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Burning out and quitting

• orzig 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. People's frank discussions of burnout in posts and comments over the years have helped me recognize the two major instances of burnout I've had over the last few years. Recognition doesn't let you snap out of it immediately, but it's a really good first step.
• PKop 5y ago
  Reminds me of "learned helplessness" [0]: "In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy; the individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from such real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation." [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
  • klyrs 5y ago
    Reminds me of how I thought about other people's mental health before I burnt out and kept pushing for several years. Good luck.
    • roflc0ptic 5y ago
      I think relating burnout to learned helplessness registered as dismissive to you - it definitely isn't. Depressive helplessness/burnout/learned helplessness all have a lot in common; GP was apparently just making that connection. They probably share some very similar biological mechanisms.
    • PKop 5y ago
      Point of relating it to learned helplessness is that companies may structure their work, or assignments, or team structure, or culture, expectations etc in ways where employees feel nothing is getting accomplished, they have no autonomy, workload stacks up, and eventually they feel nothing they do can make the situation better. They are not setup such that applying more effort causes workload or problems to get smaller, or where progress is made. They learn that the situation is helpless. Now there's some fuzziness around whether this realization is maybe the end of the struggle for some, where they stop burning themselves out and just give up. But they would need options; quitting or having alternative employment to go somewhere else. If not, they'll be in a bad spot.
  • Nevermark 5y ago
    The "learned helplessness" rings true to me. Burnout for has usually occurred to me after making many attempts to get past major inefficiencies. Work continues, but despite many attempts, remains a terrible slow inefficient slog. Far below my potential. Eventually I just become unable to work. Extreme mental fatigue even after good rest or even long vacation breaks. I am happy to say I got free of the situational factors that were never going to get better and am very happy and productive now. One things that amazes me, how truly dumb I am when depressed vs. happily creatively challenged. Anyone meeting me in these two states would have very different impressions of my abilities, potential, work ethic, etc.
    • steve_adams_86 5y ago
      Same for me. When I'm excited and motivated, feeling positive, I'm an unstoppable force and my brain works better than I realize it can. When I'm depressed, I will barely engage. I'll forget everything I'm doing. I'll have no executive function. Solving similar problems to those I have in the past seems insurmountable. Knowing this, and having no power over it in the moment, makes it a lot worse.
• kaycebasques 5y ago
  Burnout was probably a factor in my decision to take a 1-year sabbatical (as of June 2020, so I'm almost 3 months in). > I never thought I’d take five months off, without being able to explain to a future employer what I was doing. It felt like too much. I'm very specifically phrasing it as a sabbatical, to hedge against this worry. I think the general population has a vague idea that a sabbatical isn't wasted time. In reality this is probably time for me to recover from burnout, too. But since there seems to be stigma around "burnout" I'm avoiding the whole topic by phrasing it as a sabbatical. I have no guilt about this because I legitimately am taking time to build those things I've always wanted to build, study those things that I know I should study but never had time for, and all those other life things that I know I should prioritize but can never find the time/energy to do when I have a full-time job. I did cheat a bit this month, though. I got an opportunity to do some contract work with a startup for 1-month (3 hours every day, 7 days a week). There may be an opportunity to work with them again in the coming months but for now I am definitely returning to my own projects starting in September. If you can find short-term gigs like that I'm finding that it's a nice balance. Kinda keeps one-foot in work world and keeps my marketable skills sharp, but then I can go off and do my own thing again. I've heard a few people say that you need more than a few weeks to recover from burnout. I think there's a lot of wisdom to those statements. I think it takes a few months of completely disconnecting from work pressure. I doubt I'll need a year. I'll probably be itching to get back to a job before the year is up. More on why I took a sabbatical: https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue Week-by-week updates if you're curious: https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical
  • kilroy123 5y ago
    Early this year I came off a 2 1/2 year sabbatical. It might take a long time to recover. Depends on the person.
    • holler 5y ago
      What did you do to fill your time in that 2 1/2 years? Did you get bored or find yourself wanting to return to productivity?
• Applejinx 5y ago
  This person understands what actual burnout is. You get really seriously fried, like 'can't function in any sense' fried. The references to 'you have to decide what we'll watch on netflix because I literally cannot choose a thing' rang very true to me. I generally needed more than a couple months but less than a year, and the removal of whatever it was that I'd burnt myself to a crisp trying to control. Over my lifetime that's been everything from overcoming homelessness, starting a business, transitioning the business to Patreon, trying to have a relationship: it's been a lifelong process of learning that I can't have things (even very desirable things) just by pushing harder to earn them. Quite often I just have to give up and not have the thing. The more I learn that, the less I'm riding the edge of burnout. :)
  • marcc 5y ago
    I'm glad you are doing better. I think the author here does understand what burnout is, and was able to notice the symptoms a lot earlier. It shouldn't get to the point of not even being able to decide what to watch on Netflix. Burnout happens, and I think conditions less serious than yours can still be called burnout. Again, really happy you are ok. I hope you are working in an environment that is healthy, and that you are able to prevent burning out again.
    • paulannesley 5y ago
      I think you saw a "doesn't" that wasn't there in the opening line: "This person understands what actual burnout is." The Netflix reference was from the original post.
      • marcc 5y ago
        You are right!
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      Thank you :) a number of things helped. Sadly, one of them was the death of my parents (but they were cared for and respected right to the end, and my darker take on their expectations can't hurt them now), and another was cutting ties with some family members. Another thing that helped was Patreon, honestly, and I'll tell you specifically why: formerly I was making products sold commercially. This produced a lot of pressure to have 'hit' products, and a lot of fear when the ideas weren't coming, or when the idea wasn't selling. Going open source and Patreon-supported changed that to a more distributed system that was less bursty: didn't make as much peak money by a factor of three or more, but it was far FAR more predictable. The increasing stability of this has been a huge help. I believe if society instantiated a basic income, that too would help many people avoid burnout, and remain productive, for the same reasons. Over-pressure is real, and damages productivity.
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  I don't have the option to burnout and take a year off. Unemployment is very scary for me right now. Plus I tried to grow a few programming hobbies but never went far, so I'd be really bored if I quit. I think the maximum number of days that I can do nothing is around 7.
  • granshaw 5y ago
    I don’t know what your full situation is, but if possible highly recommend you start taking steps to give yourself more options/breathing room Start saving a cushion for yourself/your family. Start with a month, then try to get to 3-6. Might have to cut down on some things but those will be important discussions to have. Try to find something else outside of work that you enjoy. I know this can be hard, as I didn’t have anything before either. I now have a small revenue generating side product which in many ways is just “more work”, but I’m passionate about it
    • markus_zhang 5y ago
      Thanks. On my case it's less a financial issue than a lack of long term creative hobby issue. I found it difficult to stick to any hobby for a couple of month and quit in the middle too easily. I kinda give up amd hope I can work till my death to avoid a boring retired life. It's impossible for me to grow a creative hobby.
• howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  Catch22 - From the quoted CNN article: "...the generous pandemic-era unemployment benefits that have already ceased in multiple states will run out in September, which could affect the rate of hiring as well." Part of the burnout (certainly not all, perhaps not even a majority) is the extra load working Americans are taking to offset the voluntarily unemployed. Somehow, I suspect many states will extend these benefits beyond September until Congress & State legislatures can enact legislation that assigns benefits to those truly in need vs. electively unemployed... if that's even possible.
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    I don't think individual states will meaningfully extend benefits. Only the federal government can print money to pay for it.
  • ianlevesque 5y ago
    > Part of the burnout (certainly not all, perhaps not even a majority) is the extra load working Americans are taking to offset the voluntarily unemployed. This pattern matches against a common strategy the elite use to keep everyone else complacent - turn them on each other. Be careful with easy answers to hard problems.
  • hkt 5y ago
    > Part of the burnout (certainly not all, perhaps not even a majority) is the extra load working Americans are taking to offset the voluntarily unemployed. Maybe better to focus on paid time off and sick leave. The companies can afford it, regardless of what they say..
  • mixologic 5y ago
    This idea presumes a few things: 1. Tech workers are burning out due to 'extra load' because of staffing issues at companies. 2. The staffing and workload issues are due to tech workers being voluntarily unemployed. The first is probably very true. But tech companies have always ran as bare thin of a crew that they could to meet output requirements, which is why you can find content on tech burnout all the way back to the dotcom era and probably before. The second is, in my mind, untenable. The kinds of salaries that a tech worker makes is wildly different from the amount that unemployment covers. In my state unemployment would barely be half of my salary, and thats with the added covid benefits. I strongly, strongly doubt there is even a small fraction of people willing to take that kind of paycut in exchange for pure idling.
• yupper32 5y ago
  For me, I've started feeling like I'm close to burnout. But quitting doesn't really seem like a helpful option. Could I actually take months off recovering? No. I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on. And risk having to take a job that pays way less than before. Which brings me to my main point: I don't see an option where the work ever actually truly ends. There's always more. Always things I need to be doing. And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding. Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
  • ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
    Yeah I feel the same way. I work a stressful job that pays really well. If I leave, its unlikely I can land a job that pays the same. I just dont have the energy for leetcode. I am considering taking FMLA time off, which can be three months of unpaid time off. Just need a note from the doctor. I think three months is about enough to cure mildly bad burnout. Of course work will not be happy with me, but I have to lookout for myself. They have to honor my position upon return, the question being that my future on the team would be compromised. A more sinister idea is to take FMLA and leetcode full time for three months, then land a new role. Its kind of unethical, but life is so short.
    • tcoff91 5y ago
      Are you sure you can't reach out to your network and get in the side-door of a company without leetcoding? If you have advocates on the inside sometimes you can skip all the rigamarole.
      • ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
        Not quite, there are roles I could get. But I am mostly referring to FAANG/Some unicorns in terms of matching comp. None of which will give me the benefit of the doubt, despite my experience. But again, I am quite burned out, so in some ways its in their favor to put me through a rigorous interview process. Leetcode often filters out burned out employees
• Ansil849 5y ago
  > I was recently unemployed - fortunately, by choice This just comes off as the equivalent of saying: > I recently had to to fly somewhere - fortunately, by private jet The privilege and wealth requisite to be able to do either of these things just make it unrelatable.
  • shrimpx 5y ago
    One is far more relatable than the other. You can be temporarily unemployed by choice with a few thousand in savings.
    • Ansil849 5y ago
      Yes, I was using exaggeration to get the point across that this is written from a position of privilege that many of us reading cannot afford.
      • munk-a 5y ago
        I understand that not every tech job is paying SV wages. For a while I was earning 60k CAD and was still able to save up a good chunk of change. One thing to bear in mind is that if you voluntarily take a stint of unemployment you should probably see your expenses go down a fair bit as you'll have time to cook from scratch more often and will probably go off daily expenses like coffee. Being able to voluntarily not work in your early twenties would be pretty spectacular - but once you start building a bit of a nest egg you should be able to afford short stints.
        • Ansil849 5y ago
          > For a while I was earning 60k CAD and was still able to save up a good chunk of change. Also keep in mind that stateside, a giant portion of expenses you would have to take into account while unemployed are what you intend to do about health insurance.
          • munk-a 5y ago
• WaylonKenning 5y ago
  Like the tide slowly lapping away at your feet, the symptoms of burnout aren’t noticeable until you’re already waist deep, and then you can keep swimming, until suddenly your brain says, no thanks. I think that’s the worst part, the fact that this burnout process is happening to you, and regardless of your mental ability, you can’t outwork it, or outwill it, or outwish it. But personally I see it as your brain providing you a health and safety moment - there is danger in your current approach, and the circuit breaker has been tripped.
• hondo77 5y ago
  I've been through burnout before. A few times. Not fun. Alas, I never had the luxury of being able to take time off (it turns out that children like eating food). So, while I can sympathize, I also can't sympathize since I had to work through it (usually by changing employers).
  • trekt 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, how long did it take you before you felt like you were back to your "normal" self? I'm currently in the same position, and like the author of this blog, started my "burnout" recognition (followed by recovery) around end of November 2020 (first time experiencing burn out). I've since switched employers, and although I'm still way better than before, I don't feel my normal, creative, resilient and excited self. Minor set backs feel like the end of the world. I'm now having to battle with imposter syndrome, and I'm not sure whether this is part of the journey.
    • hondo77 5y ago
      If you don't feel imposter syndrome on a new job, you're probably doing it wrong. :-) I don't know how long it usually take to fully recover. I've found that a new job changes things around enough that I feel better so I can at least function again. Normalcy comes sometime later.
      • abledon 5y ago
        burnout counterpoint: If you are totally relaxed at a job and never feel imposter-syndrome, only work 20% of time, ... burnout probably won't happen.
    • k3liutZu 5y ago
      Not OP, but it took me maybe a couple of years. I kept telling me I was _close to being burnout_. It took me probably 6 months to realise how bad it had gotten and that I was actually in a really bad spot.
  • divbzero 5y ago
• makk 5y ago
  The author seems unaware that their problem isn’t burnout. That’s a symptom. Their problem is a failure to set boundaries. Without boundaries they’ll just hit the wall again. Over and over.
  • newobj 5y ago
    Very astute comment
  • _ink_ 5y ago
    I would like to set boundaries. Like working 4 days a week, 10 out of 12 month a year. But most employers have a different idea of how much I should work.
    • rubidium 5y ago
      This is a very findable arrangement at most Fortune 500 companies. You’re technically working 5 days , but really just work 4. With 7 weeks vacation [combine corporate holidays with 5 weeks personal PTO or those unlimited pto places] and a couple weeks of just turning in prior work it’s not hard.
    • grecy 5y ago
      For an employer to find an employee that aligns with their values (at least 8-5, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year) is easy. For an employee to find an employer that aligns with values like above is a very diffuclt thing to do. It will take years of hard work, interviews, trials, etc. etc. Without a doubt it will change your life for the better and will likely have as big an impact as other "big rocks" in your life (house, partner, kids). That means it's very worthwhile putting in the effort.
      • gnulinux 5y ago
        Yeah and then there are people on H1B who has to work the same job 7 years or they're deported in 60 days.
        • 5y ago
• WalterSear 5y ago
  I'm in the depths of this, have been since March (this last time). I now spend most of my time fighting a pitched battle with myself, in order make baby steps in the direction of work. But, I get stuck when it's time to actually submit a resume or contact a hiring manager. My biggest sticking point right now is preparing a convincing story for the interviewers. I'm just not ready to bullshit strangers about lofty 'career goals' or how excited I am to be a part of their 'company's growth journey'. Taking time off has helped, but it's also run its course: I've done this so many times now, I can no longer convince myself that next job won't lead me back here.
  • dwaltrip 5y ago
    Would it work to tell them you needed some time away from work to treat some serious health issues, and that you are doing better and are ready to get back into the swing of things? IMO burnout is a serious health issue. Also, I don’t think career goals have to be “lofty”. Showing up every day and doing good work should be enough in a healthy work environment.
    • WalterSear 5y ago
      Ah, I'm not worried about explaining any gap in my resume: I'm having trouble putting on my interview face. Career goals do have to be lofty during interviews, just like the company you are applying with has to be destined for certain and boundless success, and the interviewer wise, profound and physically attractive. :) Seriously though, job interviews are inherently processes of competitive elimination. A lack of enthusiasm, or of clear professional goals that involve the role involved, are significant red flags. I'm at a loss as to how to overcome this: I've had too much difficulty to truly believe that work environments can be healthy, or how to hide this from interviewers.
• nvarsj 5y ago
  I had my first experience with real burnout a few years ago. I took my first fully remote job at a completely dysfunctional company. It was a very frustrating experience. Unfortunately, I didn't have the luxury of taking time off like the author here. That is really the best option if you can manage it, but most people can't. In my case, I quit my job and went somewhere I knew would be a bit easier, and looked forward to the office life again. Then the pandemic hit and I ended up fully remote, yet again. So it didn't really help at all (I really, really missed being around people). I spent a year and half basically just winging it. It's hard to talk about because I still feel pretty ashamed about my performance. Some days were just a matter of sheer willpower to force my brain to do anything at all. I am slowly coming out of it finally and feeling a lot better. Swapping projects to something more interesting helped a lot. I'm still far from 100%, but getting there.
• ternaryoperator 5y ago
  As developers, I think we've all had similar experiences to greater or lesser degree. But also as developers, we generally earn enough to be able to take time off. This is why when I read about single mothers working multiple jobs to raise their children, my admiration and respect run very deep. They just don't have any option to recover from burn-out.
• lolc 5y ago
  I've always had slow days where I didn't want to work. Just give a call that today is one of those days. At most places I worked this was understood and respected. The other places I didn't work at for long. Sometimes I feel stuck in the morass of legacy apps we're looking after. Then I remind myself how things were when I started here. How we've invested to improve things. That I'm digging around in shit because that's where the work is. At times I just watch the blinkenlights for a while. With bits flowing and data transformed in quiet concert. Orchestrated by us to serve our fellow humans. I might even read some code that hasn't failed in a year. Sweet comfort to know it's there, working as intended. Then I grab the shovel again with renewed urgency. Make some red commits. Get them merged.
  • sebmellen 5y ago
    Such a delight to find prose that shines like a shimmering pearl in a mass of muddy water undistinguished from the silt. We are in dearth of writing that finds beauty in things often thought mundane.
• JohnFen 5y ago
  I've been struggling with serious burnout for a long while now. I know I need to do something to fix it, but I've been at a loss as to what. Maybe quitting my job and taking 6 months off would work...
  • icedchai 5y ago
    I also feel the same. This was building up before the pandemic, though that only made it worse: feeling isolated at home, on horrible Zoom meetings for several hours a day, etc. I hit my "FIRE" number in 2018 and didn't have the guts to pull the plug and take some time off. I hope I do now.
• cbeley 5y ago
  Wow, I have not really been keeping track, but this post made me realize I'm now almost a year into my career break (and now about four months into my road trip of mostly camping). I can't say I ever worked extreme hours, but I definitely reached a tipping point. It's only recently that the idea of working again and having a stable place to live is starting to sound nice/exciting again. I still have another 2.5 months planned on the road though and I'm still not sure what I want to do after. Finances have worked out much better than expected, so I kind of want to do international travel, but between covid concerns and concerns of being out of my field for so long, I've been a bit on the fence. On the other hand, I'm very unlikely to get rid of my apartment, downsize my belongings, and put the rest in storage ever again.
  • cbeley 5y ago
    I'll add that one thing is for sure: it took a while, but I've slowly started to feel like my old self again -- or at least the self I want to be. I'm also infinitely more relaxed now when it comes to handling traditionally stressful events.
• collaborative 5y ago
  The best antidote to burnout is to do more of what you like. Of course you first need to have a passion. Good luck if you don't (drinking is not a passion) De-prioritize whatever is boring or stressing you out and don't feel guilty about it. It will benefit everyone
  • bricss 5y ago
    I totally agree. Every time I felt burnt-out, I switched my focus on passionate precious things, succeeded with it, and puff, burn-out is gone... entirely
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    > The best antidote to burnout is to do more of what you like. But what do you do when the burnout is so deep that you find no joy in anything, even things that used to excite you?
    • WalterSear 5y ago
      1. Do it anyway, but not a lot. 2. Focus on the fundamentals: health, exercise, sleep. 3. Give yourself permission to not work and also not be doing fun stuff. 4. Expect the process to take way longer than you have either the patience or expectation for it to. 5. Take baby steps towards fun stuff, and ultimately, towards not-fun stuff and work. 6. CBT/ACT based therapy and medication
      • JohnFen 5y ago
        Excellent, thank you. I'm doing 1 & 2. I need to work my way further down that list.
• madengr 5y ago
  I took the day off to do manual labor, outside all day in a heat advisory. I’m absolutely filthy and still not finished. I love my tech job.
• acscott 5y ago
  High performance requires high maintenance. If you are burnt out or have symptoms or even suspect, I strongly urge to get a team together to help. It's something you have to actively watch out for (at least for some people) and actively treat. Here are two data points: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28119229/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28119229/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057125/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057125/
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    > I strongly urge to get a team together to help. As someone struggling with how to resolve my burnout, I'm eager for all suggestions. I don't understand this one, though. What sort of team are you talking about? How can someone in the depths of burnout cope with having to assemble one? Who should be on it? What are their roles?
    • acscott 5y ago
      Sorry for the vagueness and your burnout. I'd look for a professional that specializes in burnout, barring that, a good physician would be the first place to start. There could be underlying health conditions you want to eliminate such as Hashimoto's thyroiditis or sub-clinical thyroid issues. You could have your cortisol levels tested to confirm your stress levels once underlying conditions are eliminated. From my personal research there's a lot of factors involved, stress the major trigger. It's serious and important enough you want to get a professional involved. Sending good energy your way.
      • JohnFen 5y ago
        Thank you for the clarification. I appreciate it! And your advice is very good and well taken. Sadly, there's a serious doctor shortage in my area. I've been looking for a primary care physician for almost a year now, and coming up dry. But I could find one tomorrow, who knows? In any case, that's an edge condition and doesn't take away from your kind advice.
      • Applejinx 5y ago
• nonbirithm 5y ago
  “You decide what to watch on Netflix because I literally can’t.” About all I've heard in response to suggesting ideas like these is that I'm an adult, so nobody is able to decide anything for me anymore. I completely disagree. Depending on the importance of the decision, I would gladly relinquish some of my personal liberty if I absolutely needed to take my mind off of the crushing weight of choice for a while. On bad days, I've found myself unable to stop being stressed at constantly questioning if I'm making the wrong choices, even for the most insignificant things like sitting down and doing nothing for a few minutes. Also, some of the most significant turning points in my life only came as a result of people insisting that they knew what was best for me over and over again, and if I hadn't listened to their advice then I would be far worse off than I am now.
• timwaagh 5y ago
  I'm wishing you best of luck on your recovery. I also have a bit of unsolicited advice for those in a similar situation. it's better to pace things. If I find myself working at 1am, I know I'm acting silly. My employer won't thank me for it either. They don't want maximum output. They want someone who is dependable also the next morning. If your life is nothing but work you are also bound to get depressed. Your employer doesn't want an unproductive worker so make sure to take at least an hour for yourself and eight in your bed. If seven hours of meetings are causing you not to work during business hours you should tell your manager man hours are being poured down the drain and the team is working at 10% of it's capacity even without vacations. I never had a manager who doesn't listen to such arguments. You will still be a somewhat disgruntled employee because if it was fun they'd have someone pay to do your work. But you won't experience any other symptoms.
• User23 5y ago
  If you're burnt out at a big company job where you have performed well up to that point for at least a few years, you may have more options than you think. You might ask for a leave of absence for a couple months. Even unpaid it'll probably end up being financially better than the alternatives, supposing that it's enough time for you to recover. Another option is to negotiate a separation. Don't just quit. Approach your HR professional and explain your situation and say you'd like to discuss next steps. Oftentimes in exchange for signing a general release you can convince them to sign off on a severance package. Assuming you're not at the director level or above, they will probably just plug some numbers into a spreadsheet and tell you a number. My understanding is that 1-2 weeks salary per year of service is pretty typical in SV at least. The advantage to this route is it keeps your employee file clean and you get a little cushion. Sometimes they'll also agree to not contest unemployment benefits. If you really truly are burnt out, your alternative is to get PIPed and canned, so only forego the above if that's a better outcome for you. I'd advise against that route though, because it will damage your reputation and you may be ineligible for re-hire.
• markdjacobsen 5y ago
  This is a powerful piece that resonates with my own experience. I went through a period of severe burnout that took me a couple years to recover from. One of my later insights was that burnout doesn't merely entail working too much (although that's certainly part of it); burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love." So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc. A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.
  • wayoutthere 5y ago
    This has been my experience. I have simply learned to look for emotional fulfillment and creative output elsewhere in my life and am far happier for it. I find I’m actually a lot better at my job when I have some distance from it. It allows me to connect with people — even at work — on a human level because I don’t particularly care about my actual work and basically forget about it as soon as I stand up from my desk.
    • Areading314 5y ago
      This reminds me of some advice I got from a grad student as an undergrad -- "It's important to not care TOO much when doing research. Most things don't work out the way you expect and you'll always be disappointed or even biased when you are looking at your data."
    • WalterSear 5y ago
      Time is difficult, but I'm primarily unable to find the energy outside work for anything emotionally fulfilling or creative. I think this is why people are so motivated to find fulfillment in their work. Any time I have tried, my sleep, my work, and my life in general suffers, and I'm soon frustrated by the limited progress I can make. A good day's work can be so draining as to leave me literally depressed. A good day, mind you - not hard, not bad, not stressful - just one where I am completely focused on work for 7-8 hours. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the nature of coding for a living.
• anon9001 5y ago
  > If you have the financial ability to, don’t feel like you can’t quit your job. Your sanity is worth it. Alternate phrasing: If you don't have the financial ability to stop working, you can't quit your job. Your sanity is not worth it. > I needed to completely remove any feelings of pressure, or any external, and internal, obligations. “You decide what to watch on Netflix because I literally can’t.” I’ve eaten more takeout in the last few months, than the whole pandemic; I didn’t have the energy to shop for groceries, or cook. I desperately needed to enjoy things again - so I could remember what that was like - so I could get back to enjoying ‘productive’ things too. Remember that producing recovery, relaxation, or joy for yourself is still being productive. There are loads of people that don't even bother with cooking or groceries or enjoying things or having a sense of productivity. A lot of us are busy doing the capitalism because capital is the only sensible way to escape labor and any disruption would be very costly. What the author considers "burned out", most would consider just another day. It only becomes "burnout" when you're wealthy enough to consider converting your labor time into self-care time for some months. Also, taking time off is probably not even good advice. If you've always been miserable with the employed lifestyle, you're probably going to be just as miserable when you are forced back to it. Maybe more so. Plus you lose out on those months of earnings, which is not good because 4 months of pay now is way better than 4 months of pay in the future. Assuming, that the goal is to eventually not be forced to sell your time for money. > My boyfriend told me to stop working. It wasn’t work, and it was great. I was learning something. Completing something. Doing something because I wanted to do it, not because it was the next urgent thing that needed to happen. It felt like work used to feel like. That’s what I’m looking forward to again. I have no idea how someone whose career path is McKinsey->Google->GitHub could possibly have a great work experience where they're learning and building and following their personal interests because they wanted to do it and not because it was the next urgent thing to build. Maybe I just really suck at working in tech, or PM jobs are way easier than engineering jobs, but everything feels very urgent for my employer while actually being a giant waste of time for me personally. I do it because of the compensation, which I invest, so eventually I won't have to do it anymore.
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    > What the author considers "burned out", most would consider just another day. This statement is very much like saying "what one person considers 'depression' most would consider 'being sad'". Burnout is not what most people consider just another day. It isn't being overworked, harried, and under pressure.
• Hippocrates 5y ago
  This REALLY resonated with me. I know I am burnt out but hearing someone describe everything I am feeling so precisely and completely is crazy. I burnt out around the same time (november) and realized at about the same time too (february). Between those stages I started to phone it in at work. I’d skip rote meetings, cancel things I didn’t feel like doing, and just not do things that I was _supposed_ to do but thought would go unnoticed. Lo and behold, I received a raise and a promotion. I feel like I am slacking but maybe the burnout is a difference in perception, or it’s relative as we’re all burning out together.
• chasd00 5y ago
  I don't want to sound too callous but for those with families the cure for burnout is the terror of putting those that depend on you for their livelihood on the street. Suggesting taking a year off work because you're tired of your job is an incredibly privileged (to the point of offensive) thing to say.
  • Valmar 5y ago
    It's not nearly so simple as being "tired" of your job. You obviously have zero idea what burnout is, or what it feels like to be in such a position. I'd argue that you obviously have the incredible privilege of never having experienced burnout.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • tnorthcutt 5y ago
    I also have a family and don't have the luxury of taking a year off of work. But I also think it's possible to recognize that someone else is in a different position with different life circumstances, and not be offended by them sharing their experience.
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    I don’t have children in part because I grew up with a single mom on tight finances. Having enough economic security and a decent childhood to willfully have children is also a privilege (I’m perhaps naively assuming abortion is legal.)
  • kevinh 5y ago
    So you're saying that having a family offers you a shortcut for avoiding the worst of burnout? Sounds like both parties have different kinds of privilege, if that's the case.
    • quantumBerry 5y ago
      It doesn't cause you to avoid it, just you realize suffering through it is better than getting divorced for lack of being able to support the family, and the ensuing child support judgement (for which there is debtor's prison if you can't keep up) that will be even more onerous to your finances than supporting a nuclear family.
• deleted 5y ago
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• bob229 5y ago
  Your first mistake was working more than a 9-5. Never ever do that
• stevenj 5y ago
  I think it's still a fairly new phenomenon where white collar work often consists of sitting in front of a computer monitor all day. Not for leisure, but for work (something you possibly don't want to be doing to begin with). For me, less screen time (for work, but also in general) and more time spent outside and/or in the presence of people I like has really made me a happier person.
• Invictus0 5y ago
  I'm curious about burnout from a neurological perspective. Does anyone have any ideas on what is really going on inside the brain during burnout?
  • Applejinx 5y ago
    I'll bet there's a hell of a lot of cortisol and stress reactions. I wonder if there's organic damage. The analogy that comes to mind is rhabdo (for crossfit folks).
• vikas-kumar 5y ago
  check
• ilamont 5y ago
  Tired of 7 hours of Zoom a day I'm amazed that anyone can take more than 3. I know some people including my own children and their teachers, were doing 4-5 hours per day, often back to back and day after day.
  • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    Is that even burnout? I think we're increasingly seeing the effects of months upon months of restrictions and lockdowns around the world. They tell us it's for our health but all around me I see people looking worse and seeming more stressed. Not everyone might deal with the restrictions as well as those who enjoy working from home. How much longer can they take it?
    • jimmyjazz14 5y ago
      Yeah, it kinda surprises me how many people seem okay with the current state of never seeing people you work with in person. I don't know if they are just different than me or they don't talk about it, but I really miss seeing my coworkers even if its only for brief periods.
      • swader999 5y ago
        I volunteer locally to talk to people and balance all the remote time at my day job.
      • noisy_boy 5y ago
        Pick any combination: - They are different than you - They don't talk about it (because saying you don't really care to see your co-workers is/was kinda taboo thing to say in office) - They work in a different environment with different kind of co-workers
  • icedchai 5y ago
    I can barely tolerate 3 a week. When I have 3 a day, I feel dead inside. I don't know how kids and teachers do it.
• ryandrake 5y ago
  > To vastly oversimplify, there are two kinds of people I’ve talked to about burnout - those who get it, and those who don’t. As someone who miraculously has never really experienced this level of burnout in his career, this is a great reminder to empathize and always keep in mind that you never know someone else's situation. That person you're having a Zoom call with to talk about Q4 priorities may be one stress trigger away from a total mental breakdown. A great reason to always be kind and thoughtful in your communications with your officemates, even if nothing appears outwardly wrong. Don't inadvertently be part of the problem.
• MarkLowenstein 5y ago
  And as hard as it’s going to be to hire talent, it’s going to be even harder to retain talent. This does not square with so many organizations falling all over themselves to issue vaccine mandates. I suspect it's not true.
• giantg2 5y ago
  '... but I am indeed experiencing the “exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy” that is its trademark.' Well damn, I'm surprised they didn't put my picture next to that definition.
• soheil 5y ago
  Just a word of caution. I think anyone after reading this could believe they're burned out. A test I like to do to see if something is the case or not is imagine the opposite, what would I feel like if I wasn't burned out? Would I magically be 10x more productive? Have I ever been that much more productive in my life? Would I not want to watch Netflix without an end? Would I not want to sit on the couch and read about SolarWinds for 8 hours? It's easy to walk away from articles like this being completely sure that you're burned out.
• ahallock 5y ago
  I remember being so driven and hungry in my early career as a programmer. I worked long hours by my own volition. Weekends and even holidays. This lasted from my first job out of college until my early 30s. I remember the end very distinctly. I was at the office, slouched in my chair, staring off. I had been through a lot of product failures, but this was different. We had just retired a product whose success came just as fast as its decline. Many people quit or were let go. A feeling came over me suddenly of giving up, completely. It was uncanny. I quit two months later and took a year off. Ever since then, burnout seems to come a lot quicker if I don't disconnect, and I don't think I ever recovered mentally. That was the peak, I guess.
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    I think that the drive of youth is very common. It's part of the main reason why so many companies prefer to hire the young: they can and will work insane hours and don't have enough experience to know what their time is really worth.
• davesque 5y ago
  This article hits hard. Especially the classification of confidants into the two categories of those who get it and those who don't. For example, don't mention that you're burned out to your parents if they're boomers. Chances are, they'll act as though it'll pass (also something the author mentions) or, worse, act as though you're just being lazy. That sort of reaction can actually make a person want to off themself.
• nickjj 5y ago
  To be honest normally I would comment without reading the article but I'm half way reading this and I feel like I have to ask this now before finishing it: What type of job expects you to be on Zoom meetings for 7 hours a day but still do what sounds like a 40 hour / week job in addition to that after hours?
  • OJFord 5y ago
    That stood out to me too - I think it's either a gross exaggeration to make a point ('way too much'), or they're trying to replicate office atmosphere (I don't mean to make that sound like a good idea...) by running it constantly.
    • axpy906 5y ago
      It’s either that or they have trouble saying “no” to meetings.
  • SamvitJ 5y ago
    Looking at their about page, they were a senior director of product management at a major company (GitHub/Microsoft). The number of meetings is not surprising for that role.
• ingvul 5y ago
  I do think I'm experiencing burn out, but I don't see myself quitting. It's weird. I feel fine when I have to: - refactor code - create some new application code from scratch - fix some business logic bug I feel anxiety (and I experience burn out symptoms) when I have to: - deal with any k8s issue - incorporate any third-party library like oauth2-proxy - run some migration in a big table I don't like "infrastructure" topics, but as a "senior" software engineer I don't have a choice. I love dealing only with application code (e.g., classes, interfaces, modules, business logic, tests, etc.)
  • swader999 5y ago
    Man this resonates with me.
  • nickjj 5y ago
    Do you feel like you don't like the infrastructure side of things because it's harder to debug problems while being under immense pressure since this usually happens when production is on fire? Developing code isn't easy but if it's code you've written, you at least always know the problem is with your code or maybe a library you're using. It feels like between Googling and looking at source code or examples there's always going to be an answer. Plus it's a private struggle because this usually only happens in uncommitted code on your dev box while you're working through developing the feature. With infrastructure issues, it's like you're fully exposed because your site might be down and non-technical people (business higher ups) are being directly affected, and if you're the person responsible for this it all comes back to you. Plus Kubernetes is Kubernetes. I'm not a veteran with it yet but on a local test cluster I still sometimes run into problems where I end up deleting the cluster and making a new one because after idling for 10 days everything stopped working. That strategy is simply not going to work in production. I'm hoping that's due to kind[0] bugging out and it won't happen on a cloud hosted provider. I'll be deploying a real production workload for a very non-trivial project in the near future. [0]: https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/ https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      Why would it not be an option? I am not an SRE but I do know that we are actually able to just throw away our k8s cluster and it will be recreated from scratch. In fact our dev environments work the same and I literally did this a couple if days ago because I had a similar problem to what you are describing. Throwing it away and letting it reinitialize from scratch fixed it. You don't _want_ to do that in prod for sure. But it's a great thing to have in your back pocket, if it's tested well (disclaimer: I have no idea if and when they last tried this for prod ;))
• caned 5y ago
  I'm torn between feeling that I too am dealing with some degree of burnout and thinking that I just simply haven't been taking care of myself. A series of sluggish days leads to a pileup of work, the pile seems to grow exponentially with no end in sight, and my workplace is rather dysfunctional and lacking of a clear vision. It feels like burnout, because even if I am productive and aspects of the work are interesting, it doesn't feel like progress is being made. Motivation goes down even when productivity is good. But I'm also staying up too late. I have poor sleep hygiene. I'm on screens until well after midnight, and a significant amount of that time is spent reading "news" - not consciously reading to stay abreast of what's happening in the world, but habitually clicking and clicking and clicking. I can't really blame my job for the need to work late, because I seem to take hours to really get on a roll in the morning, and the work demands necessarily shift into the late evening after the kids go to bed. It's a vicious cycle. I'm working, e-mailing and Slacking on weekends when I don't need to be, and I'm not maintaining clear boundaries at all. Personal relationships are suffering as well. So though I kind of relate to the burnout narrative, to really frame it as such seems like a cop-out for me. Working from home is a tremendous privilege, and doing so in a functional way requires a lot of discipline. Maybe the regular hours, commute and confines of cubicle or office walls make it a lot easier to maintain that discipline. Hearing all these anecdotes compels me to try and figure this out. Somehow I don't think taking time off will be the answer...
  • jb_s 5y ago
    I'm at the end result of your situation now. I wish I'd gotten out from under it so much sooner. The death spiral really kicks off when you start losing efficiency (as you've described) and as a result there's always more work on your plate than you have the capacity to do. There's a paradox: the usual solution if you have extra work is to just push through it with some extra effort; once it's done you could theoretically go back to the usual routine. But your current predicament is because you've been working extra hard for too long already. You just go backwards if you try it. I've spent weeks and weeks trying to "catch up" on my current project - and the previous two projects - working after my kid has gone to bed, working again first thing in the morning, working weekends - it only gets worse if you keep doing it and you wind up with worse results (I've just now blown past a deadline myself). Trust me. My mental and physical health is fucking shot, I've got skin rashes, putting on weight and I've been giving too much parenting work to my wife... I'm probably going to be mentally fucked for weeks now. The solution is to reduce the workload. Drop some of the spinning plates, tell your boss you can't do XYZ in the allotted time, or just straight up quit.
• OliverGilan 5y ago
  I graduated University in December, a semester early, with the intention of using that second semester off for traveling. Obviously, with COVID that didn’t happen so I instead decided to move my start date up at Big Tech Co. to February. Now 9 months in I feel like I’m burnt out as well. For me it’s a combination of health issues but also the response to COVID. When restrictions lifted at the start of summer and everyone I knew got vaccines I mentally prepared for the end of the storm. And for a few weeks it looked like that. The summer was fun and I got to be social again and feel like the world was going back normal. Then a trip was cancelled overseas because of the Delta variant. And now restrictions are being put back in place and it’s just not clear what’s going to happen. The idea that things may never go back to pre-covid times and that when people are confronted with the possibility of covid being here to stay many of them argue that the status quo is ideal really depresses me. I cannot live in this world where I cannot see people’s faces and work is just zoom meeting after zoom meeting. It’s not just the light at the end of the tunnel that I crave, it’s seeing the light at all that i crave. I crave knowing this will come to an end.
  • jimmyjazz14 5y ago
    I feel you on this 100 percent. Things will get better. The world will move on and people will eventually get back to doing normal human things. I know its depressing right now though, but hopefully it helps to know your not alone in your feelings on this.
• schrodinger 5y ago
  I can relate to all of these feelings, and yet I’ve got a huge feeling of guilt associated as well. I’m feeling so burned out. I have no motivation at work. I’m drinking more than I like. I often don’t feel like doing anything on my days off. I don’t have the energy to change my situation. And yet I’m getting great performance reviews at work. I work remotely, of course, and quit at 3pm most days. My burnout is almost the opposite of what’s common: I feel awful that I’m being rewarded and praised for what to me is very little effort. And I’ve got handcuffs. I just got a decent retention bonus as well as a new stock grant with a 1 year cliff for total comp that rivals FAANG but SO LITTLE EFFORT. I want so badly to quit. I want a few months to just reset and figure out what’s next. I’ve got the savings to. But I’m making so much money and have handcuffs until next summer that it’s insane too. So instead I continue a job that I don’t hate, but instead feel guilty in how little I accomplish, and no pride in what I do. And pin it all on a plan to quit next summer. I just hope I can make it until then. Anyone relate?
  • Applejinx 5y ago
    This isn't burnout, you can still think. (edit: see followup comments!) This is the equally valid problem of frustration, alienation, existential meaninglessness. You could end up snapping, but it wouldn't be 'burning out', it'd be freaking out. Which is just as bad: take care of yourself. It sounds like you're hitting bottom in some kind of distress. Burnout isn't the only bad thing that can happen to a person. It sounds like you need more meaning from what is a very sick situation.
    • schrodinger 5y ago
      I'm feeling like I didn't explain myself, if I'm getting downvotes and told "it's not burnout." I'm definitely not effective at work, and my accolades are based on the fact I've been here 4 years and have historically been very productive, and that I think most of management around me is also burned out, and not accurately evaluating my performance. Regardless, I am not getting a lot of work done, and am feeling a tremendous amount of guilt around it, and am feeling very depressed and burned out. The downvotes are really hurting me; is it really not possible to be completely burnt out yet have your company not realize it yet? Honestly I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop and one day have a tough conversation… and feel I've just earned enough goodwill to get the benefit of the doubt for a little too long.
• 9735194 5y ago
  I had that, turned out I had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder (Asperger’s syndrome) and ADHD as a comorbidity. It’s a miracle I managed 20 years in software engineering. Research on YouTube: Tony Atwood (Adult ASD) and Russell Barkley (ADHD). It should give you an insight into executive function issues that lead to depression / burnout. Looking back though, a lot of things now make sense.
• blitz_skull 5y ago
  I feel like I’m going to get downvoted into oblivion for this, but let me try to articulate myself in such a way as to avoid it. I’ve been burnt out. Pretty bad. Basically coasted at work for 3-4 months because I couldn’t even accomplish simple tasks. I finally pinpointed some stressors that were contributing and through time off, therapy, prayer, and a new job—found myself back in the saddle. I was much more cynical about burnout before I experienced it. And then I was like, “Oh damn. This is real.” However, I’m still really curious about the role of tech/software in this relatively new development in psychology. Because I worked manual labor for several years before getting into tech and while I definitely had times where I was mentally not tuned in, or physically exhausted it was nothing like the actual burnout I, and so many others have experienced before. It really makes me wonder what amount of burnout is simply running “the engine” (your brain?) too hot for too long? These are just my musings however. Not saying burnout doesn’t exist, but I do feel like it’s not universal at all. Just my anecdata.
  • swader999 5y ago
    I've burnt myself out mentally with manual labor jobs. Treeplanting at max effort in an eighty day season. Took a week before I could have conversations longer than a sentence. The mental burn out from office work felt very similar but lasted longer, perhaps because I'm just older.
• deleted 5y ago
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• hamburgerwah 5y ago
  I think there is a lot of potential crossover in many of the anecdotes described in comments that correlate with clinical depression.
  • JimTheMan 5y ago
    I completely agree. Sure it might be work stress that caused the depression, but I suspect the author and others here are calling it burnout as it is more socially acceptable and palatable for them to accept. And I mean this in the least judgemental way possible.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  When you go to a regional Burning Man event, or a very long and intense festival of some kind, with someone you know and care about, it's not uncommon for that relationship to unravel and break down by the end of the festival. At the beginning of 2021, I noticed that I wanted to break up with myself. I had become a shitty version of myself and I didn't want to keep seeing me. But I'm.... Me. What the hell went wrong? What changed? By working from home, most every moment might be focused on work, purely because... I now literally lived inside my workplace. The work laptop's always there. Slack is on the phone. The same places I might relax, I also now work at. My attire has meshed. And most of the time, if I wasn't specifically doing something non-worky, I was still in work mode. I thought a lot about work problems. And without humans in front of me to talk to, I took work stuff more personally. I also stopped going to the gym, my former "stress relief / therapy", because I did not find it safe. And when I did want to relax, usually it was with food; and, hey, might as well have a glass of wine to relax too. Maybe a movie. Whoops, was that three glasses? Is it time for bed already? The reasons for the Playa breakups and Pandemic Burnout are surprisingly similar. They both come down to a radical, intense change of routine for an extended period of time. You become a new person living a chaotic life. Surprise: not everyone adapts well to that! But another funny thing about both breakups: they tend to magnify the tiny annoying details of your life that you got by with before. Burning out can be a good thing if you can identify the parts of your life that just weren't working and change things for the better. But mostly you need to remember to forgive yourself and let go of what doesn't bring you joy. We have long lives, but there's no reward at the end of life for putting up with crap.
  • worik 5y ago
    I work from home. Six hours a day four days a week. It gets into my dreams sometimes but otherwise I am strict on the hours. Why does working from home mean working more, for so many?
    • ornornor 5y ago
      And also, no one needs to have their work slack and email on their personal phone. Why would you do that to yourself??
• smolder 5y ago
  This is pretty similar to my experience. I also left my last position in November. It was a combination of a doomed project, an unsympathetic replacement manager, the stress of isolation, and general anxiety about where my life was headed. I feel I've gone through some important and positive changes in terms of habits and attitude since leaving, and am ready to start something new. So far, though, no one has been willing to pick me over other candidates, despite supposedly high demand for my skills.
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  This, only it's not my job. My job is great.
• base3 5y ago
  Yes yes yes. Work does not love you back. Scale your love. Allocate it in appropriate increments. Sell your attention _dearly_. And remember you have a life outside of work.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  Going to be buried but I think I have been burned out for almost 3 years now. Started with working 80 / 90 hour weeks for 6? months. After that hours got better to maybe 50/60 hours a week for 18 months and then new job and back to 90 hour weeks for 4 months. First 2 years of that were in a terrible environment where everyone was stressed and feared being fired. I did not look for a new job because it was double the pay of my last job and I wanted to help set my family up and buy a house. I have trouble focusing on anything for longer than an hour. I have to work in heavy productivity periods of maybe 30 minutes, then I cant do anything for 2 hours. I get good reviews but the current job is pretty easy. I dont think I have really been happy in any aspect of my life for 2+ years. Which sucks, I don't even know what happy is right now, I just exist. Wish I could take a year off and just figure it out but financially not there. Very much burned out. Need to figure out a way to essentially strip everything away to 8 hours of work a day and then just relaxing and family.
• deleted 5y ago
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• FooHentai 5y ago
  >In retrospect, this might not have been a burnout. I'll venture to suggest that this was actually boreout. The symptoms are the same as burnout and it feels very similar while also being perplexing because you know the situation isn't high stress. If anything the opposite - You're not being challenged and are stuck in a purgatory of (what feels like) repetitious, pointless time wasting. I've experienced burnout, and more recently experienced boreout, and what the author describes sounds a lot like the latter.
• keiferski 5y ago
  I’m overwhelmed by choice, and simultaneously, tired of making choices, so the solution is just to… do nothing. One angle to burnout that I have thought about (but never seen others discuss) is what I'll call "personal narrative management." It goes like this: For most of human history, people had fairly straightforward narratives that they could rely upon when going through life. You were born into a certain community, had a certain societal role, lived your life, then went to [afterlife.] The list of potential options was pretty narrow, and the list of potential futures was likewise constrained within humanly-conceivable limits. In the modern era, however, this has mostly evaporated. Nation states are too large to have a single cohesive metaphysical narrative. Traditional religious structures are fracturing without much to replace them. The media continually creates and destroys potential pasts and futures, creating anxiety and never relieving it. This is easy to see if you read articles from a year or two ago; many take the form of "If X happens, Y will happen, and then [horrible thing] Z will happen." Yet X never happens, was likely never going to happen, and in fact was mostly just a narrative created to generate clicks for ad revenue. Yet we, the readers, have been thrown through a narrative loop. One approach to dealing with burnout could thus be "managing your personal narrative." Remove the choices that really don't make sense to you. Stop reading news stories that are opinion or projection based and just stick to descriptions of events. Make a career path that is based on stuff you enjoy doing and not on the predominant narrative is for a certain profession.
• ivan1783 5y ago
  My experience: we were working long hours (until 2am) trying to solve problems which were unsolvable. The end goal could not be reached. Second to that, engineering is a rather thankless job. You get nearly no feedback that your work is helping someone or helping to achieve something (as opposed to say, a doctor where the feedback to your work is very direct and tangible). What I found is that burnout isn't a particular event or a moment in time, its rather like a scale where on one side are all of the bad things in your life and on the other are all the good things. The mind can take a lot of stress, but if the scale tips too far toward the bad side the entire balance gets thrown off. It took me around two years to get out of it, but what helped was to become hyper aware of everything in my life and if it was a net positive or net negative event, commitment or activity. I tried my best to cut out all of the negative (not my job, however). I like my boss, my colleagues and I enjoy what I do. It was a temporary phase that tipped the scale in the wrong direction but we managed to regain balance in the end. Its been around 4 years since then, I'm still in the same job (with a slightly different perspective) and totally fine now. My takeaway from all of it: make sure to look at other areas of your life to find the source/solution to your burnout. For example: sport, eating well, sleeping well, taking time to clear your mind (meditation, walking, sport, whatever works for you), social activities, activities with your partner/spouse, family. This is of course anecdotal and worked for me, may not apply to everyone.
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  > So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc. This is me. Multiple times now. Each time I’ve joined a company, I’ve enjoyed getting to know the product and the tech. I’ve grown up to it, and then I get to a “but we could do better” point. I’m a high initiative/gullibile/naive person I think. And so then we “do better”. We go big(ish) and it’s awesome. I do so, because I can’t just do the 9-5 thing. I get into it. I want to put a ding in the small part of the universe that is that product. And 4 times now it’s been successful. And then I wear out. A big part of it is some combination of discovering the company and/or team mates just don’t get into it like I do. So I feel disenfranchised then (as do the few other peers that have collaborated in doing cool things). And so then I’ve been fortunate to find a new opportunity each time. As I keep track of what happens, the product runs for 5-10 more years being maintained by “don’t go the extra mile, don’t really get into it, do what the PM asks for, nothing more, nothing less” developers. And ultimately, the project/product caves. Layoffs and depressed salaries occur. Morale sucks. What was awesome and lively, like the stupid tree in that stupid giving tree book is just a sad stump surrounded by sad engineers. As I talk to these engineers, it’s never their fault. It’s always something external. They just don’t seem to realize that if you don’t keep the product thriving, it won’t keep supporting you. Frankly I’m at another nexus like this again right now, and really struggling with what to do next. I’ve been shackled with both a very nice salary AND about as strong a guarantee as one can have that I can stay here doing whatever until I retire in 15-20 years. Ageism terrifies me.
  • noisy_boy 5y ago
    > I’m a high initiative/gullibile/naive person I think. And so then we “do better”. We go big(ish) and it’s awesome. I do so, because I can’t just do the 9-5 thing. I get into it. I want to put a ding in the small part of the universe that is that product. And 4 times now it’s been successful. I guess I'm being somewhat presumptuous but seems like with that energy/attitude, you might consider running your own business. You get to choose like minded people, put all you have into it and reap the benefits (and of course, shoulder a lot more risk as well but like minded co-founders can help with that + you have already seen success 4 times).
• zz865 5y ago
  Why quit your job? I think I've burned out, I'm currently working like 1-2 hours a day after taking 3 weeks off, some days more some days less. This is the benefit of full time work over being a contractor/entrepreneur etc.
• brailsafe 5y ago
  Has anyone found a successful path to rebuilding after having to have taken huge gaps off, either after burning out and being fired, or deciding to take the time off to recover? I've burnt out, not realized I was burnt out early enough, and my productivity ground to zero, leading me to be fired before I locked in the decision to quit. As such, I've been out of work for over a year now (for the second or third time) and have ridiculous gaps on my resume as well as just being so behind in acing online technical tests, that I don't really see a path forward. I was recently turned down in the final technical stage for not linting my code during a HackerRank test, and after so much time investment and so many other failed interviews, it's like hiking up a muddy mountain in the rain. Answering the question "What are you most proud of from a previous project" is almost laughable.
• tt29219811 5y ago
  This hits home because I feel the same currently. My current work is not really challenging and I think I have a pretty easy life with a decent salary, but since a couple months ago I started feeling so tired. My work is uninteresting, I don’t feel fulfilled, I have no motivation. Worst is I stopped caring about everything. I don’t care if my performance is bad, I don’t care if progress is slow or my project suffers. I’m very detached, but I still think about work a lot. Even in my private life I don’t want to do anything anymore. I realized myself that I’ve been burning out a few weeks ago, but it was hard to accept because like I said, I don’t really have any crazy challenging things that eat me up. Do I “deserve” to burn out when I have an easy life and steady income during this pandemic. Even harder is to bring it up with others because what’s the goal here? Do I want people to feel for me? Do I want special treatment? Will this damage my career? Lots of stuff to think about.
• andrea_sdl 5y ago
  One of the most difficult thing about burnout is that it can be quite different for each person in the way it is expressed and it's hard to discern. I was (and probably am to some extent) burnt out. The hardest thing was caused by the fact that I asked for help. Help to reduce my workload, help to have some kind of support, whatever. What happened is that many if not all the people I knew always reacted with "Yeah, you'll be fine". And this is because of two major things 1. I always solve problems. People expect me to do the same so when I ask for help, they don't consider this a threat. 2. People don't want to face pain: I was the only one in a team noticing that one of our teammates was on the edge of burnout. We don't want to face the pain because it's hard, because we don't know how to fix pain easily and sometimes we also can't fix pain. In the end I decided to do something like Maya. Tell my story. I documented myself for the burnout part, asked a friend that's expert on psycology and wrote a piece to help people understand how complex this topic is. (here it is in italian, for those who care: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vogliamo-parlare-di-burnout-o-preferiamo-fare-finta-nulla-grassi/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vogliamo-parlare-di-burnout-o...) Result? Many people reached out and shared how much critical was this problem. We need to fix it and learn both how to see this in ourselves and in others, and how we can help them (and to me the fist key element is being able to face other people's pain and suffer with no fear)
• yohannesk 5y ago
  What is a good definition of burn out? Or why are you burned out and not depressed? Or have anxiety?
• gilbetron 5y ago
  A big factor for burnout, at least for me, is the never ending treadmill that is Agile. There are zillions of different things people call Agile, but the core of nearly all of them is the never ending series of Sprints (side note: I hate that the industry has settled on two week sprints, they make them so unbearable, 1 month is the best sprint, imo). I like a lot of the thing Agile thinking has brought to the toolbox, and before Agile there was a lot of horror and suffering, but what I do miss from that primordial time was when you finished a project you could stop and think and breath for a while. For a few days, even several weeks. Just stop and tinker and think about what you had just done, and what you want to do. When you actually train for running and other athletic activities, and you actually sprint, there is a recovery period where you let your body regain and recover from the effort. It improves performance and it improves your training. We either need a recovery period built into Agile, or, my preference, get rid of Sprints. Actually, keep sprints around but turn them into a more fitting analogy. Infrequent periods where you focus and work harder on something. "Ok, it feels like we don't have traction on project X, let's do a two week sprint where we push aside all other concerns, cancel all meetings, and just focus on the project." Right now it feels like I haven't had time to stop and think for 18+ months, it doesn't help to have my family sitting in the house with me full time. No quiet periods, no reflecting periods of recovery.
  • balefrost 5y ago
    This is exactly the source of my frustration as well. I'm naturally inclined towards iterative development, frequent steering, and interacting with the people that will actually use the stuff that I'm building. I believe in those aspects of the agile mindset. What has worn me down over the past few years is the constant refrain that we are "behind" and "don't have time" for a lot of things that appear to me to be essential. We've been in a mode where we don't really have time to explore options. And once we've made a decision, we rarely revisit it even as information changes. I don't think this has anything to do with agile per se. One could argue that it's Scrum's fault, but even then I don't think you can lay the blame directly there. The point of sprints is to create frequent steering points. As new information comes up, let's make sure that we're still pursuing the correct course. But sprints can easily be misunderstood to be frequent deadlines that must be hit. There's some value there, but I think that misses the mark somewhat. I think a lot of it stems from a conflict of personality styles. From what I've seen, some people like the treadmill - it gives them direction, purpose, and energy. But for somebody like me, that treadmill is more of a grindstone.
• ppeetteerr 5y ago
  From a manager's perspective, I see this a lot, people who overcommit to their work, thinking that they are responsible for everything. I appreciate their efforts but that's never expected (and anyone who does is abusing you). What I expect are sustainable and realistic expectations. Losing someone because they couldn't sustain 80+ hour work weeks is about as useful as someone who works 20 hour weeks.