Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care
I am depressed and burned out for quite some time already, unfortunately my brain still couldn't recover from it.
If I summarize the impact of burnout to my brain:
- Before: I could learn things pretty quickly, come up with solutions to the problems, even be able to see common patterns and see bigger underlying problems
- After: can't learn, can't work, can't remember, can't see solutions for trivial problems (e.g. if your shirt is wet, you can change it, but I stare at it thinking when it is going to get dried up)
Take care of your mental health
342 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadAI was supposed to allow us to work less, not more.
I'd be okay if science moved 50% slower than it does now. I'm okay with AGI happening in 3 years instead of 2. Or 5. Or 10. I just want time to take care of myself, spend time watching sunsets with my girlfriend, create some art, and learn about what's going on elsewhere in the world instead of die early.
The biggest problem with many startups I think is workaholic, narcissist founders who don't know how to treat humans like humans. It's generally less procedural and internal competition bullshit than big tech, but more immature management trying to bite more than they can chew or expecting employees who have a 0.1%-0.5% stake in the company to behave like founders with a 40% stake in the company. Not going to happen.
They should not expect this same level of dedication from employees. No one is ever going to care as much as the founder. Just like a teacher or baby sitter is never going to care as much about a kid as the parents (assuming good parents here).
Personally I’m just curious to see what happens when everyone just gives up. People already feel working hard no longer leads to a better life. (https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/2020-edelman-tr...) Will the management class learn?
For me, it's not just a feeling; objectively, it doesn't.
I tried working hard. As a PhD student, as a founder. I had my 1st cardiac arrest the week after my graduation and my 3rd cardiac arrest during the height of startup stress. After that all I can say is that I'd rather have a life than my life lost. Fuck working hard. Work smart, work healthy, get a reasonable amount of shit done, but take care of yourself, your family, and your friends and enjoy everything the Earth has to offer before you die.
We are never going to be allowed to work less in this current state of capitalism. No new invention will be allowed to help you more than it helps people richer than you. They have more power than you do.
Imagine the DVR being invented today. A device that lets you skip ads. It wouldn't happen.
I got burnt out 3-4 years ago and am only now feeling like I’m coming back to normal. Maybe if I took a more intentional path to recovery I’d be back earlier, but it’s not like the kind of thing where you can take a couple weeks PTO and expect it to clear up
Burnout isn’t always about overwork. There are several different typologies and mine was more related to a lack of control/pointlessness that led to a very extreme form of ennui. The end result was the same with depression, anhedonia, and cynicism.
Admitting you're burned out is the fist step on the path back. It can take years to get back to normal and have passion again. But it will return if you take care of yourself and avoid the kind of things that send you spiraling into stress.
When your identity is “person who does this job”, it’s hard to see that you’re doing the job too much.
And even if you do have that realization, it opens up a new struggle to figure out what you’re supposed to do if you’re not doing the job.
One thing I realized recently is "don't put yourself in a bad state just because you have EXPECTATIONS for future", because if the future is not what you expect, you'll find yourself regretting every bit of your action, and to keep this expected future alive, you'll push yourself too hard.
I really wish you the best.
You have an identity that says you're good at something, responsible, motivated, etc. that identity is the one that talks in meetings, promises to do stuff, signs up for things, etc. This is the part that would push back on the idea of being burned out as well, because it identifies with not being that way. Part of your brain is dedicated to projecting this identity out into the world.
Meanwhile you have another part of your brain which is your actual executive function, which responds to your needs and makes you want to do things. It will try to do what the first identity says, to a point, but if it starts wear down, be bored, be frustrated, etc, it will start to fail.
What's supposed to happen is that your first identity, or rather your whole coherent self with all of its parts, recognizes that something is not working and does something: takes a break, quits, stops working so hard, changes something, adjusts the identity to be healthier, whatever.
What happens instead is that those small failures are ignored and start accumulate into a larger and larger debt, of being behind, not getting what you need, and draining yourself of executive function to keep up with it. Eventually this becomes untenable and your brain just starts to shut down.
The way out is somehow reconciling the two. I expect that it looks like: first, realizing that you're drained and properly recuperating, then second, realizing that you're not getting what you need to stay driven and doing something about it. Just recuperating on its own isn't enough.
I’ve obviously heard of burnout and experienced it before, yet somehow I failed to recognize what was happening until then.
So thank you for posting this. Hopefully it’ll help someone out there realize they’re burned out and start addressing it.
In my hardest semester at college, I wound up spending a somewhat unreasonable amount of time in nature. I would walk 3-5 miles a day and up to 20 miles on the weekend. I had a wetlands preserve across the street (well, highway) from my apartment, and a great state park about 10 minutes away. My workouts got more intense as I was more stressed as well.
It all seemed to balance out and I've been trying to get back to that sort of balance of activities since I graduated.
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/ecotherapy
> The Cornell study found that after a month of reduced stress, these effects disappeared.
I do not believe I will ever be able to experience “a month of reduced stress” until the day I die. But maybe that’s just the burnout talking.
Read your sentence again, so you can see how ridiculous it is. What do you have to do that is so incredibly important that you have to throw away your entire life for it?
Or you are using your family as an excuse for your self destructive patterns.
You blaming me for the capitalist hellscape I happen to have been born into is hilariously absurd. I have some very not nice things I’d like to say to you, but I’ll just leave it at that.
You could ask your boss for a month off as a first step, if that's what you want.
At which point I guess at least you will not be able to do whatever stressed you any more.
But then also there's no (complete) coming back from burnout, even after years of reduced stress :
https://web.archive.org/web/20230607211423/https://www.econo...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234937
I’ve always been an eloquent speaker in meetings but recently it seems like I can’t respond at all, I have these thoughts and then when I go to speak nothing comes out. I’ve began to doubt my skills and abilities even though I’ve been a senior dev for almost 20 years.
The past several weeks I get in front of my screen at work and just stare, sometimes for hours… it’s as if I have waking sleep paralysis or something.
Everything feels fake, like I’m observing myself from the outside and the person I’m seeing is someone else.
That is out there. But it is rare.
These are all good things to have done, but the secret hope of everyone once they walk into the doctor's office is to get told "take this drug and you'll be back to feeling like you're 24 and just graduated college".
You really have to insist, in the US anyway, that there is really something wrong. I was told for ~6 years "idk you're depressed bro", when in fact there were material physiological things that could have been addressed right away.
The fear of this attitude, which is all too common, is what keeps me away from doctors.
I had a doctor several years ago who was amazing. She actually focused on lifestyle and would even host classes for her patients at night. Best doctor I ever had. Sadly I moved away, and I don’t know how to find another doctor like that. She was like a unicorn.
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxy4qdJ_dSU4Thv0MpGzqxJ8OYPfSvPW3...
Sleep deprivation disrupts memory https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01732-y (3 months ago, 103 Comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681345 )
Its probably not the same as chronic burnout or depression but in a way staying awake after a stressful day could be self medication.
There is a moment, when I've been up all night and am engaging with the world, that I feel a lack of anxiety and a mental clarity. It's like I've finally "sobered up." I think it's my body telling me "we need to sleep, none of this shit matters."
Sleep deprivation is very bad for you, though, so try something else instead.
But you and others should keep on mind that "burnout" is not a very precise or actionable word and thinking of your current challenges as being products of burnout doesn't give you much traction on what you can do about not feeling well or what external circumstances might help you recover.
Reading between the lines, and trying to be more precise, it sounds like you may have pushed yourself too hard for too long while neglecting essential self-care pracfices.
* You probably weren't resting very well (sleep; low-stimulation idle time).
* You probably weren't eating very well (fresh, nutritious food) and may not have even been preparing food for yourself (cooking).
* You may not have been physically tending to your self (being active, cleaning, dressing) and your space (cleaning, decorating).
* You may not have been keeping up with your relationships (friends, family) and your community (hobby groups, church/etc, light acquaintances).
For most people (and animals) -- when you don't do those things for long enough, it eventually just catches up with you. You're wired to do those things almost every day and the wires short out and things get funky when you ignore them for weeks or months or years as many fall into the habit of doing.
"Burnout" often suggests that the malaise is a product of what you were doing instead when that often isn't even relevant. Presumably, if you're here, the thing you were doing was something you were passionate about (impressing someone, acheiving something) and probably isn't suited for villification anyway.
Rather than just casting everything that feels wrong into the big vague lot of "burnout", try to take a minute to figure out what you were specifically neglecting and then try to get your hands dirty doing those neglected things (even if it's clumsy or slow or whatever in your fog and fatigue).
This has an incredible "freeing" effect on the mind and "soul". You dont need to be a HIT or cross fit fanatic. just get out and active reguarly. This will also help with sleep and eating better.
Get into regular tiring excersize. It will help with so much.
I had it there, then revised as "being active" as I think a lot of people get distracted and discouraged by the the contrived, abstract thing that is modern "exercise". I personally enjoy exercise as a hobby, but doing some productive labor, commuting or running errands by foot/bicycle, engaging with active kids, etc, can all hit the same mark in terms of ongoing wellness.
Front-enders get surface body modifications. Ink and piercings.
True engineers know that the worthwhile body modifications are a resting heart rate sub 45, or being able to bench double their body weight.
Once you're in a slump you'll probably start neglecting things, but that's getting the causation the wrong way around.
By the way, this isn't a "when the going gets tough" sort-of post, I'm just stating the reality of life.
At this point, quitting seems like the only option. However, I’m in what should be the best earning years of my life, and it seems like any new job would mean a pay cut. I don’t want to cut my legs out from under myself… especially when a new job is an unknown, it could be even worse. I also have this idea in my head that I would be able to be mentally strong enough to find happiness in any situation, and if I run away from something bad, rather than being pulled toward something better, than I won’t grow as a person.
Okay. Let me stop you right there. If that is something that happened once, I could believe you ran across someone who wasn't very emotionally balanced at the time. Twice could be a coincidence. Three times or more means you work in one of the most toxic workplaces I have ever heard of.
I want to be a crystal clear as I can on this point, so I'm going to raise my voice a bit to be heard: THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
> I don’t want to cut my legs out from under myself… especially when a new job is an unknown, it could be even worse.
Yes, a new job is an unknown. But that's life, change is a constant and you have to embrace and embody that in order to truly thrive.
Based on the fact that very few companies are staffed entirely of psychopaths, outside of fintech anyway, let me ask you this: do you really think throwing a dart at a random list of companies is likely to hit one that's materially worse?
Either way, if you're not happy where you're at, wouldn't it make sense to throw the dart anyway, just to see where it hits?
> and it seems like any new job would mean a pay cut.
1. You are already halfway to the mental ward if you think a little extra money is worth all your sanity.
2. You are probably wrong anyway. If one company is willing to pay you X dollars for your skills and experience, others will too. In fact, and I speak from recent experience here, many are willing to pay a great deal more.
> I also have this idea in my head that I would be able to be mentally strong enough to find happiness in any situation, and if I run away from something bad, rather than being pulled toward something better, than I won’t grow as a person.
No offense, but that is extremely backwards thinking. Would you continue to live with a physically abusive partner until a better mate showed up on your doorstep? No? Why would you continue to live with an emotionally abusive one?
It sounds like you are waiting to be rescued from this situation by something or someone. Let me assure you: no one is coming to save you. You are the one in charge of your physical and mental well being. That isn't to say you shouldn't ask for help, but you need to be the one to stand up to whatever fears are holding you back and say, enough with this bullshit, enough working for fuckwits, I deserve respectful coworkers, competent managers, and rewarding work.
You may not find complete happiness, but you don't have to stand for constant misery.
Funny you say that. We seem to use various fintech companies as our feeder for senior management positions, who then bring in all their people. I usually try to wait them out, as they typically only last a few years. The idea being that it can't get worse, so the next person will be better, but they just keep getting worse somehow. We just got a new guy recently, so the impacts from that remain to be seen.
> do you really think throwing a dart at a random list of companies is likely to hit one that's materially worse?
When I look at job postings online, without relocating, it seems I'd likely take a 25-50% pay cut. I also have some golden handcuffs on me, so I'd have to forfeit a bunch of stock. While money isn't everything, and I keep my cost of living pretty low, it is a concern when I think about retirement.
I've shared some of my frustrations with my dad, who spent his whole career in corporate IT and worked at several different places. I don't know that I brought up the crying, but I've told him quite a bit. His general replies are that he can relate, and will often point to Dilbert to show that it's the same everywhere... if it wasn't, that comic wouldn't have been popular. I've also seen people leave and beg to come back. These things together make me think the grass isn't always greener.
On the flip side, I've also seen a lot of people leave who end up with a permanent smile on their face after leaving. Several have also lost significant amounts of weight, as they stop needing various coping mechanisms or find healthier outlets.
I suppose this means the fear of regret is stronger than the hope that something new will be better.
My old boss seems to have a standing offer if I want to go work for him. However, a former co-worker did, and he texted me about a month ago saying how bad it was. And the boss is saying he makes less than me now, so the pay cut comes up again. While he liked me and gave me a lot of autonomy, he also lied to me for several years, manipulating me to sell my house and move several states away from home. When I was finally fed up and decided to move back near family/friends in my home state, he tried to keep the lie going. I called him on it, and found out it was all BS. So I'm not excited to jump into that again.
> No offense, but that is extremely backwards thinking. Would you continue to live with a physically abusive partner until a better mate showed up on your doorstep? No? Why would you continue to live with an emotionally abusive one?
I think what screws with me is that I will occasionally see someone who seems happy in spite of it all. It's rare sight, but there are a couple. I wonder what their secret is and how I can get to that place, where I can be happy in spite of my circumstances. Maybe it's all an act.
> I deserve respectful coworkers, competent managers, and rewarding work.
My coworkers, the ones I've been working with for 10-15 years, I like. I feel some loyalty to them. Maybe I shouldn't, but we've been in the trenches together for a long time. They've had my back and I've had theirs.
When it comes to management competence and rewarding work, that's currently at an all time low. I used to take on a lot of these shortcomings myself, to fill the gaps in leadership, but with 4 re-orgs leading to 4 new bosses, in 4 years... I'm sick of starting over and sick of doing other people's job, so I stopped. So far it's not gone well and everything is worse as a result, which has me questioning if I should go back to working 60-80 hour weeks to try and get the house in order as I've done in the past, but these people don't deserve that. I don't deserve that. And if I do all that work, they're just going to re-org in 6 months, so it will all be for nothing.
I once told my old boss I thought about quitting every day for 15 years. Though the reasons why changed over t...
Man, given this story, I think you have way more options. Like burning the place down, Milton-with-the-red-stapler style.
Jokes aside, GTFO that place, bro. Leave a harsh glassdoor review for the cathartic release (even if it won't get posted). The grass is definitely greener somewhere else even if it might be a gamble to find it.
Just note down everything you don't like about your current shithead employer and ask yourself, "what questions can I ask in an interview that will reveal these shithead employer tendencies?" Then go interview and remember that you are interviewing THEM. Don't worry about actually getting the job, interviews are a coin flip anyhow, just worry about how much shithead signal you're getting from them. If you end up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, just update your list of shithead employer questions and do it again. Life is way, way too short to deal with shitheads. Love yourself more than that.
I realised my burnout came from working (5 days a week), feels like an unending marathon
What worked for me was dropping one full day of work each week. Now work 32 hours a week, really happy
I’ve worked at places that did both. Check your health plan. Most decent ones have mental health coverage.
Don’t let coverage stop you from getting help. From experience, there comes a point when staying just won’t be an option. Your body will make the decision for you.
I started a sabbatical right before all of the layoffs started. It was a little spooky at first but it was also the best decision I’ve ever made.
Also worth looking into taking medical leave. Easier if you’ve been speaking with a therapist and/or doctor who can help justify the leave. I almost did this but didn’t want any pressure to return.
I also have a more general question to everyone on this thread, what is the difference between burnout and demotivation? How can one tell the difference?
I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work. I stopped taking on more work once I got my stuff done. I would do exactly what a Sprint called for. Nothing more, nothing less. If I finished early with my tasks, I would stretch out the time and just tell the scrum master I was close, but not done yet, but always finished on time. I basically just did what was required of me. I wasn't out to impress anybody, I just became "Mr. Dependable" on any of the teams I worked on.
This was the approach that changed everything.
Now, some ten years later? I'm never too high or too low. I still do the same thing, I still just do what is asked of me and that's it. 5pm every night? Laptop gets turned off. Friday at 6pm? Laptop is off for the entire weekend. I turn it back on right before my meetings on Monday. Separating my personal life from my work life with a hard delimiter was paramount.
I found out that if you don't protect your sanity and your own well being, people will take advantage of you and your time and it will never end. Once you break the cycle and get that time back for yourself? You'll make sure you never willingly give it to someone else ever again.
Protect yourself. Protect your sanity. Once you lose it, like OP said, it's very, very hard to get back.
I hope this helps someone else struggling to break this cycle.
It was a revelation for me when I realized I could tell people “no, I’m swamped right now” and they’d be “ok, no problem”
I'm a self taught dev with 2 young kids. I've always had a healthy approach to work, but now I'm feeling quite a lot of pressure to learn new things on my own time, whether to make sure I'm prepared for the interview circuit if I get laid off, or to patch my skills that are needed at work.
I'm starting to feel burnout creep in, getting an hour of study in the morning, taking care of family, and then working 8 hours.
I appreciate your insight.
I have never had a leetcode-style interview in 40 years. (I may have had one such question, maybe - hard to remember for sure.) So, no, it is not required at all stages.
Disclaimer: I'm in embedded systems, which is very different from FAANG.
Some of the folks here don't see alternative options when FAANG compensation is some integer multiple of what the rest of the industry has been supporting for the last 40+ years, and I don't entirely blame them for that. I'm not surprised when some later find themselves miserable and feel like they're trapped by golden handcuffs and insufferable bureaucracy, but I understand how they got there.
Caveat: I don't live in the Bay Area, though the Boston area isn't exactly cheap.
To my pleasant surprise, the HFT is more rewarding (not just in comp) than the FAANG was. At least for now, or that's what I keep telling myself.
It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? It's basically the top 1% speaking. And you can't tell me that the other 99% have miserable lives.
> unless your partner is also in tech and is ok with not being a stay at home parent.
Stay at home parent is a choice, and a pretty expensive one. One does not have to choose that and can still live a comfortable life. Many women (and let's face it, we're unlikely discussing the man staying at home for the next 7-15 years, eh?) even prefer not to interrupt and/or basically end their careers because of parenthood.
Americans often look to Europe, claiming that these things are so much easier there, which might be true, but at least as much is it a matter of personal choice as well.
Yes, to some extent the asinine expenses of people like me are a result of various choices we made, but that's assuming those choices had any really realistic alternative at the time. And now I'm stuck.
The interview is about finding the obvious resume frauds and seeing if they can communicate their problem solving process, not finding a genius that’ll invent new algorithms
But some of the internal postions do it differently. My favorite was a mock code review on a PR that had intentional flaws. Then you'd call put what was wrong and how to fix it - not just pure code but also requirements, tests, commit messages, etc.
LeetCode is different though. The rating and stuff. Even the interface... I still don't know what it's doing behind the scenes to run the code and feed inputs and what those inputs are. Believe it or not, this LeetCode interview wasn't my worst internal code screen. I once had one that HR said to bring my laptop and use any language I wanted. When I got there, the manager handed me a Mac (which I've never used), told me to use Angular to create a page with a table (hadn't used Angular at that point), and told me to do it in Webstorm (most teams were still using Eclipse at that time, so no experience here either). I managed to Google my way to a working table, but cut the interview short when he wanted me to style it. It's and internal posting. I clearly know the basics and got something working, even in the worst possible interview scenario where I didn't know the tools at all. Surely I can learn the rest (this was a midlevel posting, not even senior).
On the opposite side, I usually skip teams for their repo so I can review them. Are there test cases built out? Do they have east to follow code design, or descriptive comments? Do they have a normal level of abstraction, or are there multiple layers of interfaces for not real reason? I recently declined a position because the team was building a UI, didn't have a CMS, didn't have any real rests, and the code looked like a bit of a mess. It didn't help that the languages (Go, React) were completely new to me, so I wouldn't be able to make an impact on improving these issues.
I also have a hunch I've gotten easier coding questions when an existing team member referred me to hiring for their own team.
Your brain only has so many truly 'on' hours in a day, and it's already less than 8. Trying to burn even more in the pursuit of complex knowledge isn't just robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's eating the seed corn and wondering why your harvest failed.
It's a scary thing to realize, and can be hard to stick with. But limits are real, and respecting them gets more work done in the long run than not.
This is so important. I have a 3yo and wife, I currently work for a series-A startup - It's incredibly easy to do things out of hours, answer messages, train, lab things up, etc... But at the end of the day that is a part of my career.
So except for when I'm traveling for work, I don't do a GD thing past 5pm, unless i choose to. When I choose to, it's likely because a lot of my team is in IST time zone rather than EST.
When you're a family person, your job is to be there for yourself first, your family second, your other commitments after that.
I have a weekly 4:30p friday call. Would i rather have that at 1:30p? Yes. But i've chosen to work remotely in Ohio instead of move to Cali like the last four companies have asked. So I take that friday 4:30p call.
But you better believe that i check out until monday after that.
During the week I'll take odd hour calls for my counter-parts in IST, but that's nearly entirely out of courtesy than necessity.
Take care of things in the following order: 1. You, as a human, holistically 2. Your family, spouse first, kids second 3. Your work 4. Everything else
It's reduced a huge portion of stress from my life by doing this.
The hedonic treadmill exists in all countries, stepping off it is a personal priority and discipline regardless of where you live.
There’s a few other expenses and some cons of living here but some research and YouTube videos will help you figure out if it’s right for you. And of course you can ask me :)
However, on the point of last names, I feel the urge to point out that I personally know several, very devout and traditional, catholic couples who kept their last names in wedlock.
On a slightly different note: Hammurabi's name means literally "his uncle is a healer" (related to Arabic عم (ʕamm) meaning paternal uncle, and the latter part to rabbi).
I my mind there's a mildly funny* movie where Hammurabi, the person who created/codified the foundations of our law, someone remembered for 1000s of years... was an insecure overachiever. "You conquered the Elamites? And Larsa? Oh, that's cute my boy. Now get a real job like your uncle who is a doctor!"
* (for me, my bar is low)
Cultures share history but the whole point is that they’re not continuous. You specified the pre-Christian era, and there have been many significant changes since then which any common definition of the term would consider discrete boundaries.
> Also, I've never ever heard anyone say that wives need to take names of their husbands, because the Bible says so. Is that an American thing?
It’s not specific to the US but there are certainly American churches which have strong opinions on this point. One thing to remember is that these things aren’t just the literal text of the scriptures in whatever version of the Bible they use but also the collection of interpretation and custom around it, and people have a history of interpreting scriptural text differently based on a position which they want to support.
Now is the fact women take over the majority of the childcare and are more likely to take off to raise their children misogyny? Depends on your definition and perspective.
Yes, given that:
- In conservative circles, there is a strong expectation that a woman's chief job is to be a mom,
- Many businesses are lead by conservatives, and
- Many states (at present) are run by conservatives and enact policy to make this so (anti-abortion laws being the biggest example)
Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Many of us developers justify our sky-high compensation packages in today's remote-first working culture by the "value" that we provide relative to the profit margins produced by our work.
If this is true, then this should apply equally apply to working moms since them being moms doesn't take away from the value they bring to the table. Moms don't stop being great programmers once they bring children into this world!
However, if we're going to use _availability_ as a compensation-affecting performance metric, then dads should also be paid less since, in an ideal world, they are just as involved in parenting as moms are.
Given that being paid less due to being a parent is de facto illegal in the US, then I think that any argument for suppressing women's wages is either uninformed or in bad faith.
(As an aside, we don't and won't have kids, but I am a huge advocate for equal-length parental leave; nobody is at their best when they're working on two hours of sleep because the baby's always crying through the night.)
> Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Whether a women wants to enter motherhood is irrelevant to her compensation. But how much time, effort, and experience she brings to the job is relevant to her compensation. And despite there being plenty of mothers who bring more of those things to their job than their childless counter parts, most people cannot bring as much time and energy to bare on work as they could if they were childless given how we currently divide up childcare. If you're on partner track at a lawyer, you're expected to bill 2000 hrs a year which means working 3000. It's very hard to continue to work 3000 hrs a year while raising a kid and the lack of billable hours will effect bonuses and promotions. How could it not?
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
Then the social security cut gets distributed regardless of preference to who raised the kids who now pay the taxes.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons, offload almost all the cost on moms then socialize the taxed gains.
My experiences were similar, however I must add when your day job is not related to skill building activities, you may find your "on" time to be greater.
Still, be careful.
In my case, my day job was manufacturing and I was an effective prototype mechanic. Loved the work, hated the pay, so...
I used a percentage of my free time learning more computer related things.
When the time was right, I was ready to take the jump.
Landed nicely, and have no regrets.
Now, later in life I find the dynamics above are in play and we all ignore them at our peril.
My family wouldn't understand that, so I play hookie.
Twice a year, I schedule a vacation day that I don't tell my family about. I act as if I'm going to work like normal, but I spend the day at the art museum or sitting in the park reading, or something else that doesn't involve anyone else.
My big thing is being able to protect my sense of autonomy, even when I'm responsible for things or obligated toward others. If I literally can't take a day away from my phone or without telling people where I am, I've found myself in a risky space emotionally. So I'll occasionally leave the phone at home, or go hiking from sun up to after nightfall alone with the phone off, only maybe telling someone (including my spouse). People need their own space.
In addition to my previous comment, burnout seems to happen when you're working a lot on something you don't really control the outcome or reward of, along with the presence of some force that gradually erodes your sense of autonomy. If you feel like someone else is the arbiter of not just most of your energy, but all of it, over a long enough period of time, you'll grow to resent yourself, those people, and the work.
It’s a frustrating position to be in, and you can feel quite helpless.
In my experience, it’s less about “do only what’s asked”, and rather “say no”.
I.e. explain “I can do X, but if I do that then Y will suffer, and Y is a priority”. (Y being another company priority, or even your own mental health). Stated in these terms, it’s easier to negotiate your time with your coworkers.
I did this but I was surrounded by coworkers who were stupidly running straight into burnout themselves and said yes to anything.
Well, upper management felt I wasn’t doing enough in comparison and pressured/harassed me. Ultimately, I were the first to burn out.
Of course, in hindsight, I should have left way before it happened, but when you are in, you have no hindsight. Sometimes you can’t grab the surrounding toxicity before being hurt.
But, I did all that and more in my 20s as IC and 30s as a leader. I helped 3 startups go up and now 2 of them are unicorns (That was pure luck but doesn't change my view).
My point is, there is a time for everything. I've hired a couple of JRs at my startup nowadays, and I tell them: what you lack of experience, I want you to cover by will.
Guys at 20s want to eat the world. The energy and motivation is amazing. Those are the years to run and hustle like a demon. However, I would never do that in a big Corp environment (like Goog, IBM, MS, etc) because you will only be abused by middle manager.
But as 1st, 2nd or 3rd engineer in a startup. I'll do it all again.
And your sanity is only yours to keep, protect it at all cost.
I transitioned to software development in the age of ~30 and am based in Austria, Europe. The way I did is was to work on a project in my free time, and use that to a) LEARN, b) demonstrate that I can aquire skills myself and c) can stay motivated and push through. I wanted to show that I'm worth being given a chance. It worked flawlessly, I got hired on the first try.
Just try it, what's the worst that can happen? :)
I've got the feeling good software engineers are a bit more rare here, though, and Whiteboard interviews are not a common thing either.
That sounds like a good philosophy for work-life balance. I sometimes work evenings or weekends, but it might be a bit different since I don’t work at a company but at a university, so my work hours are a bit flexible. I have had burnout before, especially during Covid home office.
A big improvement for me was:
- Regardless what’s going on, have at least one day per week when I don’t work at all (usually Saturday) and never pull all-nighters (no work after midnight);
- Stop syncing work email to any mobile devices, and close the mail app on my laptop outside standard working hours. (This does wonders for destressing.)
- Track the amount of time you “try to work” (e.g. how long you have your work laptop open). Note that this is not the same as tracking e.g. “focus hours”. Keep an eye on it and don’t let it accumulate too much per week.
Why are you working during the weekend and after work hours?
This is my reason for burnout, opposite of your example. There's a thin balance doing more work because you enjoy, and doing it because managers are pushing you to do it. And now that I JUST do my job and what I'm asked to do, I have lost a lot of the drive that I loved about being a developer and engineer, making life kind of dull. Weird thing is that it is the job description that put me into this place, with no room for growth, and the search for new jobs has been dry, year after year of searching.
I traded my sanity for a big chunk of my life's enjoyment. That ain't great either.
If your "do the minimum" is having complete control over a module and implementing features as slow as you can without pissing anyone off too much, you're going to have a great time.
If your "do the minimum" is picking up the bare minimum number of Jira cards in a sunshine and roses "teamwork makes the dream work" team where everyone is responsible for every line of code but nobody knows more than 5% of the codebase, your mental health is going to go straight down the toilet, because nothing is more stressful than working with over-complicated code you didn't write, and the less cards you pick up, the less code you're going to understand.
Personally, I think autonomy has little to do with it and lacking autonomy is dangerous to pin burnout on because it puts the responsibility on the person, when burnout is often the result of a system (broken or exploitative).
Sure having autonomy can help cope or delay burnout, but I don't think lacking autonomy is causing burnout singlehandedly.
So I have always had such a nice (some would say epic) work-life balance as far as "hours" and "availability" go. After a (forced) break from work, and exploring health related help professionally, I came to know I was clearly burnt out. I was told high number of "hours" working or "visible or quantifiable work load" don't necessarily have to be present for a burn out. There are other factors at work which cause stress/etc and they are often more insidious than the typical "load" (not to reduce the ill effect of the typical load^). And were those signs abundant in my life and work!
It was quite shocking. I always used to think that with my kind of work-life balance at least burn out was never going to be a problem.
^ It was added by them - those typical load/etc almost always cause mental health damage so I should not consider them okay all.
"Will the fight for our sanity, be the fight of our lives?" - flaming lips
I don’t know why this is a revelation to so many people.
Who cares about you more than you do? Nobody — especially not anybody at work.
Maybe it is a revelation for those who haven't been taught to say no outside work?
I was told to be quiet and obey growing up, why would anyone expect me to be equipped to stand up for myself as an adult after that?
Because you are equipped to do it. It’ll be a new experience for you but it shouldn’t take you long to figure out that it’s in your best interests.
A PM at my company told me a few weeks ago "if you finish your work early, we can always find other things for you to work on" and I told him "you understand that my incentive is not to do that, right? If working faster only gives me more work to do, then why would I work faster?" He told me that fast workers are repaid with bonuses, promotions, etc., but I don't think most people believe in that kind of upward mobility anymore. I certainly don't
i just forgot how to do my job. not exact operations or how to code. by what is exactly my job consist of what. for year like. and at same time appeared i started to do my job better as per 3rd parties feedback.
also i was thinking i am clever, but after just came realization i am far from. so i did learn some math and what are other people really are to catch up with the world.
just learn math, hear what boss/wife/child tell, no coffee , and some meditation of absolutely any kind.
after some years, i feel life as like walking in a forest with animals and random forestfires here and there.
PSA for anyone who might have the same situation — if you've experienced anything that resembles hypomania this may be worth investigating. The average time from first bipolar depression to diagnosis is 10 years, and I mistook several depressions for burnout while doing plenty of damage to my career and personal life during that time.
This is one of the best books on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Depressed-Recognizing-Managing-Bipola...
The huge challenge with diagnosing type 2 BPD is that it basically needs a historical time series of data to be detected properly, so either you or someone close to you needs that data. It's believed to be a lot more prevalent in the population than officially diagnosed, which sucks because it results in consistent, increasing depressions that don't respond to treatments for "unipolar" depression (major depressive disorder), which are actually dangerous as they can trigger mania.
I was lucky that the first medication I found worked really well with no side effects, and I basically went from "random 3-6 month depressions every 1-2 years" to "normal person", which removed a huge debuff, in video game terms.
Just like you have a primary care physician for your general health, a dentist for your teeth, it makes sense to have a medical professional to help you with your brain.
I think of it as a best practice. Can you get by with out it? Sure. Will you be doing things optimally? Definitely not.
Mechanics: it seems easier to get in to burn out but far far longer to get out of.
I know what I wanted to do but could not bring myself to do it.
Though not always, gut health (or the lack of it. My burn out coincided with my IBD episode) could be an early symptom to back off the throttle a bit.
Subjective: I've learnt to remember that look on someone face who's heading down burn out wall.
In long distance cycling, in order to not 'bonk', you must fuel and hydrate sufficiently and consistently over time. With burn out, I feel the same dynamics apply, but with different 'fuel' and 'hydration'. And every person is so different that the rate of replenishment needed should and have a wide variance.
What really helped me get out was, ironically COVID, when I couldn't do anything about my startup and I had to stop it and rest. The bleeding with my IBD just went away during the peak of lockdowns. Started to build and buy stuff, for leisure, that I enjoyed and had postponed away in my hustling years.
On hope: The human body and brain has a remarkable capability to recover and heal itself. But one does need to give it the right input: hanging out with wholesome or wise people, exercise, eating well, getting medical intervention when needed etc.
Getting that all sorted is like an insane nootropic. I'm smart again and can work real fast.
it feels like you can't learn, can't work, can't remember - this is just your body protecting itself, your ankle is wrapped. you have to listen to your body and give your mind a break before it takes one.