17 ms·

This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself

by fleb 4y ago

This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself sorted out, but this could be pretty destructive because if I waited too long, the change I'd need wouldn't really be conducive to staying on whatever project I was on. The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine. Back when I'd get myself into burnout periods the most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else, and instead came out of that with a whole new outlook on how and why to write code. Then around 5 years later I started writing code on the side, for myself, to gradually improve over the long term, and this can be absolutely therapeutic. Try to switch things around a little bit, do something new, see if that helps?

sinenomine 4y ago
Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?
- ttoinou 4y ago
  Any example of a smart KPI ?
  - groffee 4y ago
    "Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely" Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/smart-goal/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...
    - lobocinza 4y ago
      It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.
      - sinenomine 4y ago
        In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping. Virtue signaling should be banned.
  - disembiggen 4y ago
    it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is: Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    Some examples of directly measurable KPIs: 1. Mood diary 2. Time spent on social media, negative 3. Hours of sleep 4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt 5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/ https://openpsychometrics.org/ 6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02208/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220... 7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence 8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biological-age/ https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi... You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once. SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.
    - adriand 4y ago
      I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction. My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe. I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.
      - sinenomine 4y ago
        I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space. Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice. > If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. And that's a big if.
  - jordanbeiber 4y ago
    Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen. This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways. Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it. I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto": https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chaos-engineering-for-teams/ https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress. If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout. If not, it might be depression or something else. In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.
- lobocinza 4y ago
  Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  >In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects. On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth. It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.
rightbyte 4y ago
Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.
- giantg2 4y ago
  I'd like to see it that way for my own situation. But I have no alternatives for making decent money. It's not wise to be a slacker without a contingency plan. I'm just dumb.
- jseban 4y ago
  Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you. I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. It's really rigged for shorter careers.
  - trevormcneal 4y ago
    the whole tech thing is changing fast, ageism is a true thing, in a scenario where most of the previous knowledge can be ignored, being a senior with 5 years of experience, 10 or 20 doesn't change much. Given that young people usually simp for the companies much more due to being naive, they have a huge preference in the hiring process. Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.
    - helge9210 4y ago
      Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half. This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate. Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.
foobazzy 4y ago
> most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?
- solatic 4y ago
  Not OP, but in my early thirties finishing an MBA now. Here's how I sum it up. Pure CS is about determining what's theoretically possible, then software engineering is "applied CS", about taking what's theoretically possible and making it in the real world, which includes a mature understanding of costs (both upfront to build v1 and long-term maintenance). Thus an MBA is "applied software engineering." It's not sufficient to understand the costs of the engineering we build, because it doesn't matter if it costs $2,000 or $2,000,000 if we don't have the money for it. We also need to understand how to make it actually self-sufficient, by ensuring that it brings in enough revenue to cover the costs. $2,000,000 in costs, let alone $2,000 in costs, may be too much for a college student to afford out of pocket, but if you can show that you can earn it back and more, then you will find investors - be they angel or VC investors for a new venture, or your company's Finance division for a new project in a Fortune 500 company. Ultimately the skills you get are about convincing people to fund what you want to build, for different definitions of "fund", whether it's literally cash, or persuading people to invest blood-sweat-tears equity by joining you, or just getting work to allow you to put time into it. Instead of working on what others want you to work on, you will learn to persuade The Powers That Be that your work should be funded. The main caveat: working on the MBA may change your mind about what's worth working on.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  What do you want to do after your MBA?
  - emmes 4y ago
incomingpain 4y ago
>The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine. I wonder if the VW ID Buzz California Camper van will be great for this. Take it for a drive to wherever. Go fishing, whatever. No need to rent a hotel or anything like that. Just hit the road and enjoy.
flemhans 4y ago
I'm doing these mini vacations so often now that they feel routine. What's next? :P
- fleb 4y ago
  Buy an old house and start renovating?

by fleb 4y ago

sinenomine 4y ago

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

ttoinou 4y ago
Any example of a smart KPI ?
- groffee 4y ago
  "Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely" Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/smart-goal/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...
  - lobocinza 4y ago
    It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping. Virtue signaling should be banned.
- disembiggen 4y ago
  it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is: Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month
- sinenomine 4y ago
  Some examples of directly measurable KPIs: 1. Mood diary 2. Time spent on social media, negative 3. Hours of sleep 4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt 5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/ https://openpsychometrics.org/ 6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02208/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220... 7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence 8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biological-age/ https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi... You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once. SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.
  - adriand 4y ago
    I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction. My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe. I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space. Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice. > If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. And that's a big if.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen. This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways. Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it. I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto": https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chaos-engineering-for-teams/ https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...
dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress. If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout. If not, it might be depression or something else. In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.
lobocinza 4y ago
Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).
Dudeman112 4y ago
>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?
- sinenomine 4y ago
  I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects. On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth. It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.

rightbyte 4y ago

Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.

giantg2 4y ago
I'd like to see it that way for my own situation. But I have no alternatives for making decent money. It's not wise to be a slacker without a contingency plan. I'm just dumb.
jseban 4y ago
Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you. I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. It's really rigged for shorter careers.
- trevormcneal 4y ago
  the whole tech thing is changing fast, ageism is a true thing, in a scenario where most of the previous knowledge can be ignored, being a senior with 5 years of experience, 10 or 20 doesn't change much. Given that young people usually simp for the companies much more due to being naive, they have a huge preference in the hiring process. Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.
  - helge9210 4y ago
    Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half. This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate. Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.

foobazzy 4y ago

> most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?

solatic 4y ago
Not OP, but in my early thirties finishing an MBA now. Here's how I sum it up. Pure CS is about determining what's theoretically possible, then software engineering is "applied CS", about taking what's theoretically possible and making it in the real world, which includes a mature understanding of costs (both upfront to build v1 and long-term maintenance). Thus an MBA is "applied software engineering." It's not sufficient to understand the costs of the engineering we build, because it doesn't matter if it costs $2,000 or $2,000,000 if we don't have the money for it. We also need to understand how to make it actually self-sufficient, by ensuring that it brings in enough revenue to cover the costs. $2,000,000 in costs, let alone $2,000 in costs, may be too much for a college student to afford out of pocket, but if you can show that you can earn it back and more, then you will find investors - be they angel or VC investors for a new venture, or your company's Finance division for a new project in a Fortune 500 company. Ultimately the skills you get are about convincing people to fund what you want to build, for different definitions of "fund", whether it's literally cash, or persuading people to invest blood-sweat-tears equity by joining you, or just getting work to allow you to put time into it. Instead of working on what others want you to work on, you will learn to persuade The Powers That Be that your work should be funded. The main caveat: working on the MBA may change your mind about what's worth working on.
dehrmann 4y ago
What do you want to do after your MBA?
- emmes 4y ago

incomingpain 4y ago

>The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine. I wonder if the VW ID Buzz California Camper van will be great for this. Take it for a drive to wherever. Go fishing, whatever. No need to rent a hotel or anything like that. Just hit the road and enjoy.

flemhans 4y ago

I'm doing these mini vacations so often now that they feel routine. What's next? :P

fleb 4y ago
Buy an old house and start renovating?