12 ms·

I quit my software engineering job last May because of extreme burnout. I took 5 months off and just started working again and feel really good. Something is s

I quit my software engineering job last May because of extreme burnout. I took 5 months off and just started working again and feel really good. Something is seriously wrong in this industry

briandear 8y ago
We sit at a desk writing code. Air conditioning, comfortable chairs, often free snacks and high pay. I realize burnout is real, but until you’ve worked as a refinery worker, on a road crew or a police officer, it’s hard to say that something is wrong with “this” industry. Every single profession has burnout. Every single profession has stress. Most people should be so lucky to have the opportunity to get burned out in one of the highest paying professions. If our industry has a problem, it’s that its practitioners don’t really know what actual suffering on the job is all about. The luxury of taking 5 months off is something unheard of for most typical middle or working class people. Not to diminish burnout, but claiming that the industry has a problem is just incorrect. Some employers might have a problem — but employers in all industries have problems. The best industry in the world has shitty employers and the worst industry in the world has great employers. Any normal working class person would laugh at this. It’s like first class travelers complaining about quality of the champagne at the airport lounge. We are immensely lucky to get to do this job. I get close to burnout from time to time, but then I remember what it was like before I got into this industry when I got evicted and slept in my car while DJing at dirty strip clubs just to be able to afford food. I would have given anything for the chance to burnout sitting in an Aeron working with all this incredible technology. Perspective.
- brickcitymang 8y ago
  Telling yourself that you have it better than 99% of the world is only a temporary and ineffective remedy to career dissatisfaction. The answer is introspection, finding out what is missing, and the life-long pursuit of self-actualization and eventually transcendence.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  You’re absolutely right and you’re getting silently down-voted by cowards who find it uncomfortable to take an honest look at their lives and realize how great they have it compared to 99% of the rest of the labor force in the world. I’ve done manual labor and dead-end fast food service work, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I currently find myself gainfully employed in a comfortable office.
- projektir 8y ago
  Question: have you experienced burnout? From what I've seen, people have a limited... chain...? Regardless of how "good" their situation is. Some people shoot for "luxury" jobs because they know they won't survive otherwise. It doesn't really make their situation "good", and I see absolutely nothing gained from "it could be worse". Do we all want to be like refinery workers? If a person burnt out at an office job ends up committing suicide, while the refiner worker is just mad at life, it raises questions.
- arh68 8y ago
  So what do you think about Doctors, whose pay is even higher than software, but whose discontent is even more widespread? Doctors really are committing suicide, but it’s still better than landscaping, so do you just laugh?
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  You are comparing high paid jobs to minimum salary jobs. Apples and oranges. There are other careers out there that pay similarly without any of the issues our industry face. There's nothing special or "lucky" about STEM. You can be lucky if you are someone who is not affected by those issues, but that's all the luck there is to it.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  I've worked in other industries, especially borderline minimum wage jobs. I've worked just about everywhere at a fast food restaurant, as a clerk for a retail store, unloading freight for another retail store, inspecting, sorting, and transporting parts for a factory, as a server for a restaurant, and stuffing envelopes/packing boxes for a distribution company, as a guy who had about seven reponsibilities at once for a video game publisher (video editor, qa overseer, build tester, pitch evaluator, producer, designer, asset creator) and watch in desperation as our games failed to find an audience to the point where the company eventually closed down. I've had to deal with vindictive bosses, black fridays, rush hours, sweltering buildings, running all over the factories and buildings, jerk customers, bad press, and all sorts of other crap I've long since forgotten about. But I've never had anywhere near as much stress in any of those as I have as I have as a software engineer. When you have 10+ different people hounding you to do different things, have tasks in 6 different programs this iteration while having to juggle tasks by other developers, when an architect thought something would take 8 hours but neglected to take into account five different complicating factors and it ends up taking you a full week with increased pressure placed on you to get the damn thing working, when there's a totally esoteric error that you and everyone else in the company or on the internet has no idea how to identify, let alone fix, but you're expected to figure it out anyway. Or figuring out how to get 12+ different technologies (frameworks/languages/platforms) to play nice together all at once, etc. I'm sure there are other industries that have similar issues, but, software engineering is a more unique than most, because you can work around the fuzziness of people in just about every other industry. With computers if you don't get the incantation exactly right, the computer will not work with you, period. It just won't work, until you eventually find a way that it does. I still enjoy the logic puzzle to a certain extent, but the shine of the industry is starting to go away and I'm tired of being stressed out all the time, to the point where I pretty much have to take three months off in between jobs just to feel sane again. I've been working my current job for the past three years and I'm pretty much fried. Every day I have to fight the urge to quit, remind myself I can't afford to do that right now.
danieltillett 8y ago
The fact that you can quit your job and not starve to death is a sign that something is seriously right about the software industry. Poor peasants living hand-to-mouth don’t have the luxury of burnout or sabbaticals. They work every day or their family dies. Being more generous, I think a work patten more like a tour of duty in war may be desirable to encourage. Work hard in a high stress job for a period of time at the metaphorical frontline and then rest and recuperate.
- 1000units 8y ago
  "Listen kid, just be glad you aren't a peasant."
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    Having worked as a farmworker in the past every day I am thankful that I have a cushy office job. I live better than the kings of 200 years ago lived let alone my poor ancestors.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Exactly. Spend a summer nailing shingles to roofs in 100F weather all day, and then complain to me about how awful an open office is (with air conditioning and a comfortable chair to sit on). I’m grateful every day that my old man pressured me to get a technology education so I didn’t have to destroy my body daily doing construction like he did.
      - gerbilly 8y ago
        >Exactly. Spend a summer nailing shingles to roofs in 100F weather all day, and then complain to me about how awful an open office is Both can be awful. Just because physical labour is physically tiring, it does not follow that mental labour might not be even more stressful. I worked farm labour in my 20s and those were some of the best jobs I ever had. Every meal was a banquet and I slept like a log. Potatoes tasted so good, it was as if I was eating ambrosia. I also believe that the body and the mind need to be worked together. The disembodied work typically done in offices is unbalanced, and can be very taxing.
Kiro 8y ago
While programmers definitely experience burnout, the causes described in the article (fear of losing your job etc) are probably not characteristic for our industry.

I quit my software engineering job last May because of extreme burnout. I took 5 months off and just started working again and feel really good. Something is seriously wrong in this industry

briandear 8y ago

We sit at a desk writing code. Air conditioning, comfortable chairs, often free snacks and high pay. I realize burnout is real, but until you’ve worked as a refinery worker, on a road crew or a police officer, it’s hard to say that something is wrong with “this” industry. Every single profession has burnout. Every single profession has stress. Most people should be so lucky to have the opportunity to get burned out in one of the highest paying professions. If our industry has a problem, it’s that its practitioners don’t really know what actual suffering on the job is all about. The luxury of taking 5 months off is something unheard of for most typical middle or working class people. Not to diminish burnout, but claiming that the industry has a problem is just incorrect. Some employers might have a problem — but employers in all industries have problems. The best industry in the world has shitty employers and the worst industry in the world has great employers. Any normal working class person would laugh at this. It’s like first class travelers complaining about quality of the champagne at the airport lounge. We are immensely lucky to get to do this job. I get close to burnout from time to time, but then I remember what it was like before I got into this industry when I got evicted and slept in my car while DJing at dirty strip clubs just to be able to afford food. I would have given anything for the chance to burnout sitting in an Aeron working with all this incredible technology. Perspective.

brickcitymang 8y ago
Telling yourself that you have it better than 99% of the world is only a temporary and ineffective remedy to career dissatisfaction. The answer is introspection, finding out what is missing, and the life-long pursuit of self-actualization and eventually transcendence.
ryandrake 8y ago
You’re absolutely right and you’re getting silently down-voted by cowards who find it uncomfortable to take an honest look at their lives and realize how great they have it compared to 99% of the rest of the labor force in the world. I’ve done manual labor and dead-end fast food service work, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I currently find myself gainfully employed in a comfortable office.
projektir 8y ago
Question: have you experienced burnout? From what I've seen, people have a limited... chain...? Regardless of how "good" their situation is. Some people shoot for "luxury" jobs because they know they won't survive otherwise. It doesn't really make their situation "good", and I see absolutely nothing gained from "it could be worse". Do we all want to be like refinery workers? If a person burnt out at an office job ends up committing suicide, while the refiner worker is just mad at life, it raises questions.
arh68 8y ago
So what do you think about Doctors, whose pay is even higher than software, but whose discontent is even more widespread? Doctors really are committing suicide, but it’s still better than landscaping, so do you just laugh?
Raphmedia 8y ago
You are comparing high paid jobs to minimum salary jobs. Apples and oranges. There are other careers out there that pay similarly without any of the issues our industry face. There's nothing special or "lucky" about STEM. You can be lucky if you are someone who is not affected by those issues, but that's all the luck there is to it.
cableshaft 8y ago
I've worked in other industries, especially borderline minimum wage jobs. I've worked just about everywhere at a fast food restaurant, as a clerk for a retail store, unloading freight for another retail store, inspecting, sorting, and transporting parts for a factory, as a server for a restaurant, and stuffing envelopes/packing boxes for a distribution company, as a guy who had about seven reponsibilities at once for a video game publisher (video editor, qa overseer, build tester, pitch evaluator, producer, designer, asset creator) and watch in desperation as our games failed to find an audience to the point where the company eventually closed down. I've had to deal with vindictive bosses, black fridays, rush hours, sweltering buildings, running all over the factories and buildings, jerk customers, bad press, and all sorts of other crap I've long since forgotten about. But I've never had anywhere near as much stress in any of those as I have as I have as a software engineer. When you have 10+ different people hounding you to do different things, have tasks in 6 different programs this iteration while having to juggle tasks by other developers, when an architect thought something would take 8 hours but neglected to take into account five different complicating factors and it ends up taking you a full week with increased pressure placed on you to get the damn thing working, when there's a totally esoteric error that you and everyone else in the company or on the internet has no idea how to identify, let alone fix, but you're expected to figure it out anyway. Or figuring out how to get 12+ different technologies (frameworks/languages/platforms) to play nice together all at once, etc. I'm sure there are other industries that have similar issues, but, software engineering is a more unique than most, because you can work around the fuzziness of people in just about every other industry. With computers if you don't get the incantation exactly right, the computer will not work with you, period. It just won't work, until you eventually find a way that it does. I still enjoy the logic puzzle to a certain extent, but the shine of the industry is starting to go away and I'm tired of being stressed out all the time, to the point where I pretty much have to take three months off in between jobs just to feel sane again. I've been working my current job for the past three years and I'm pretty much fried. Every day I have to fight the urge to quit, remind myself I can't afford to do that right now.

danieltillett 8y ago

The fact that you can quit your job and not starve to death is a sign that something is seriously right about the software industry. Poor peasants living hand-to-mouth don’t have the luxury of burnout or sabbaticals. They work every day or their family dies. Being more generous, I think a work patten more like a tour of duty in war may be desirable to encourage. Work hard in a high stress job for a period of time at the metaphorical frontline and then rest and recuperate.

1000units 8y ago
"Listen kid, just be glad you aren't a peasant."
- danieltillett 8y ago
  Having worked as a farmworker in the past every day I am thankful that I have a cushy office job. I live better than the kings of 200 years ago lived let alone my poor ancestors.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Exactly. Spend a summer nailing shingles to roofs in 100F weather all day, and then complain to me about how awful an open office is (with air conditioning and a comfortable chair to sit on). I’m grateful every day that my old man pressured me to get a technology education so I didn’t have to destroy my body daily doing construction like he did.
    - gerbilly 8y ago
      >Exactly. Spend a summer nailing shingles to roofs in 100F weather all day, and then complain to me about how awful an open office is Both can be awful. Just because physical labour is physically tiring, it does not follow that mental labour might not be even more stressful. I worked farm labour in my 20s and those were some of the best jobs I ever had. Every meal was a banquet and I slept like a log. Potatoes tasted so good, it was as if I was eating ambrosia. I also believe that the body and the mind need to be worked together. The disembodied work typically done in offices is unbalanced, and can be very taxing.

Kiro 8y ago

While programmers definitely experience burnout, the causes described in the article (fear of losing your job etc) are probably not characteristic for our industry.