I’m taking an electrical engineering class and exploitation security class online. I’m constantly learning, which I love. I work on a product which just clones other similar products with a slightly better price point, so it’s hard to really care about the goal, but it would be nice to shift that mentality slightly.
I think long term I want to work on low level systems, but my current mental state is affecting my ability to learn effectively. Maybe therapy could help.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
You’re beginning that existential question of what matters to you and what you want to spend your time doing. As soon as you do that, uncertainty will creep into far more than just your work.
You chased the golden dream, now you “have it” and are near the top given your nice high salary. You’re not at the absolute tippy top, but you’re closer to the summit than at the base of the mountain.
Congrats, your Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is mostly met and now you’re getting mildly philosophical about your life and work.
It sounds like you’re in a state where you’ve learned to grind. It paid off, now you’re trying to keep up the pace by continuing learning to eek out that last bit of performance from your engine as you speed along.
I was there too. Voracious learning felt like I was building, finding my niche, but I was bored with what I did at work.
The solution is to go to therapy and discuss this problem directly with them. Explain how what you have put all this time into is now boring you, you feel the need to change, but are unsure how to. You want to stay motivated.
Get ready for a big change. You’re about to uncover topics like burn out, depression, expectations for life, building meaningful and fulfilling relationships… this is the meaning of life stuff.
Possibly, you’re putting too much weight of importance on your job. You may be letting it define you.
You’ll need to process all this and more. It’s going to take time. I suggest therapy so you don’t end up in the deep pot holes I did before I decided to eventually start talking to someone about the uncertainties in my life and how I handle them.
Good luck, this is a big topic you’ve just opened up for yourself.
It's good that you're taking classes and are constantly learning, but consider that in this season of burnout those (vocationally related) activities could be contributing to the problem.
With that out of the way, and at risk to your cognitive load (by adding something else to your life), have you considered taking up a hobby/interest that is unrelated to your profession, and unrelated to the EE and Sec. learning that you're doing? It might sound silly, but maybe you need to activate other parts of your brain - hence a hobby might do the trick. Alternatively, if you want to dive into your learning path...have you considered contributing your time or code, etc. to an open source project that is aligned with your security learning? This could get you some real-world experience in security, enable you to connect with a network of people for future (hopefully more fulfilling) job, help you feel good about donating time to some open source goodness...and ultimately distract you from your dayjob...at least until you're ready to jump. ;-)
Therapist: "What about today? Is today the worst day of your life?"
P: "Yeah."
T: "Wow. That's messed up... I'm sorry. Go on."
P: "Is there any way that you could sort of just zonk me out so that, like, I don't know that I'm at work... in here? Could I come home and think that I've been fishing all day, or something?"
T: "That's really not what I do, Peter"
Then, try talking out loud to yourself as you walk. Sounds strange, I know, but it can actually be really fun and elucidating. For me, it was a helpful exercise to clarify my values, goals, and find more creative ideas for moving forward. You can put in some earbuds and those around you will be none the wiser.
Someone else mentioned this, and I will echo it too. Be compassionate with yourself. It will take some time to find your way out of your rut. It's completely normal and from this you will grow stronger and more resilient.
You mentioned therapy, which is a great and I think everyone should try at least once. I would also recommend coaching. The difference is that therapy deals more with trauma and healing where coaching deals more with a person's present situation and guiding them to a more desirable future. In a coaching relationship, you are seen as the expert of your life, and the coach simply acts as a partner to help you discover the answers that are already within you. Disclaimer: I am a coach by training so I am biased, but I've worked with a couple different coaches myself and have found it to be incredibly powerful.
If you want to work on something different, you can only do that by getting a different job, either in the same company or at another one. If you stay where you are, you know you won't get what you want, so you need to make a move.
For example in my job (quite dull) I automated some data collection, stored the data in a database, created a web app to present data from the database, ran it all on a server etc. None of it was anything my boss would have given me as an explicit task, but it was useful stuff that I could make a case for. It was also stuff I hadn't done before and was interested in learning how to do.
Granted, the weight of crappy project management decisions eventually became too much for me to put up with, but for a while I quite liked going in to work and setting up my mini-projects.
A lot of people go through this. I’ve been through it twice, and both times it felt like it hijacked my brain. It probably feels like you’re doing something wrong or you’re a bad employee, but most likely you’re just in a temporary rut.
If you are young, and you have a good social safety net (family), then it is probably better to actively search for a different company, one where you feel that you are contributing meaningfully and purposefully.
If the only reason you are there is for the high income and the prestige of working there, but you do not feel you are contributing meaninfully, then forcing yourself to work through this will hollow you out. You'll wake up at middle age with a middle-age crisis. You might succeed with the prestige or wealth, and none of it means much. (Or you realize that your youth is ultimately ephemeral, and you can never get it back again). Further, at that time, you are much less likely to absorb the risk of changing your career -- dependents, tech-industry ageism, etc.
In this post-lockdown economic time and huge demand for workers, this is the time where it is favorable for employees. That window is still open, but it is closing. When it closes, we'll be left with lower demand for workers and higher inflation. The window for job mobility is open now and it won't last forever.
You may possibly be able to apply for a different job internally, but I suggest it is something you feel you can contribute meaningfully.
If you still insist on staying, you can try to get a mental-health leave until you come out of burnout. Take the time to find out what is really important to you. It is probably not status or prestige, even if it seems that way. If you're able to find the purpose within you, then that will be what gets you up in the morning; you might be tired, and even exhausted, and yet, purposeful and meanginful work makes it feel like it is worth it.
Surely others have dealt with this - but I actually did pretty okay throughout the lockdown in my okay sized room in NYC. My roommates paid rent but left for other states so I basically had an apt to myself. I got lucky enough to have a job as well - however, this instilled an odd kind of lazy malaise.
I've since left new york since everything worth doing in tech is remote - separated where I sleep and work etc. But it seems like my ability to properly get focused or excited about my work has completely atrophied.
My first step in solving this was using an app to track tasks that give me the most and take the most - so different kinds of "work" and things that "waste" time (youtube, web browsing etc).
I haven't found a solution but it's troubling to say the least. I initially was worried about not progressing as fast as I wanted to - now I've identified the issue is I rarely complete more than 3hrs of deep work per day. Or 6hrs of doing anything.
However, I've sort of accepted I'm an introvert - stopped trying to be "cool" for the right reasons and idk I have decent savings which feels good.
Take a long weekend every few weeks, go to yosemite. Or fly to vegas and cut loose. Pick up golf or pickleball or whatever. Make some friends who aren't engineers and live a bit.
Then you can come back to work with a fresh mind and care enough to get your shit done well.
1. Find a project at work that you are interested in, and move over to that.
2. Join a completely different team/org at work.
3. Join a completely different company, doing different types of work.
4. Join a socially responsible company, doing charity work.
5. Quit your job, and take a 6 month break. Don't think about work during that break.
6. Go see a therapist for at least a couple of months.
7. Improve your diet and exercise routines, potentially with professional help from a trainer or a nutritionist.
8. Begin a treatment plan using drugs w/ the approval of a psychiatrist.
9. Begin a treatment plan using drugs without the approval of a psychiatrist, YOLO mushrooms time.
10. Leave your job, and move into an entirely different industry. Go start a farm.
11. Take a trip to a country with a radically different way of life, to gather some perspective.
12. Take some daily time to do something away from a computer - like join a pottery club.
13. Read some philosophy books on the meaning of life. Do some introspection based on what you read.
14. Pick a goal at work, like getting a promotion, and figure out what you need to do that.
I want to also offer a quick theory of burnout. Burnout is caused by 3 different sources:
1. Plain old overwork. Too much on-call is not good for your soul.
2. Mission doubt. If you begin to doubt the reason why you are doing something, you will get burned out.
3. Broken steering. If you feel that nothing you do actually is changing the situation, that you're unable to make meaningful progress in your work.
What I want to stress about this theory is that you don't need all three to have burnout. Some people think that taking an extended vacation is the cure to all burnout, because their theory only accounts for source 1, when you can have burnout from a job where you only work 20 hours a week. You might wish to first try and figure out which of these 3 sources seem like the cause for your burnout, and then which of the 14 options seem most appealing to you.
What I’ve come to believe is that responsibility is the meaning of life, so try adding responsibility to your life.
Fundamentally, there isn't much overlap between the work that we get paid to do and the work we find meaningful. Unless you work for a non-profit that's saving the world, there just isn't.
What to do? Well, one thing I've considered is that once I am fully ready to retire, I do part time software development and give half my earnings to a deserving charity. I get back a few days out of my week, and the knowledge that my donations are doing far more for a charity than my volunteering could ever do, and as a bonus I get to keep half to pursue my hobbies. I think that would be a win win for everyone if you could swing it.
Observe your situation (gather details of the 'problem') & you'll likely naturally make some headway at resolving your difficulties.
Example:
Why did you take the job in the first place?
What excites you about the current job?
There are many reasons to be de-motivated. Something wrong about the job. Something about you. Something that's unconscious, for you, it seems currently. Focus on observing the flow:
* your sensory experience ("my butt really hurts today sitting in this chair")
* => thoughts ("this job requires that I spend a lot of time backing-up what I'm working on with evidence of progress, for the sake of my Manager's approval, and for my Manager's own upward-mobility")
* => evoked memories ("when I was young, Rob took my pencil and claimed I had stolen it from him in the first place")
* => feelings ("this job offends me")
* => and follow-on thoughts ("to be successful at this job I'm going to have to become a different person than who I am now, how am I going to do that, do I want to do that. I really prefer that people just trust me, and not require proof and evidence that I am Good at my Job.").
My mind often has a general Sense > Thought > Memory > Feeling flow in my experience.
The important thing to realize is that life is already sufficiently challenging and complicated, working more takes away time from basically everything else that matters more.
Working and learning for the sake of both is unimaginative and kind of a dead end imo
Edit: Not that these aren't worhy pursuits, but you need to consider that they need to contribute to your overall wellbeing. Do you have a good social life, do you have a lover, a community, non-tech hobbies, great health and fitness, good relationships with your family and yourself?
If I had not been forced to step away from programming a few times in my twenties, I'd be pretty depressed by now/still. I have vague interests that are tech related, but outside of my duties I literally couldn't give a shit about working more; it'd be a crutch if I ran out of other ideas.
I’m saying this from experience at the wrong end of answering this question, or at least addressing the same underlying cause. I’m over two years into severe burnout and have no idea if I’ll ever recover. I made the wrong choice by committing to my job over what my body and mind were telling me.
Get some rest, before your body forces you to do it. And before you build a cycling habit of it. You’re clearly smart. You’ll get to chase all the career things you want to, but you’ll only enjoy them if you take care of yourself along the way.
And yes, do seek therapy if that’s something you’re open to. It can help, especially if you’re in a place where you can go in with trust. Which it sounds like you are.
That being said, "my current mental state is affecting my ability to learn effectively" sounds like you're in some distress. It will not hurt at all to seek help.
Therapy probably couldn't hurt either, but you should make your career move soon if you can. Burnout takes a long time to recover from. Personally I burned out from working long hours and it took years to recover from, even though I was enjoying my work and found it meaningful. Don't overwork yourself.
Care about yourself.
If you're working on things that interest you and with people you enjoy interacting with and you're treated well by your employer, then your job with take care of itself.
If you're not, find a new job until that list is satisfied.
If your job isn't allowing you to express what you love about your career, then you have something to go on in terms of changing your job. But if you're finding you actually don't love your career, that that would imply a different path entirely.
> I work on a product which just clones other similar products with a slightly better price point, so it’s hard to really care about the goal, but it would be nice to shift that mentality slightly.
Building something that has already been built at a better price point can be an interesting challenge. Obviously there's only so much control you have over the project, but learning how to deliver solid software on a budget is a super valuable skill. If you want to shift your mentality I would suggest that you approach it as it's own learning process.
I think this is where I'd start. At times in my life I focused my efforts at solving my unhappiness by thinking I needed to change my job. In retrospect I mostly did that because I found it easier or more socially acceptable to say something like "I hate my job" than "I am lonely and depressed" (even when only thinking it to myself). Therapy was pretty good at working through some of this, at least for me.
Of course, there are jobs that aren't right for a person. Talking to someone might help you sort out whether that's the case.
Instead of sitting around learning (taking online classes) actually DO something.
- Create something with your own hands that gives you satisfaction.
- Write a journal everyday to give yourself a sense of accomplishment.
- Use those new EE skills to make a circuit that performs some small task to automate your daily life.
Create, don't consume.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/excuse-me-but-why...
Your problem is not that your "mental state is affecting your ability to learn effectively" as if you were a robot created only to work and learn. Look at yourself with some dignity and compassion.
There is no shortcut: you have to really care about what your job is doing, the people you are helping, the core mission. I love helping my employer make more money.
If you can't align with your job (ex: there is no price I can see myself optimizing/sellings ads-to-eyeballs), find another.
Also, take a vacation for a bit it helps to add perspective.
Finally, if you get thrust into a crap situation, you'll learn to count your blessings quickly.
This could be: - Areas where you can improve &/or learn - How can I climb up the Corp ladder? - Where can I add value that no one else can add
Sometimes it helps to take a step back and look at the bigger picture
I took 2 weeks off earlier this year and it did wonders for my motivation and accruing burnout.
2.)Work at doing something else, since you clearly don’t like what you’re doing. Looks like you’re already doing that, so just keep going. Could your physical activity and health be what’s affecting your mental state?