I deleted my Twitter account because of this. I realized it was an empty echo chamber of inaction. If anything you say can be interpreted in a way that the hivemind can destroy you over, they will do it, even with incomplete information and little to no proof.
I've determined that the key for me is to limit the inputs. My inputs now are a few cultivated social sites (this one, one or two tech sites), books, and podcasts.
In my opinion, feeding my mind properly has lessened my feelings of burnout. If you have the choice to feed your brain digital junk food, don't be too alarmed when it starts taking of too much space, like fat.
The number of conversations I've had to have with friends and family about, let's say, the "Russian hacking of the election" or "the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" or "the bulk collection NOT mass surveillance by US intelligence" is greater than even the amount of time I've had to spend speaking to each of them.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I think Kenneth is one of the people who should be a bit more ignorant and arrogant. [1]
[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/a-cocktail-for-putting-dents-in-t...
There is a very real cost to this choice (especially depending on your lifestyle). For me as a huge introvert I could tolerate the cost of not having Facebook.
For Twitter I'm feeling the professional cost of not having an online identity or an outlet or following to once in a while be able to announce or promote something.
So I've been considering joining Twitter again after many many years.
Does anyone want to comment on that?
I have noticed all the time I'm hearing about people talking about deleting Facebook and Twitter and blah blah but I never ever see someone in real life who actually sticks to that.
I feel like I'm the only fool who has gone through and stuck with it and has paid the price.
I've found this to be true on Reddit, increasingly true on HN (if you look at my comment history you will see people trolling me and accusing me of being a foreign shill), and writ large in American politics.
Psychologically, people are anxious, they have little time, and they have a lot of information to filter.
They have an idea that because you are anonymous you very well may be a US information agent from the Fort Bragg propaganda center or a a propaganda agent from another country. They think that you may be from a different political party or from a group of people that you think are culturally a threat to their type of existence (cis white male, LBGTQ or urban, rural).
And so when they filter, they filter out the imagined adversary and anything that increased their level of anxiety. If they don't filter, they often attack it.
The rest of the posted article is excellent. Going to re-read it from time to time to see if I'm falling into the ruts described there.
Of course, if you're trying to build an audience/brand then being anonymous might not be an option, but I've discovered I'd rather avoid such things and just work on my own stuff.
More like "It happens to everyone."
I know this is a developer-focused site, but this isn't a problem unique to people in software.
An old joke, "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar."
Personally, I've never heard of or met anyone who loves their job and has burned out.
Have you?
This guy inspires me to always find a way to love what I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6He0FWoFj0
Wish everyone was as happy as Tim.
I think we could all be a little happier, if we just tried. I'm not saying curing depression or burnout is as trivial as just trying to... But, you can certainly choose to be a notch happier than you are at this moment. Just one notch today, and try for another notch tomorrow. We can start by appreciating what we have.
I think it can happen in any job where: it's possible to care about the quality of your output, quality tends to be proportional to effort, and it's easy for your output to be discarded or ignored...
But somehow it is different in software development?
Often engineers (being human) will want to do a good job, give 110% on an important project, and when its over and their pay and work hours are exactly the same, they get angry with themselves for giving 110% instead of the bare minimum. They have this "I just wasted a month of my life because I'm a fool" feeling that completely zaps their motivation to do anything.
Getting enough or too little sleep is also huge so if you're reading this, make sure you get your (average of) 8 hours tonight. Think of it as a small way to unsure you live long enough to enjoy retirement.
Some burnout is basically your mind slowly coming to associate some (class of) activity with negative feelings eventually building up to the point where it basically becomes an emotional net negative to the degree you can't push yourself to work on it anymore and you (have to) disengage.
Then there's the kind of burnout where you've been marinating your nervous system with extreme amounts of stress hormones for extended periods of time (months or more likely years on end) and when your performance starts to degrade due to this, as it inevitably will, you keep pushing yourself to maintain your expected standard of productivity up to the point where your body is basically trashed and your productivity suddenly drops precipitously to virtually non-existent levels which generally takes years to recover from.
The former is mostly psychological; the latter starts psychologically but most definitely crosses into the territory of the physical.
As an aside; the book The Upside of Stress [1] is a really good book on dividing 'good stress' which basically trains up your body and 'bad stress' which bathes you in damaging hormones. Many burnouts happen when someone with a high workload unwittingly switches from good to bad stress.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23281639-the-upside-of-s...
It's why scientists burn out regularly. 9/10 experiments fail - and that's for a highly skilled scientist.
When PhD students or postdocs burn out, it's because of underpaid boredom, lack of communication about their research or job uncertainties, and a generally ungrateful and passionless environment.
I've never seen scientists burn out over failed experiments. They know upfront that (basic) research is hard and that 90% of their stuff is not working.
I'm through some kind of burn-out experience and I realize it's really important to make myself feel good and that that is just fine. When I'm overworked I explain that I have limited time and stop working. When colleagues flood me with issues and problems I eventually stop talking to them if that's the only way.
Since programming is mental and not physical....yes?
Weightlifting is cheap, has proven physical and psychological benefits, and is eventually fun (sucks for the first few weeks/months though). I just recently starting taking lessons to get a private pilot's license. GA is expensive (relatively - anyone on here who isn't a student can afford it) but it's no more dangerous than riding a motorcycle and is a fairly rare skill. And it has the added benefit of being pretty mentally taxing as I am still very new to it.
LOL come on now.
It costs $5-10k to get a private pilot's license which requires at least 40 hours of flying time. Most schools will recommend that you do at least 2 hours per week, which usually comes out to $200-$400. (It's easy to forget things.)
Shit's expensive.
I know you mean well but this is the epitome of living in a bubble. :)
There's too many successful stories around that sometimes can cause depression more than stories about failures. It's a bit hard to explain properly in single HN comment. I'll try to blog about it during the weekend. If You're interested - follow me on twitter (@lukaszkups), cheers!
It's like all the suicides in springtime: that's the time when the people and the nature are full of energy and joy and life and everything. And you are not, so the contrast is extremely painful and hopeless.
I was struck how most of the most interesting people I was following pretty much don't tweet any more.
Not sure if that speaks to how they became interesting, how much Twitter squandered what was once a special community, or both.
A lot of people read the same things, should we all burn out?
The second, like the author, was when I was gung-ho into a new technology and went at personal projects endlessly for a solid 12 months before I came up for air and took a breather, with similar but more superficial effects than the first burnout.
I regret these mistakes, and I've learned the hard way to do work in moderation. However, I am not an entrepreneur for these very reasons, and I simply don't want that lifestyle for the long-term. I'm hoping my health will thank me 30 years from now.
I was excited to start working properly after school, regardless of what I worked on, it would be something that mattered enough that I'd be paid for it instead of paying myself. I started interviewing mostly after graduation and while it was stressful (must find a job soon to pay bills, and start paying student loans) I landed one after not too long. I was fortunate that my start date wasn't until a month after acceptance so I was able to chill for that whole month and really unwind after the stress of years of school. Looking back I was telling people during interviews that I was basically available to start "immediately" (because I wanted more money immediately) but I really should have pushed for at least a few weeks lead time before starting in all cases instead of lucking into it.
I recently came back from a 2 week vacation of just chilling, it's lifted a lot of work stress that has been accumulating. But some times I've entertained myself with calculations about how long I could go financially if I quit tomorrow. I even did that at the start more for fun than stress relief, since suddenly every two weeks you're getting a paycheck that covers 3-6 months of expenses if you keep your college lifestyle. It doesn't take long to save up for a year of goofing off and then a couple months of runway to find a job after that.
Sorry for the crude metaphor. :)
One option is to find an enclave that is not a fast-paced startup.
Do you know how many big dumb companies out there are starving for actual talent? A lot! If you don't mind working with mediocre people and moving slowly, you can find a job in 'not hot' industries where the pace is not so fast. You might feel a little numb though :)
Isn't that exactly what hobbies and fun side projects are for though?
I experienced terrible burnout around a year ago that I'm still working to get over.
I had taken a pay cut to join a startup with the promise (contractually) that I receive a raise to market value + bonus after 12 months. The latter 6 of those months were spent working 16 hour days ramping up to a massive launch. There were multiple times were I was in the office for 40 hours straight. Throughout this entire period I was locked in and producing top quality code.
A few months after launch I approached my boss about the contractual raise + bonus. After blowing me off for a few weeks I had a meeting with the president and CEO where I was told that I would not be receiving either because I was not coming into the office by 10 AM. Not only that, but they told me they didn't appreciate the amount of work I put in, nor the fact that I had barely seen my family and friends in that the period because "no one asked you to do that." Mind you, our CTO had quit with 4 months to go until launch so I had taken some of his responsibilities, and I was the sole developer on Android, and one of two for the backend. All the while the feature requests kept pouring in.
Within a week I was bedridden, and I stayed that way for the next 3 months. I've been slowly recovering since then, but I'm not sure I'll ever be the same again.
I know I could've sued for the money, but it was the lack of even a basic appreciation that did me in.
Some people have told me that I have no one to blame but myself. I sort of agree with them, however, I know that if I would've gotten my raise and bonus I would've been fine.
Ultimately, if people want to renege, they will renege. Unless you have a ton of money and energy to throw at lawsuits, it's better to structure your deals in a way that clips your potential downside (e.g. work on a retainer basis, don't accept stocks in lieu of cash etc).
a) reduce the scope
b) fail to meet the deadline
c) compromise the quality by frantically hacking things together over long nights and weekends.
Always go for option a), if you can't extend or get rid of the deadline.
This is, of course, why it pays what it does: Software for software's sake pays about like math for math's sake, with the same people paying.
But unfortunately it seems that despite the deep integration with other facets of work and life, most professional developers seem to basically write code 80-100% of their time (including associated activities like meetings etc.). Far fewer developers are also domain experts (or at least domain enthusiasts) and spend, say, 30-50% of their time coding and the remainder working within the domain or on integration.
I wonder if this separation between the coders and the domains contributes to burnout. Maybe it's more economically efficient (specialization and all that) and we all like our abstractions. But having a lack of meaningful contexts to switch to, i.e. eating ice cream for every meal for lack of broccoli, can't be great. Directly gaining the benefit of the software should also help with perspective, motivation and an appreciation of the work invested.
But maybe it's too hard to find people who can fill what are effectively 2(+) roles in given field? In what areas other than science/engineering do people actually do this?
When I burned hard out at my last job, I resigned and decided to take some time off. Writing code felt disgusting. I had a timeline when I was going to get back in to work and the hope was that I'd be good.
Welp, the one month I gave myself turned in to two, and that turned into three and I still felt just like garbage. I normally work as hard as anyone and yet the inertia to write even the simplest code was insane.
My cat got sick and was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and the vet trips and treatment obliterated my savings. Within _two_ days of this starting I found the mental blocks removed. This is fortunate because I was starting to get pretty scared I'd end up homeless and starve to death.
Necessity caused by crisis seems to have cured my burnout. I've paid the rent on GARBAGE upwork jobs, most of them have paid minimum wage or worse while looking for full time work. All my clients have given me 5 stars and, while it's not fun, rewarding work, it's necessary and I can do it. I can say with 100% honesty that I physically could not have done it back in September when I was flush with cash and still reeling from my last work experience.
These people sound like they are bomb technicians not software developers...
> "I'd rather do anything else than this right now" — even though writing software is one of your favorite activities in the world.
So? Does this mean you have burnt out? How does this compare to jobs like algorithmic trading or mission critical software?
Burning out over stress of writing a web site? I call BS on all these burn out blog posts.
You have other problems in your life that make you depress, coding might be little part of it but I don't see what levels of stress can you be under while doing mostly non interesting jobs.
Do you have a robust mental model of the day to day experiences of these people who you are calling bullshit on? If not, I would be careful with your words. It can come off as fairly snide, ignorant, and callous.
For me, it's the opposite. Since I first played Super Mario on the NES and wrote my first line of C a decade ago, I've wanted to have a career with computers. But that means I never get to switch off. If I'm not working on something cool at work (and no, I'm not in a dead end job... In fact love my job and team), then I'm at home trying to code something awesome (Was just setting up a DCGAN when I saw this post).
I have no financial worries and should technically be living the good life, but I always feel that if one day all computers in the world shut down abruptly, I have absolutely nothing to do... for work OR for fun. And when I got close to burning out a year ago, the hardest thing was to find something to do.
The route back involved calling people I hadn't spoken to in years, Reading (and smelling) a dozen books, Quizzing and quite a bit of travel. It was hard at first, but since getting back, has provided a much clearer view of life!
So please, plug off for a bit. Don't wait till you start hating yourself/your life. Life is about so much more. :)
Considering how hugely popular requests is I imagine my message was just one of so many he answered on day to day basis and he did all this without really needing to do any of it.
I guess I understand how he and other people in similar situations get tired of it all after a while. For whatever its worth requests is an amazing project and has made my life easier in my personal and professional hacking.
The "publish-only mode" is a great, pragmatic solution to this problem. We need some sort of revision to the Tao of the IETF: "Be conservative in what you send. If you have time and energy, be liberal in what you accept."
This actually changed it for me. I still feel fear that I'm broken permanently.
So, yes, another anecdote. Everyone just needs to really take care by managing themselfes. Working fixed hours only instead of trying to get features by the end of the day / week has done did it for me.
My summer internship was a much needed break but even now it's hard to go back to work.
I expected something more like maintaining a big ball of mud or dealing with unrealistic expectations or struggling against the inertia of a large company.
You are also someones child, maybe a father or mother and only one step away from being a pianist, boardgamer, hiker, traveller or whatever.
Identity diversification.
