feature. I usually try to do one large thing in a work day and right when I push the commit, go watch tv for an hour or something. I've found it works very well because instead of using entertainment as some sort of "boredom medicine," it makes it into a reward.
- baby 9y ago> working remotely is not necessarily a cure for burnout I've never been close to burning out so take this with a grain of salt, but I definitely felt way more relaxed once I started working more from home.
- Clubber 9y agoI've been burned out at the office (recently) and at prior a while working at home. I was working 100+ hour weeks while at home because they decided to RIF everyone and I was basically working 4 jobs. It's possible to burn out at home, but it takes a lot more doing. At home, you can get up and watch a show on TV for 30 minutes, or play a quick game or something to alleviate the stress. You can't do that at the office typically.
- archagon 9y agoI've seen this mentioned quite a bit around these parts and I just don't get it. What kind of problem takes 20 minutes to wrap your head around? Can you give me a working example? I'm asking honestly, by the way! I've never personally encountered a problem in my professional career that takes half an hour just to internalize, and I've always wondered what one might look like.
- deepakkarki 9y agoI was planning to write under a throwaway, but I guess I don't care anymore. When most people talk of burn out, they usually have spent years in the industry or probably have been probably working 12 hour days for a long period of time. For me on the other hand, I kind of managed to get burnt out (depressed) two years in the industry. I loved CS back in college, but my job felt like a punishment. The worst thing was I couldn't get myself to figure out what was wrong. The lack of a support structure for "emotionally exhausted" developers is surprising. But anyway once it got worse enough I just decided to quit, wasn't worth the toll on my health. Got back to the basics - started learning some ML and webdev. Built and shipped a side project. https://discoverdev.io https://discoverdev.io - A daily list of interesting engineering blog posts. Even now I have anxiety pangs, but at least I'm not depressed :) I realised I liked learning and building stuff in a collaborative atmosphere - it's something that just makes me happy. Currently I'm working on creating a platform for people like me - who just want to get together and make things.
- vfulco 9y agoYou are an inspiration. I hope you realize your dreams. Sounds like you deserve them.
- errnoh 9y agoThanks for the link! DiscoverDev looks like a site that I'll visit a lot in the future. P.S. I'll try not to go offtopic from the original topic too much, but my intuition was to click the hashtags in order to get list of posts that match that hashtag. Didn't work as expected.
- vanderZwan 9y agoJust wanted to chime in with a "thank you" for supporting RSS feeds. Glad to read you're feeling better now!
- l5870uoo9y 9y agoWould love to hear more about how and with what you build that site.
- vog 9y ago
- GoToRO 9y agoIf you are stressed at work just leave. No amount of tricks will make you feel better in a toxic enviroment. Also, why would you help a toxic company by staying, when you could help another company that respects people. Because people stay at toxic companies it why there are so many of them and not enought of sane companies. People don't respect themselves first.
- Clubber 9y agoThat's good advise, but most companies are toxic, and they don't even understand why. I personally think scrum has a lot to do with it, but there are many other things like cube farms and open workspaces. A very dear friend of mine who is a high level manager (and used to be a developer) was extolling the virtues of open office and how it improves collaboration. He didn't understand that we collaborate maybe 1% of the time and code 99% of the time. Though open offices help that 1%, it greatly harms the 99%.
- smallgovt 9y agoYou seem to be assuming that the only reason one can be overly-stressed at work is due to a toxic environment. There are plenty of other reasons people become burnt out. They are listed in the article.
- gerbilly 9y agoMy mother has a saying: "No is a complete sentence." In North America, we live in a "default yes" sort of work culture. We say "yes" to every request at work until we're overcommitted and then we burn out. Why do we say "yes"? Here are some reasons I detected in myself: * Afraid to rock the boat, to appear uncooperative. * My own ego. Sometimes I think I have a a super clever way to solve a problem and I say "yes" so I can show off. * Not thinking it through. Sometimes I say "yes" before thinking the problem through, and the problem ends up being way bigger than it first seemed.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> Sometimes I say "yes" before thinking the problem through, and the problem ends up being way bigger than it first seemed. My stance at work is that my default answer is "No. But..."[1] I've seen too many developers wanting to show how clever they are saying an immediate "yes" to things (because obviously anything is doable when you're a clever developer!) and then spending months bitching about the sales people / managers / customers who asked for the thing THEY AGREED TO DO. Easier to start with "No." and then pivot into "But" with the angle of finding out exactly what's involved, what alternatives would work, etc. [1] I should point out that this does not make me a popular employee but it does make me productive in that I always deliver what I say I will.
- gerbilly 9y ago> [...] and then spending months bitching about the sales people / managers / customers who asked for the thing THEY AGREED TO DO. This is a legitimate critique of the worker, but some workplaces have this culture where PMs stalk the office looking for 'resources' to work on projects to promote their career. In cases like that, they may mislead you while selling you on the idea in order to get you on board.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> In cases like that, they may mislead you while selling you on the idea Of course, that's always possible but a perfect example of why the "No. But..." protects you from landing yourself in a nightmare.
- mettamage 9y agoI have a story for young HNers: if you want to learn about burnout, I propose to you a dangerous thing to try out (note: I did warn you). I did it myself (note: I did warn you twice). What I tried out was studying as much as possible for the longest period of time on university. Do this as long until you either (1) cry yourself to sleep at night from exhaustion or (2) start to feel emotionally numb. This has to be combined with the condition that you see yourself having a reduced output/productivity. I expected to get (1) but instead I got (2). I then went to the wikipedia page on burnout and looked at the checklist [1] and saw I had almost all of them, except for the most severe ones. I took on half the amount of study work (which was still more than most students would do) and since it was the end of the second semester, the summer holidays arrived. The next academic year I was fine. Why did I do this? Simple: I recognize that I am a person who wants to work hard. So I knew I'd get a burnout sooner or later in my life. It's better then to be acquainted with it, so that I can see the warning signals. Also, it's easier to experiment with this on university than in a working environment, since it's easier to take uni a bit less seriously than work -- for me at least. Also, I prefer to make deliberate mistakes as young as possible when I know there's a high likelihood I'll make them down the line anyway. Note: I did warn you thrice. It is a dangerous experiment, but so is any experiment where you want to look up your limits. Knowing your limits, however, can be very beneficial. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150413145539/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29 https://web.archive.org/web/20150413145539/http://en.wikiped...
- neolefty 9y agoThat sounds both systematic and disciplined! I rarely got close to my limits simply because I couldn't focus that long without getting distracted. (Result: Quit after undergraduate, got a job, was happier with that than academia, but I admire the discipline it takes to get through proper PhD research and even more, a career in research.) (Other result: I learned that I'm much more socially motivated than internally, so group projects and collaborative environments are much more my style than most of the work I found in school. If research had been more collaborative and had more hackathons, maybe I would have stuck with it longer.)
- sclangdon 9y agoI guess burnout means different things to all of us, and is probably caused by different things, too. What I'm about to describe probably wasn't the start of burnout, but I ended up there all the same. I'm currently looking to get out of programming after 17 years because I'm tired of politics and bureaucracy. But anyway, on to your question... I can't tell if these were signs of an on-coming burnout, or if I was already gone by then and just didn't realise what it was. But for me, I started to get angry and frustrated, quicker and easier. Sprint meetings annoyed me, daily stand-ups seemed pointless, interruptions always came at the wrong moment. I started to believe my own hype and went days without doing any work what-so-ever because I knew I could still do more work than my colleagues if I wanted to. I used to moan about my employer all the time and would often find myself saying things like "this fucking company...". All of those symptoms probably have nothing to do with burnout per-se, and were almost certainly a result of a complicated relationship with a co-worker and a lack of credit and respect by my employer. Nevertheless, I believe that period changed something fundamental in regards to my thinking about programming, the industry, and perhaps life in general, which has led me to want to get out (of the industry, not life) as soon as I can. I think what I'm trying to say - and having some trouble conveying - is burnout can come as a result of some other thing that starts you on the road of questioning if this industry is really what it's cracked up to be. So perhaps instead of looking out for potential signs of burnout, look instead for changes in your attitude. If your attitude is becoming more negative, you need to change something quickly or you’ll probably end up “burned out”. Or maybe I’m just rambling about something that most people wouldn’t describe as burnout…
- gerbilly 9y agoI usually think a bad attitude or cynicism as a symptom of burnout. Everyone knows that sleep deprivation can make you cranky and put your nerves on edge. Burnout reduces your sleep quality and you might not notice it except that you feel cranky in the early stages.
- JepZ 9y agoI think there are two very helpful skills when it comes to preventing burnout: 1. Being able to know where your limit is 2. Being able to tell your boss were your limit is Many of us try to be good at their job and are not afraid to give constantly 120% but while focussing on the task at hand we put aside our physical needs. And telling your boss you have enough work for the next days and that any additional tasks will have to wait, is something many people are afraid of. Often they fear to give the impression that they are not enthusiastic about their work. In my opinion, everbody who tells his boss about his or her capacities cares about the efficiency of the company.
- thewhitetulip 9y agoWhen you are too busy to make time for doing something you love like readimg or trekking
- hackermailman 9y agoThe Rock method of waking up 6 days a week, doing 30 mins of heavy cardio and then lifting weights and pull ups is the only way I've found where you can keep an insane schedule without burning out. As soon as I hit a pillow I sleep no matter what I'm thinking/worrying about, and I wake up without any back pain or other problems where before I started this routine I always woke up with little pains and stiffness. I have energy all day, and the cardio seems to help with focus. Something else I do for sanity is on Saturdays I work in a medical lab at a local university for a few hours designing and testing algorithms. It pays a joke salary, but it's intellectually satisfying work and you get access to PhDs to leech their knowledge. This can get stressful as mistakes can blow the results and ruin their research grant but it's something I look forward to doing every week outside my usual job of just adding features and putting out fires. If you can I highly recommend looking at your local university research position pages and seeing if there are any open on the weekend or in the evenings. For some reason local students here never take these.
- aj_g 9y ago> Something else I do for sanity is on Saturdays I work in a medical lab at a local university for a few hours designing and testing algorithms. Interesting. What is your main job and how did you get into doing this work for the university on the side?
- hackermailman 9y agoReading TAOCP and CMUs Parallel Algorithms book in my spare time. http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com Stack exchange jobs listed the research grant position. I have 2 main jobs, one is a unionized labor shop I've had since high school from 10:30-5pm (can't give up that indexed pension) and I remotely add features to a dbms before it starts which I also learned from a free CMU resource http://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2017/ http://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2017/ but before that I did a variety of things like contract framework feature writing, writing simple kernel mods, QA testing ect.
- fweespeech 9y ago> Feeling alienated by your colleagues and bosses, feeling constantly underappreciated, or feeling ostracized by them. Lol. I find it funny I got attacked and censored for describing that and then being told it isn't related to burnout lol.
- jefe_ 9y agoI write and distribute a 'weekend update' just about every week and send it to my team on Sundays. It serves two purposes: 1. Clearly communicate project progress and near-term goals to everyone involved, including non-technical people. I outline the features / issues & resolutions in fairly technical detail while tethering it to more accessible concepts. If things were truly easy or exceptionally difficult, I note that. This has helped Sales and Marketing better manage expectations. The times I'm most stressed are when Sales and Marketing have underestimated the difficulty of something they've promised a client. It's typically not frustrating because it's hard or there are time constraints, it's frustrating because they're prioritizing something that may not be aligned with technical or user priorities. Pile several weeks of this and it can be exhausting. The 'weekly update' has helped that. 2. The process of writing the update offers reassurance that whether the week felt productive or not, progress was achieved. This is the piece that makes sitting down to write it feel like a fun activity rather than a chore. My mind may be saying, this week wasn't productive, but by 15 minutes into composing the update, I'm finding things I had already forgotten about. The week may have been less productive than expected, but it's almost always more productive than the mind gives credit, and writing the update forces the mind to acknowledge these small achievements.
- nzyg 9y agoHas anyone dealt with being burnt out while enjoying their job at the same time? I started a new job and although its very interesting (I like the technologies used, the project domain and the competence of my teammates) lots of symptoms mentioned in the article apply to me. I just feel so stressed out all the time its affecting every aspect of my life. Not really sure how to proceed right now. Honestly I don't feel like pushing through will help but I don't want to quit my current job so soon.