I could be wrong, but rcklmbr and I probably hit burnout at the same time at the same company. Some of the lies I told myself/was told: Lie 1. The technology d

I could be wrong, but rcklmbr and I probably hit burnout at the same time at the same company. Some of the lies I told myself/was told: Lie 1. The technology doesn't matter. All languages sucks and are turing complete anyways. Who cares if it's in perl or enterprise java? Does my happiness really depend on writing python? Lie 2. The technology does matter. If I'm working on a Social-Mobile-Location startup using python with free reign over technology I'll be in developer bliss right? Wait, maybe if it's all go and protocol buffers I'll be giddy with joy. Frankly the difference between new and old technology is usually the choosing between decades old tech and decades old tech. (Oh, you're using epoll/select/kqueue? The 1980's called, they want their tech back) (Javascript? The 1990's called, it's for you) Heaven forbid you go talk to startup folks with your 90's programming language called Java. Lie 3. (From PHB) "while long term overtime doesn't scale, it's a great tool to boost productivity in the short term during crunch time, after all a startup is defined as a way to cram 10 years of life experience into one" So here's what I believe to be the truth, for me, so far. 1. Burn out takes longer than you'd ever imagine to recover from. After a certain point you just don't care if the fire alarm is going off and the building's burning down because it's always burning down. Once you leave that situation/job, it's hard to shake that mentality. 2. New technologies, platforms, and protocols are fun. Learning is fun. I don't mind writing my own libraries because it helps scratch that itch of always wanting to know how things work just one level deeper. 3. People matter exponentially more than anything else. It's not just working with smart people. I've worked with lots of smart people with the emotional IQ of a poorly trained Rottweiler. The best engineers I've ever worked with are usually people who've made the decision that engineering is not the most important thing in their life. They've also discovered Lie #2 and so are a little bit less dogmatic. "Oh you want to send binary encoded messages over UDP to collect statistics, I remember when we did that with ASN1. Here's a nickel kid, go get yourself a real protocol".