Ask HN: Can I ask about burnout?

I recently read the BuronOut wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_burnout because I was having some thoughts about it myself. Burnout is a real problem in the software industry. With the exception of 2 months hiking leave (about five years ago), I never stopped working since after University (actually also during). I found that multiple short intensive vacations (long weekends 4-5 days), in times of stress, eases the tension a lot. It also depends how much support do you get at work (from you peers/manager, can you openly talk about it)? And how much support do you get at home from your immediate family. A few things to remember - once you got a new job it is ok to negotiate the start date. Buy yourself enough time to recover, knowing that you are going back to work, but not now. Depending on your negotiation skills, if you can't get the salary you wanted, try to trade it with vacation days (so you can take more long weekends). Some burnouts could take a few months to recover from. Take your time.... Looking back at your career 10 years from now, these few months are very short, and who knows - you might get more offers during that time... going to meetups, messaging friends for better job offers, asking them about the stress levels in the place they work.

I think the trick isn't so much in the down time (or the length of it)...it's in what you do with any free time.

Burnout is generally a result of getting stuck doing lots of stuff you don't want to the majority of your time...and generally very little of what you do want to be doing...

So in my experience you only get over burnout by focusing and rediscovering what you were truly passionate about in the first place (or at the very least what you are insanely passionate about now).

Then, once you can figure out what excites you, start getting small wins in that direction however you can...and before you know it, you'll be full of energy and near impossible to stop again.

I've been burned out in the past and I'm going to to with what might sound like a cop out answer: It really varies. I think it depends on:

- Your personality - What you did with your off time - What kind of job situation you're going back to

I do think the last point is probably the most relevant. Are you going back to the same situation as you were before? Then you're probably not going to feel like a month is a long enough time. To be honest there might not be a long enough time. You might need to find a new job. Especially with having run at burnout levels for a year or more. It was probably longer then you think.

I've had burnout twice in my career. Once I negotiated getting laid off, took the summer off (went to the beach a lot) and then started a much more low-key job after about 4 months of just relaxing and recharging.

More recently I was starting to burnout. I thankfully said something to my boss during my review and we had work taken off my plate. I'm lucky enough to have a great boss that understood that and was willing to do it. It's definitely helped curtail any sense of burnout.

"I didn't give myself a break after final university year"

Ok...

Stop drinking, exercise, and have an activity out side of work (that isn't drinking or eating).

That outside activity is important. Take some classes, join a club/meetup group, go to church, find a hobby sport.

The trick to not burning out is to have other outlets, where you do things you enjoy. Your going to realize when work is getting "bad" because you skipping out on the outside activity (don't do this), or your looking forward to it so much your not working.

When this happens you know to "slow down" and plan some more personal time to balance things out take a weekend out of town, a vacation, change jobs etc.

Recovering from burnout for me (I've been hit twice - once when I got out of school, once more recently from a truly terrible work environment) takes about half a year of avoiding programming, but I have other issues (anxiety, depression) that come with the burnout. It's easy to tell now that it's happened twice - there's this pretty deep unwillingness to code coupled with a kind of fog that comes with reasoning about your programs that makes your work inferior to your 100%.

If your job is nasty like mine was, I know it's hard to start moving on but you have to switch. The longer you let yourself be burned out, the longer it takes to get back to 100%. I've made a certain set of choices that let me pursue a graduate degree and I feel much better, but you have to be on the lookout for abusive situations. For me, it's about 3 to 6 months of laying off of work. But really, extricating yourself from whatever situation is bothering you is what you want to do.

Avoiding burnout is pretty simple - be in an environment you like, surrounded by people whose company you enjoy, spending your spare time doing healthy things (exercise, going out, meditating, whatever works for you) that aren't related to work. Avoid indulging too much in vices like drinking, smoking, and drugs. Take breaks when you work, stand up, stretch, walk about. Sitting down for too long makes you stiff and feel stagnant. Take your vacation days when you feel worn out. Do what you can to make sure you're healthy and happy. If your employer feels threatened by you taking care of yourself, you find a new job.

Basically, work is a function of your competence, willingness, and emotional state. You do your best when all three of those are at max.

I have finished God's temple. I am waiting for God to kill people.

I'm sooooo sorry for you. Here's a story and some advice.

My grandfather was born in a small village in Poland. He's younger brother died in infancy. His older brother was blown up to pieces during the war. My grandfather worked as a foreman in a steel mill. He also kept bees and animals. And he built his own house.

To this day, I have the shovel he used to dig the foundations himself. The handle got impregnated with his sweat and body oils. It looks as if someone put varnish on it.

Personally, I've been working since being legally able to (16) and only stopped for 1 year of Uni, then found a company I wanted to work with and made anything I was able to to get hired. I haven't had a break longer than 1 week since that day.

Burnout is only in your mind. Burnout means you never pushed yourself hard enough and that you never really wanted anything in your life hard enough.

My advice for you is: stop being sorry for yourself, take a cold shower, drink a coffee and get on with your life. You only get one, achieve something - you can behave burnt out when you're old.

When I first got out of college in the mid-90s I was under a lot pressure from my family to find a job and get to work. Within a month I landed a great job working for a government contractor. I loved every minute of the job and the people I worked with, but after 3 years I wanted more. I also knew my skills were worth a lot more than they were paying me.

At this time the first "bubble" was beginning to grow rapidly and I was lucky enough to end up as one of the first employees at an application service provider (ASP), or what could be considered a precursor to the SaaS market today. It was a great job and the pace was fast as with any startup. We worked long hours and saw our work actually come to life as we built out global datacenters and brought on large customers. After 2 years though I wanted something different and more.

I wasn't burned out, but at this point my career acceleration had become my drug. I was always wanting more and was out to surpass my previous position. I didn't mind the long hours and would burn the candle from both ends while occasionally lighting a match in the middle as well. I got a job at Microsoft as a technical account manager for premier support.

I truly liked the job, but it was not the pace I had grown accustomed to over the past 7 years. It was in to work between 8 or 9 and home by 5:30 every day. On some days there would be a customer crisis that would wind into the night or a support issue that needed escalating, but it wasn't the same. It was then I started to lose interest. I don't think my body adjusted properly from going non-stop to a skidding halt.

This loss of interest caused me to burn out on technology. I thought at the time I had reached the pinnacle of career moves. I was working at Microsoft when the bubble burst and the startup scene dried up almost overnight. I grew to dislike the job, and even more the environment, within Microsoft. Yet at the same time, I didn't see other jobs as a stepping stone, I only saw them as falling backwards. I decided to quit and give it all up almost overnight.

I packed up, moved to Florida. I took a couple months off and thought I would get back into IT. I applied to a couple positions in Florida, but was in for the second big shock. Salaries in Florida were not even comparable to what I was making in the D.C. area. We were talking $20-30K differences. Granted the cost of living was much cheaper, but at the time I didn't want to look at it that way. I turned down great jobs because I was too stubborn to look at the big picture when it came to salary. Looking back though, I also think I was still burned out from IT work and was using salary as an excuse to get back in.

At this point I jumped ship. I went into a completely unrelated field (funeral industry), yet one that was non-stop 24x7 excitement for lack of a better word. I was instantly back to working long hours and loving every minute of it. Working a non-IT related job though made me miss technology. I started doing consulting on the side to fill the void and keep my feet wet. Yet I continued to work for almost 7 years at the new job. The longest I had stayed at any job up to this point.

I am back in IT to some degree now, but have learned a lot along the way. I learned that there is no real answer to how long it takes to "recover" from being burned out or how to recover. Every person is different, but one thing is definite, you can't force yourself back in when you are not ready. I also learned that every time I have those feelings of needing more or wanting more, I stop everything that second. It may be at completely random times. I will go for a long walk, listen to music, and appreciate life in general. I also got random jobs completely unrelated to IT. These jobs allowed me to see other people, learn new things, and completely detach from my IT self. But they also made me realize what I liked and disliked about working in IT. I now use that mental list to adjust my work/life balance so I can control my...

I overworked for seven years. I took an entire year off. Time alone wasn't enough. I kept a lot of the same bad habits, I just wasn't working. What I failed to do was make conscious, positive actions to de-stress and fix my lifestyle (which led to the overwork) during that time.

I hit my burnout point about 10 years into work. I had flunked out of college, so I was about 30. I was in banking, doing risk analysis. I had a manager who would give us arbitrary, ridiculously short deadlines, then expect us to work all hours to meet them. I was listening to suicide-y music. The breaking point was when I got my bonus; it was less than half of what I had been promised.

When I hit that burnout point, I took 2 weeks off and went to a remote place with no internet. I drank heavily the first couple of days (I think of it as a mental-reset). And then I started analyzing what made me burn out. I realized that for me it was a combination of two things: Time, and Talent. I was spending too much time at work, and I was working with supremely untalented people. I also realized that I had a good amount of experience under my belt, and that I was fairly desirable as an employee.

Armed with that knowledge I went back to work, and started saying "no". I also started interviewing (I'm not stupid).

> No, I'm not staying late tonight. No, I'm not staying late tomorrow night. I've got arrangements. What am I doing? That's personal.

I wasn't anti-social. When the team did things I hung out with them and was friendly. I just didn't work late.

> No, I'm not going to work with him on that project. In the past he has worked against me, even though I was the lead. I don't feel like the project can be a success if he's involved, and I don't want to be on a doomed project.

If any of my "no"s had been met with threats of being fired, I would have quit on the spot. I made it clear to my manager that I enjoyed what I was doing, but I had a handful of open offers at a higher rate. My manager backed down for a bit. We started a new project, it was done later than his demand, but before my estimate. And it was the most stable project we'd built. After that I never felt like he was judging me again.

Eventually I did move on, and at every job since then it's been about setting expectations on day one. I do not work evenings or weekends (unless it's something I'm genuinely excited about). I do not run errands for other people. I do not fix other people's bugs or document their code just because they think they're too important to (of course I work with other people's code, I'm just not their bug bitch).

It's been 9 years and I haven't felt burnout-y since. It didn't fix everything overnight, but actually enjoying my primary job helped the burnout feelings fade. I still get angry and frustrated, but they're usually short-term things that I can eventually work around or fix.

I burned out pretty good 6 years ago, I was able to work around two to three hours a day, it took me two years to get to six hours days and I have tried to keep it at that ever since.

I told my complete founder story on the rogue podcast recently http://www.roguestartups.com/rs023-perseverance-with-anders-...