(Totally agree with the advice who have money and relationships though. But none of us start there.)
That said, having balance is usually a good idea. If you have interests indepedent of your work, you will be able to lean on those interests when work isn't going well. This may not seem important now, but some day you may find yourself tired and lonely working late at night without seeing the fruits of those labors and suddenly your stuck with nothing else going on in your life.
I mean, sometimes we give young people advice and they are super eager to do everything right and use all the lessons the older people learned. I figure, there may be value in learning that particular lesson on one's own and on one's own time.
The recent Tesla news are a good warning bell against never learning it, though. As was in a different way the recession.
I smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. I mean sure I also went through similar unbalanced years as you and I learned from them, but if I could go back and change something I would instill some more wisdom in myself earlier. I don't live regretting that time of my life, but if I had the chance I'd certainly do it differently.
That's why I think we should at least try to warn our younger friends that all that eagerness to 'make it there' might actually hurt them in the process. Consistency is key and will take you far, because you'll keep on delivering.
Your boss most surely won't remember of your "weekend hero/superstar" phase when you're having a one or two month downtime period because your head isn't right, and your body isn't working okay from all those jolts you've given yourself from your caffeine micro-poisonings. He'll ask "are you gonna keep me those deadlines?" :-)
So yeah, we should leave the young people be young but the more information, the better.
In my personal experience, the way to prevent burnout for me is to have other hobbies, to stay physically healthy (especially to get enough sleep, but exercise and diet are super important too), to take plenty of holiday time, and to work on passion projects that are meaningful to you. Working on stuff to make someone else rich isn’t meaningful to me (especially when you see people getting burned by employers again and again — it’s rare that companies will return the favour)
Also, go easy on the coffee. Caffeine is a bad substitute for sleep.
My overall productivity was extremely bursty then–herculean efforts followed by barely anything at all. Now, years later, I'm much more defensive of my time, it's far easier to maintain a consistent flow of good work, and I no longer wake up in the middle of the night having had a bad dream about my code crashing.
I know that taking a vacation is important too, but it's hard to take enough time off when you only get 10 days' a year. And I have a crap immune system so I end up using half of that to cover for when I run out of sick days every winter. (At my last job they started "hemorrhaging" developers because a local startup put out a standing offer to higher people for 20% less pay, but 20 days starting vacation. So many people took them up on it that our branch office dwindled from 12 to 2-3 people and retention of new hires went to the basement as well. The impression we got from management was they'd let the company burn to the ground before making "more vacation" a negotiable, probably because they had a vesting scheme and existing senior employees had worked there 10+ years to earn comparable amounts.) At my now-job I have the option to work 9 hour days and get a day off every other week, which helps make my "real" vacation hours stretch longer but the downside is that 9 hour days are not easy, either.
Working all-nighters to the point your health starts to suffer is not being young. It's exploitation the likes of which the chapters on the industrial revolution warn us about.
More importantly, we as a society should actively discourage this sort of abuse. It makes no sense to let our health waste away just because a manager wants to boast about a target or a deadline.
> "coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week"
which makes no sense. Of course if one ever codes outside of the day job one should code for their own project, but that's not what the OP was suggesting.
Also, not sure if Counter Strike should be regarded as bad as alcohol, though indeed both might become addictive if careful.
