Has anyone come back from being burnt out to love what they do again? If so, how did you manage to do it?
You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today, so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company.
Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. If you don’t have particularly healthy hobbies, maybe start some. Getting away from your work more and more will make it all the more bearable.
These days work is close to the bottom of my list of concerns, which sounds really bad - BUT - I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.
If you’re burned out this badly I’d suggest it’s your soul’s way of telling yourself “hey this isn’t working for me”. As someone who has been to some pretty messed up depths with the anxiety monster, I’d heed that voice. Life isn’t long enough to stay stuck in a rut like this for any amount of time at all.
I also found that regular physical exercise outside (running for me) is a game changer and totally allows your brain to disconnect.
Finally, don't guilt trip yourself on your free time. There is nothing you "should" be doing on your spare time. Want to code? Fine. But do you really? Want to just veg out and watch Netflix? Also fine. Want to do some "junk food" gaming? Do it. Hang out with friends family and loved ones? I encourage that. Don't pressure yourself about open source projects or side hustles etc.
The term has roots in "seven", just like Sabbath, so with 14 years in the industry, you've skipped one.
I think a solid half-year off every seven to ten years is an excellent practice for intellectually demanding labor.
What makes it a sabbatical is that it's a change of pace which furthers your career. I'd love to take a sabbatical and just work on building stuff, personally: from soldering, to designing boards, probing them, writing firmware, I'm a rank amateur, and I'd love to level up for awhile, while free of the burden of justifying my salary in the process.
It could be painting, there's a popular author who wrote a book about the connection between painting and hacking, can't remember his name but his stuff gets posted here all the time.
What it isn't, is a vacation, or a convalescence. It sounds like you haven't hit "can't work", just "sucks to work", which is a blessing.
If you can't afford it, that's understandable, there are ways to get some of the benefit from a new job, but "relieved of the burden of delivering value" is an important factor.
I've known people who pushed "sucks to work" until it became "can't work", and they don't all make it back to the profession, a bit less than half in fact. Whatever you do, I urge you to take burnout seriously, because at the limit it's a serious medical condition which can cripple or kill you.
I recovered fine, but it was pretty brutal. For a while I couldn't even look at code without getting nauseous and a having a splitting headache. I'm not exaggerating here, it was like I had lost the ability to comprehend code at all. Code was just meaningless symbols randomly arranged without any rhyme or reason.
What helped eventually is about ~6 Months of completely distancing myself from Programming. No programming for work, no programming for fun, not keeping up with current developments, nothing. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford this, but I truly believe that a 6 month long hard brain reset was needed. Wouldn't have worked in 3 months. Other comments here echo a similar sentiment and you'll find other blog posts and personal experiences on the internet with the same conclusion.
On the upside, coming back after 6 months and discovering that I stopped getting physically ill trying to code was an amazing moment. I fell in love with programming all over again. Only this time I learned to listen to my body and started prioritizing health and happiness over a steep career and financial success.
Honestly I don't think many people would be impressed by my professional output (especially not on this site), but I can honestly say that I've never loved it as much as I do now and I can rest easy knowing that it's sustainable and doesn't negatively impact my mental health.
I recommend reading the whole section on burnout. Although burnout isn't really the topic of the article this is the most enlightening writing I have ever read on it. Hoping it might serve you.
For me, switching to 4 days a week was a huge improvement in my quality of life. Now I've switched to 3, and have a completely different second job 2 days a week. And two days of rest.
I love both, for different reasons, but could never go back to a full week of IT, or switch to a full week of my new job. They balance fine, but I don't think they can exist on their own.
After going through 7 different jobs in 12 years, I realize the only thing that keeps me happy is the team itself. Great team? Great job. Bad team? Bad job. Your mileage may vary, but if you're in a rut, maybe try finding a better, more humane team.
And by all means, scale back to 4 days a week. You'll have way less disposable income (especially because some costs are fixed: rent, food, health...), but you'll have more time.
Essentially, you're trading time against money. What's most valuable to you?
Nobody says you have to be a manager, or take a permanent role. This time is a gift - an opportunity to sidestep whatever "career track" you thought you were expected to follow and instead figure out your own values and priorities - it sounds like you've already gone along way towards that, at least you know what you don't want.
We are uniquely blessed in this business with such a wide range of opportunities and modes of working. The rise of remote work has only made that better. Be kind to yourself, and remember that despite whatever kind of imposter syndrome may be lurking in the back of your head, you most likely have an extremely valuable skill set that continues to be in demand around the world.
Good luck.
If I ended up in the same situation again, but say, without that job, I would tell my older self:
- take a big break, and reconnect with your enthusiasm. The book “Unmasking Autism” has a lot of concrete ways to do that, since it can be hard for us. It also talks a lot about autistic burnout
- go back to freelancing, or find a job where I have lots of freedom to follow my routine, and where I am valued for my thinking and communication style
- reconnect with writing code for fun. Programming is legitimately the one activity that fully calms me and replenishes me. I stopped doing any side-programming for 10 years, and reviving that atrophied part of myself has been absolutely invigorating.
- get monster ear protection. This has to be one of the revelations: noise stresses me out sooo much, and I have been repressing it for so long. I now have -35 dB + noise cancelling earplugs and can basically live in complete silence, in the noisiest environment. I can finally think things true the way I want to.
(edit: formatting)
I have ~40 years experience delivering software around the world in a variety of industries. I have found that whenever I get burned out on the subject of software, its usually because I haven't had a good hard look at my users.
The people whose lives will actually be impacted by the value I provide in the software I write.
If you can't conceive of how you're going to see your users, or get a feel for the way their lives are improved by your work as a developer - there's your problem.
Everyone needs to have their work acknowledged - everyone, no exceptions. If you can't get access, fix that. If they're unhappy - fix it. If their lives are not impacted positively by your efforts - fix that.
I took a job in an education setting, a much more diverse role, hardware/software/networking, very little coding, much less hours. I arrive at 8am then leave at 5pm on the dot everyday. I walk to and from work. I work very hard, but not at all when I'm at home. I only look at email when I am sat at my desk. I don't think much about what I've done on a given day, or what I'm going to do - just do what I'm told.
The scene in American Beauty where he finds a job with the least possible responsibility reminds me of my life.
I look forward to each day. I don't dread Sundays. I have a good nights sleep every night. It can be done with variety!
I think there are a few things that I've found that always help:
* Removing the source of frustration or the thing that is burning you out -- this might mean quitting a toxic job, reducing hours, whatever. But be honest with yourself, ask for somebody who you talk to a lot to give input on what they think it is and listen.
* Rest. This doesn't have to mean "do nothing" but it can. I think a lot of people do nothing for not enough time. A 2 week vacation and then back to the grind, you may find yourself feeling fresh and re-burnt out in less time than you were gone. I'd say rest more accurately means "do something that is easy but keeps you active" or "do things you've neglected, but don't push the area you're frustrated". I find that working on something that's lower stakes or requires less back and forth and allows me to think through and fix without questions of my dedication or intention are most helpful for me, but for you it might be something else. If burnout is around coding, managing a complex, non coding problem might be helpful. I have friends who have done home improvements or setup beer brewing etc to focus their skills on somewhere lower stakes.
* Do recovery "exercises". If big projects or coding has burnt you out, slowly introduce it in a healthy manner, accounting for the changes you made by removing frustration. This should feel like the most difficult part, because you're attempting to do something new. Introduce the thing you want to do but you've been prevented because of burn-out and try slowly to do it while addressing any strains the source of your injury immediately. This might mean having more candid discussions with managers or team members to prevent toxic patterns from emerging. This may mean tempering expectations early or setting clearer boundaries. Do the hard thing and prevent re-injury. Taper, and don't increase capacity until you're sure you're gaining energy rather than losing it again.
* Be patient. I've been burnt out pretty badly with projects and it's taken several months of healthy, quiet coding in the back seat of a good team to feel well rested again. It's given me a lot of time to assess what went wrong, what I liked and what I have missed about my time resting. I'd say probably 6mo for just a single terrible 2 months of work. Be patient and trust the process.
Stop killing yourself for their profit. You have no downtime, you have no peace, you have no time to 'do' anything else.
70hrs a week (assuming you sleep 8hrs) only leaves you with 10hrs a week. That's just 2hrs a day! AND I bet most of those 2 hrs is used up in "morning routine, and food preparation".
You need to cut back A LOT.
Stop working at 40hrs. Stand up for yourself. Don't let your company bully you. Pre-Industrial revolution, the average person had more 'time off' then we do. A peasant, living subsistence farming lifestyle had more free time then you do.
I experienced major burnout after a 4 year stint in an early stage startup, and I walked away. I had a six week break which was wonderful, but the next step I took after that was essentially a similarly stressful (but rehigh profile) job. I lasted a year.
Now I have a less prestigious job, at a less recognisable (but much more compassionate) company. I've moved out of the big tech hub city and now I work remote. I'm much, much happier, and have something approximating a healthy work life balance. I can walk to quiet woodland from my house, where I work, which helps.
The hardest step, which still troubles me from time to time, is stopping striving. I could be earning more, have a better job title, etc. But I remind myself I don't want those things more than I want a fundamentally comfortable life with ample time to spend with family and friends.
For the first few months, time just passed while I was at home, and I thought it would get better but it didn't. I realized I needed to change environments, so I ended up doing some traveling in Europe but staying at places for longer, not just hopping around(I also have been wanting to visit forever). It was cool, and fun, but also realized I needed to work to change habits and mindsets in order to totally feel recharged.
Habits like checking my emails, and social media, are very hard to turn off and were draining me of my mental energy and being able to enjoy the present moment. I wanted to travel without my phone, and to just get a not so "smart" phone. But, I ended up ditching that idea as I'm dependent on it even for travel. It's a work in progress, but I'm starting to notice changes in habits, and I hope to carry those forward with me. A lot of it has honestly been me working on emotional intelligence, and figuring out how to manage my emotions, which in turn will help me manage stress, work/life balance, etc, and in turn avoiding burnout.
Finding hobbies I enjoy, and spending time on it, like Art and drawing has also been rewarding. I think a lot of it is un-learning bad habits, and learning good ones, like taking care of yourself better. Wish you good luck on your journey!
just wanted to vent
What you need is a change at work and the exercise to heal the mind. So as you make adjustments at work, also make sure you're setting aside time for any amount of exercise and vitamin d.
Every time I've changed jobs it's been a total reset for me. It takes a while for a job to reach 100% workload and that honeymoon period is usually enough to recover.
I believe that once you feel an unhealthy personal connection to your job it's time to move on. For example, you're upset and exhausted every day because a project you spent two years on isn't gaining traction and may be cut. Or you find yourself regularly checking in while vacation because you're worried.
I was lucky that I had money to quit working completely for about a year and go backpacking.
When I started again, I did so in a different company but in the same field.
The biggest change I made and which I think was key to find a balance was to enforce boundaries.
Before I had a job that had lots of midnight on-call wake ups and no set hours.
In the new place I forced myself to show up at the office at 9am so I could walk out at 5pm without anyone having anything to grumble about. This was not the norm in the company but as I started doing that from day one, it was accepted.
Whenever anyone asked me to stay late I referred them to my manager for them to approve paid overtime. Most of the time the discussion stopped there, but there were a few times when they decided to pay.
It's incredible how much time for yourself and friends-family is left over when you clock-off at 5pm always.
In my experience, it's much easier to learn to be good at something you enjoy than it is to learn to enjoy something you're good at. It's okay to not enjoy programming like you once did, find and do what you enjoy now.
Its like playing a video game with a leveling system and you have an aha! moment where you recognize a grindy pattern from the past has come back and are sick of it. The difference here is your employment is directly linked to being able to eat, etc.
Be more disciplined, put in the hours, slog through the work and also be more disciplined about stopping the work when the day is done and taking vacation or time away to recharge. Discipline is something you will need to build up but is much more reliable than waiting for passion or motivation to stop by (they still will). Find hobbies or interests outside of computing/digital things.
I have made the commitment to myself, from that time, that I only work 40 hours a week. I'll occasionally work a little overtime if I am on a roll on something interesting, or if there is a short term panic at work, but very infrequently, and never, ever, more than fifty hours in a week.
I make that clear when I interview, and I will admit that on individual jobs that has been a deal breaker, but those were the small minority of interviews.
The twenty four years since then have all been good. Four different employers, all in embedded development, all interesting challenges.
I wrote an entire book that was basically "I'm fed up with the world and my job right now, there's got to be more to life than this".
I found more meaning in my work as I got to know myself better. Similar to an oxygen mask in an airplane, I had to put myself first before I could for others(or work for that matter).
The only advice I'd give someone in this situation is to work on yourself everyday until you gain enough clarity to make your next move. Don't panic or do anything drastic until you're in a stable mindset.
I don't know how much useful advice I can offer but I think my own problem is lack of self discipline. I end up working when I should not be. Whenever I can muster the self-discipline to stick to a proper schedule things seem to get better.
Try to manage artist, designer, song writer, actor, or stand up comedian and they will burn out as well.
I've burned out a couple of times and the fix was to stop working and do other things (e.g. travel, music, photography, pottery, sport) until I naturally drifted back to coding. Obviously not an option for a lot of people, but with 14 years of experience maybe you have money in the bank.
Finding enjoyment in work feels like a slightly different topic, I try to find some sort of interesting technical challenge or new learning opportunity in every project - though not just adding unnecessary stuff for the sake of it, of course. I kind of disagree with people who say "get a meaningful job", there aren't nearly enough of those to go around. Redefine "meaningful" instead.
It's unsurprising people burn out when their job is about optimizing ads to enrich some billionaire and stuff like that.
Find jobs that are meaningful to you and you can improve.
Exercise. Sleep. Reduce your workload to something manageable.
Say No.
Meditate, active meditation is ok (yoga, some martial arts, even running)
Stop having hobbies that look like work and involve obligations, at least until you recover.
Clear your todo list. Clear your inbox. Like, just empty them.
Rest. Take back your evenings and weekends. Vacation if you can.
Above all, this is going to take a while. I don't think there is magic bullet.
I got really burnt out at the beginning of the pandemic. Ended up quitting my job and taking some time off. For a long while, just thinking of doing coding projects would fill me with disgust.
After about 9 months, I decided to make an app for the workout program I was following (5/3/1) as I didn’t like the ones out there or using spreadsheets. Working on something where I was user 0 was tons of fun and reminded me of why I liked coding in the first place. The fact that the response to the app was great did help too.
Can’t say that it would work for everyone, but this got me unburnt out. I just started a new job now and am loving it.
There's an oft-used expression: do what you love, and you'll never work another day in your life. (The meaning, for non-native English speakers, is that if you love what (the work) you're doing, then it won't feel like work and you'll be naturally motivated.)
I was in bad mental shape during my last gig. When the company decided not to renew any external contracts due to economic fears, my contract expired and I was without a job. I decided it was time to finally do something that I cared about, and do it my way. Maybe money would come from it, or maybe not. My runway is fairly short, but it's enough time to maybe build something.
It took at least two weeks of doing nothing computer related (other than reading HN, I'm sure) for me to start to see sunlight. And when I was tempted to look at jobs, it would only take reading one job req for me to feel sick. So I decided to make my own reality and stick to my belief that if I build something, something good will happen. We don't know how that story ends yet, but I know I'm infinitely happier and certainly healthier. My alcohol consumption is near zero now, down from a very excessive amount. My weight is down too. Bonus!
My advice is to take some time and try to discover what your interests or passions are. Then start making connections with people who have similar. If you don't know what those things are, then start doing new things which don't necessarily have anything to do with work or projects or money. Take some latin dance classes (much fun!). Take some fitness or sport classes. Travel and enjoy good food, and meet strangers.
Just maybe you will start to see where you can do things which make you feel energized, and just maybe it will become profitable.
Even mediocre managers are valuable. Some of us need a manager sometimes to keep us from falling into too many rabbit holes or to help us map goals and plans and stay on them. The way to find those people seems unclear or random, but it certainly seems that the more you connect with others, the better the chances are.
Long answer: after a long time in the technology sector with a single employer, I felt that I had grown to hate the entire tech industry. I left the sector for a couple of years, working various freelance / self-employment roles outside of tech. Finally, after the prolonged break, I decided to consider going back in, but with some very serious requirements: I had to have highly competitive pay and 100% remote work with a flexible schedule, or I wouldn't go back. After a long hunt I finally landed a role that fits, and I'm actually happy with it.
Why did I go back? The camaraderie. If you leave the tech sector, but you're still passionate about the field, you're going to find that there is a major part of your intellectual life that you don't get to share with other people. In other words, my main motivation to return was not the income, but to get that kind of cerebral interaction again. The high requirements are simply my minimum standard for dealing with all the horrible, soul-draining aspects of the industry (and I'm under no delusion that they've changed).
What eventually worked for me, was switching from operations to infosec, and switching to a new (to me) company, where I was able to pre-vet my chain of command, making sure I wasn't going to run into the previous problem, that of working for someone or someones who have squandered their chance to earn my respect for various reasons. Thus far, it has been highly successful. Not only do I not feel burned out, I am relatively excited to start working when I wake up, and kind of have to restrain myself in order to maintain personal life boundaries. At night, I'll spend time thinking of new ways to solve work problems, because it's fun, not because I'm stressed out or obsessed with completing a given project or task.
My advice would be to do what you need to do to weather this period of your employment and not give yourself a hard time about it. you don't NEED to be doing anything. If your job is still coding, do some coding while you are at work, go home and then do some hobby that you have been wanting to do. Learn to play the piano or fly racing drones or whatever.
If you have a long enough career, having a six to eight month slump of not being into coding is nothing, so don't sweat it. Just make try to make it through it without making it worse.
It's hard work but it will pay off both for you and your near ones :)
I think once you hit burnout, you need to completely stop doing the activity entirely to really recover. Switching to a less draining variant helps before you hit full on burnout.
If you are in a position to do so I'd recommend taking 6 months out of work, and go and do something where you have no pressure to be productive. That might be personal projects. It might be travelling the world. If you have any hobbies or interests that you usually don't get as much time as you like pursue, then that might be a good starting point.
A 2 week vacation might also help if such a long break isn't practical for you.
In the beginning, we routinely worked 60+ hours a week and it didn't really bother me. But when it felt like no matter what I did my efforts wouldn't matter, I lost all my motivation and burned out. But I still couldn't bring myself to quit. I was emotionally invested in the company, our team, and our customers.
The second round of layoffs in a year (a 67% staff reduction) was the final nail for me. After I left I didn't work for at least six months. The first two months, I basically did nothing and got a lot of sleep. Then after that I decided to start doing all the things I never had time for. I cooked all my meals, I exercised, I traveled, I spent more time with family and friends, and I developed some hobbies outside of tech.
That was about five years ago. I've had 3 jobs since then, and I left each of them before a year was up. If the right amount of balance is just to have a job you punch in/out of that pays pretty well, I'm just not that interested. But I also know that there's no way I have another startup in me. For awhile now I've actually made more money with my "side hustle" than I can as an engineer, even though my cash flow is very uneven. So I think I'm basically done with software.
I took a break and a hard look at what I wanted to do and came back the other side thinking I wanted to learn something new and apply it to make the world a better place.
I took a job that paid the bills and allowed me to have (long commute) time to learn AI. Fast forward 5 years, I now work using AI to help doctors do their job better and I love it.
I should say a big part of it was promising to myself to separate work and life. 9-5 is work. Weekends and other times are for my family and I to enjoy, recharge, and make sure I can back to a job I love.
Good luck on the journey.
The idea that that some motivation circuit in your brain has fried. This happens when you spend too much time forcing yourself to roll the proverbial boulder up the hill just to see it come back down again. Your brain will heal itself, but you need to stop rolling that boulder first.
Burnout also manifested itself in health problems with no explanation. I suffered epileptic-like episodes on a plane a week into my leave from work. I spent a year getting tests, unable to drive until cleared by a doctor, which were all inconclusive. The timing of this, and the fact I've not experienced this before or since, makes me think stress was the cause.
It took months of doing practically nothing at home, and a year or so in a new job, to understand a few things.
- There are external and internal stress factors that can influence burnout. You might have external workplace factors you can't influence, or you might also have unrealistic expectations, be a perfectionist, have an intense work ethic, or unbalanced work-life balance.
- After burnout, you can recognise these stress factors, and how to mitigate or avoid them. Some you can control, some you can't. If you need to leave somewhere, then leave. Before I suffered burnout, I saw a therapist and they said that leaving was the best option. They were totally right.
- Once you recognise stress factors that you can control, you take steps to mitigate or avoid them. You change your attitude towards work. You time box between work and life activities (if your work allows). You make meaningful boundaries, which can be physical, time-based, or mental.
- It's ok to feel defective for a time. For a year or two after my burnout, I felt like I was "damaged goods". Certain situations were triggering, I would not apply myself to work in the same way as before. I wondered whether I would "find my mojo" again. This is temporary, but it's a crucial time for reflection and learning.
2. While there, consider if burnout is partially your subconscious telling you something. A lot of people, myself included, have gone through phases where we later realized that the joy in learning how technology is made has faded and the mission that we're attached to doesn't actually align with what we actually want to do. Sometimes it's ok to quit a six digit position and take a five digit one if it means it fulfils some longing in our life, like help a friend, help the poor, or safeguard the world in some way.
3. See if there are aspects of your life that you may, deep down, want to change but that you're avoiding changing. For me, it was excitement. Note that these are different than mission in that they're self or at least family directed. Be clear eyed about the risks, because ultimately you are responsible for the choices you make, but don't be so cautious as to be cowardly. If you want to fire a gun at bad guys, first understand that they may fire back, but ultimately if you still think it is the best call, to not do so is cowardice.
4. If nothing above works, just start helping the least fortunate. It has a double effect of reminding yourself, viscerally, just how bad it can get[0] while also providing your mind with a sense of community and purpose.
[0] I met a former programmer at a soup kitchen who just had a run of bad health and life issues.
I also do at least 2 hours of cardio almost every day and strength exercises with my own body weight. This helps very much both physically and mentally.
Some things that were useful when I was thinking about quitting:
1. Auditing my assets to see what I could pull from on short notice without impacting my tax situation or retirement savings.
2. Reviewing this guide (https://www.academia.edu/9672192/MDD_Major_Depressive_Disord...) to verify that I was burnt out and not depressed; I didn't want to quit if I was depressed and not burned out. Had I been depressed, the move would have been to get on therapy through my company insurance.
3. Journaling about how I felt, what I didn't like at my job, and what I was looking forward to on break.
I don't know if I'll go back to the same type of work or industry, but my time spent reflecting on my goals, enjoying hobbies, and sleeping is already paying off tremendously.
I see some people mentioning the stress of not having a job during an economic downturn, but I find there's a certain amount of peace to it; I've already lost my job so I don't have to worry about that happening in the future.
I wouldn't say I've rediscovered my love for coding, but I have periods where I do enjoy it again (if I limit the time I spend in front of the screen and balance it with other activities). Also what was important was to really focus on simplfiying my own life and also achieving that through my work/product for others. You could say the crisis helped me to shift my intention regarding my purpose and to really appreciate simplicity.
I was appointed the role of team lead on top of my normal team member role. The major issue was that management told me not to hold team members accountable for their performance or actions. So suddenly i was responsible for everything within the team but could not do really much about issues within the team or its clients. Trying to solve everything myself made me very tired and depressed.
I long ago came to terms with the fact a lot of problems when working with technical systems arise out of the human side of things. People saying they did this, but they actually did that. People staying silent out of fear of looking daft, or hoping to $deity they don't attract attention to themselves. People saying they understand when they demonstrably do not.
I guess I had a slight shift in life goal. I'm no longer all about just learning/driving/using computers, but actively trying to get at the root of what makes it so difficult for people to bridge the gap/learn them well enough to use them.
Particularly since there are so many problems with other complex systems you can't even recognize until you've had the epiphany that nothing is magic, and if you didn't do it, it's not a safe assumption to think it'll just work, you can't even begin to approach trying to understand that they are fundamentally broken.
Changing jobs really helped me. Gave me new perspective on what matters and what didn't matter (and I had inflated some things needlessly in my head).
One thing that really helped me was that I was trying to be a hero in the past - I realized that systems built on the back of heroes is not healthy because eventually the hero has to leave and the system decays rapidly. Rather, it's much better to have a system that works well when it's operated by average people doing a reasonably good job. That really took the pressure off of me when it came to my own mind.
That advice may or may not apply to you - it sounds like you've done some thinking but I would try to isolate the problems into a couple different categories: is the people? is it the domain of the work (e.g. are you making games, or e-commerce, or saas, etc)? the type of work (you mentioned you don't like coding)?
Lastly, remember that it's a big world out there. You don't have to pick between 'coding' or 'manager'. You can always move to a beach in Indonesia and be a fisherman or something. The world is wide open.
Since then ive started on carpenter school which all though fun and "real" also has made me poor.
I picked up the computer two weeks ago and coded some badly written code to do visuals for a friends techno gig, first time coding for half a year and i liked it. I dont know if i would be able to go back to full time coding but the idea of teaching others sounds interesting to me.
Good luck!
I sold my flat and was planning to move into a van to become a surf-bum. I handed in my notice and was working on autopilot/coasting until it was done. Then it all happened very quickly, that start-up contacted me, I had an interview, did a trial week (which I loved) and I decided to join them.
It was the best decision ever, I very quickly got my passion back for programming & creating products. Plus the job was remote, so I could move somewhere closer to the beach/mountains to surf/snowboard more.
I think what helped me was getting away from the stuff I hated, i.e; meetings/emails/'chats'/story points/jira and just focusing on programming and the product I was working on. Combined with the fact that it was much easier to peruse my hobbies, it cured my burnout (if you can call it that).
I took night classes to get my real estate license and was planning to change careers. Seemed like a good idea. After going through the training, getting the license, seeing how brokerages worked and what was involved in the field...I knew I could do it but I realized pretty quickly that I hated just about everything around how the industry worked. It honestly seems more designed to extract money from people who decide to get their license than anything else. Fees on top of fees on top of fees. My favorite was a Keller Williams speaker who looked like he was on drugs and told us all how to trick rich people into being friends so they would refer people to us. Scouting doctor's offices decorations and inviting them to do things that they seemed interested in, etc. Creating shopping or tennis groups for ladies to hang out where you can mention you're a realtor next time one of them says they are looking to sell. It was all so sleazy.
After that, I took a step back, realized that I was in one of the best fields in the entire country. Decided to suck it up and move forward, realizing that my worst days were better than most other folks best.
Since doing that I've done a lot more training and tried to ensure I get stronger and the things that interest me the most. I do scaled agile training and consulting to help create environments that will help organizations work more effectively together and prevent programmer burnout. I started focusing my energy on finding ways to fix the issues that caused my initial burnout.
It's going well so far. Picked up a good bit of consulting work and will probably be teaching some training courses fairly regularly in the future. It's nice to have an outlet to fix things that matter to me.
I've also left jobs that burned me out for no real reason. For example, I was on a project where there were two of us holding down a critical piece of software. After hearing we will get more engineers for the Nth time I just gave up and left. I couldn't do the constant on-call, being the liaison for bugs and everything, etc.
I also deliberately avoid going into management to fix my burnout because you simply just transmute your burnout into a different form. What you need is a break. You may not wish to quit your job but it is important that you minimize your work as much as you can possibly and focus on yourself. Given you are working double a normal schedule you may even consider saving up enough money to take a month off and then looking for a new job.
Option 1: Pivot
You need to analyze what you still enjoy, if anything, and what areas you would like to pivot to and hopefully excel in.
Management is a clear option, but not everyone's cup of tea. Maybe you could utilise your analytical skills in a completely different area outside of software development? For example, I've recently moved from a developer role into the company's Learning and Development manager - it's a dream (especially because nobody in this area has an engineering mindset).
Take what you're good at, see where you can grow, add value and find joy and then put a plan in place to aim for that.
Option 2: Break
People take sabbaticals for a reason. Maybe a complete 6 month break is an option. Or if not now, then in a year's time. It depends on your financial and personal circumstances of course.
I burnt out playing piano in my youth (I was aiming for concert training at the time), took a two year break after university, couldn't listen to any Classical music during that time, then one day turned on the radio and fell in love with it again. Now it's my favourite hobby. Breaks help if circumstances permit it.
Option 3: Less is More
During the lockdowns, I started to burn-out in my role because I was not speaking to anyone in person anymore. So I made it a deliberate practice to meet and talk with people as much as possible. 5pm - laptop off, talk with my family, meet friends, go for a run, place soccer with the local club, anything to get away from work, switch off and talk to people. Just listening to their complaints somehow helped me deal better with mine.
The cult of constant productivity is strong in this culture. Try to recognize it and resist it. Don't rest so you can be more productive (I often hear this) - rest because you are a human being who has worth regardless of how productive you are. Rest because you realize you are finite and have a finite amount of energy to give. Rest because you need to. Consider practicing sabbath - sure that's a term usually associated with certain religions - but the concept is applicable even if you're not religious. Pick a day to disconnect. Don't try to be productive. Get out in nature and let your mind wander. Disconnect from social media. Try to connect with yourself, others and nature again.
Switched careers to dev work and enjoy it a lot more. As others have said enforcing a healthy WLB and 40 hour week has helped a lot.
I dont dread going to work anymore. I view work as part of my day rather than my entire day. I also try to do something with my lunch break other than sit at my computer. I go to some type of exercise class, because I enjoy it, many days. Bike/run with my dog others.
So Monday isnt, ugh the start of another week of work. Monday is a day where I do some work, go to a jujitsu class in the middle of the day, do some more work, walk my dog at 5, make dinner with my wife, play a little video games or read, and then get to wind down for the day.
Nothing work related on my phone. Notifications shut off on my computer. Slack gets closed at 5. Laptop gets closed at 5. Once in a while I need to do something extra for work but as long as that is rare then its easier to keep the balance.
I am working again for almost 2 years now, but I dare to say my burnout is not yet over, but ather under control. I have a very good manager and he teamed me with a coworker that acts as a buffer between me and the other departments. I have daily meetings with my co-worker and let him decide when solutions I develop are 'good enough', even if I see plenty room of imporovement. I work 95% of my time from home, but I have a seperate working room. Closing the door of that room means end of the working day for me. This really works.
From my first week out I have been visiting a psychiatrist and have been practicing yoga. 2 activities I would recommend everyone, even to those not (yet) in a burnout. The psy sessions really helped a lot, not only to identify what were the real causes of my burnout, but also working towards a solution for each of them.
I can really say, I do enjoy my work again, although it will never be the same as it once was. Even now I make progress every week, little things I wasn't able to do anymore are coming back bit by bit.
I see lot's of 'care less' advices. I'd like to adjust this a little: Only care when you're in control of it, and even then try to balance.
Now I am back at the same startup in the same role after a 1.5 year break. I always enjoyed the work, just was burnt out. And this farm project helped take my mind of that work.
If it's the latter, it generally comes back, but you might need to change job or workplace.
Over the years I've worked plenty times 84-94 hour weeks for months at a time, but that was project work with a foreseeable end and in a fully catered mining/construction camp or offshore where they made your bed every day for you, meals on tap etc etc.
But a few times I had to do the same hours close to home and going home every night, and it just killed me, the overheads are all yours so a lot harder, plus family don't get you have no free time, because they can see you.
So, it's not just the hours, it is also the structure around them, if there is actual light at the end of the tunnel, and so on.
1. Therapy - it turns out a lot of my burnout was due the ways that I had grown to handle hard situations breaking down. I needed to process how I dealt with success and failure and hard situations. Ultimately it’s similar to the “care less” advice but I couldn’t have gotten there without therapy.
2. Time off - this was a tremendous luxury, but I took about 6 months off. For the first month I did nothing but help my kids do remote Covid school. After that I started trying to work through where I was at. I started meditating, reading books on self-compassion, burnout, and career changes. I started exploring potential career changes. After a while, I started getting the itch to program and worked on some personal projects. This was really useful for processing that I still enjoyed programming.
3. Figure out why the previous job didn’t work. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about why the previous job was hard for me. Turned out it was the slow pace of decision making and diffuse accountability that made driving projects really stressful for me.
4. Find a job that checks the boxes… once I realized I still enjoyed writing code and had figured out what I didn’t want, I was able to optimize my job search and ask the questions I needed to during the process to find something we’ll-suited for me. It’s possible to be wrong here, either about the causes or about what the new job will offer, so I gave myself some slack here; nothing is perfect. 5. Medication - even after I started my new job, I still dealt with some burnout-y feelings, after conversation with my therapist, I got a prescription for a relatively low dose. This wasn’t magic, but it has helped me reset my baseline feelings and approach things with more ambivalence.
If you don't, resize you're list untill you can steal away a 1.5 hour lunch break each day. If you're doing something like hitting the gym or running you'll find you have a lot more energy and generally feel better. That may not solve the problem of liking your work, but you'll at least be in good shape and rested to deal with it.
If anyone calls you out on the long lunch breaks, just cancel / don't attend meetings to make up for missed time. and block book weeks and months of calander time out with complex sounding meetings no one is invited to.
Give yourself space. You're probably still burnt out a bit.
Generally, the best way to regain enthusiasm is timeout, perspective, and a change of environment. This has never been easier than today, with increased tolerance for remote work, many services facilitating remote offices and mail, and increasingly popular digital-first financial and government services.
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. - H. H. Williams
... quote via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
There is a good chance you can see 80% of the benefit by taking only 20% of the time off that I did. Start with a 2 week vacation and then notice how after 2 days you're itching to get back to work on something. Resist the urge, let it build. After two weeks go back to work and find that your first week back is great but don't get demoralized when your 2nd week you find yourself in the same rut. Your weekends are 32 waking hours (almost a full work week) where you can pursue activities that are not work and can be your own vacation (32 hours ~= 40) if you get up early and get out.
If that doesn't work then think seriously about taking 6 months off and see where your hobbys/desires take you.
Good luck!
But the central point is taking care of yourself. Finding tools that work with you.
For instance, I'm finding more and more that music is great, even being a bad player, just by playing a few notes here and there I found myself interested in the math and logic behind. SoMe2 movement on YouTube helped me find this.
Then I started doing simple programming exercises with different languages. Not the ones the market thinks are the most important ones. But ones that can bring back the "hacking" joy. Being a craftsman again.
For instance, I tried to start a side project with Elixir. It didn't work well so far. So now I'm just using exercism.io to do that. Basically, finding the smallest piece that you can handle, truly.
At the same time, you need to find people that you can talk about openly. You'll be surprised that people around also don't take their time to think about them.
I took a few months off (in SF, that burned through my savings) and had a nice long think about my relationship to my job/career. Ended up moving out of the Bay Area because I wanted hobbies and to be able to meet people who weren’t in tech.
IMO boundaries are really important. I work a max of 40 hours a week as a rule (always been salaried) and force myself to leave my work desk at 5PM (even if I’m having fun working on something and want to continue). I only work after hours if there’s a page or something similarly urgent.
I’d also recommend a hobby or a sport (programming is ok just make sure it’s not work related stuff)
So far it’s working, but I guess I could always become a float plane pilot in Alaska, or do something with bikes if I got tired of software.
TLDR: learn to chill and enjoy your career and free time doing the things you like most, with the people you like the most.
I decided to get back to a technical role (from management) because it's what got me excited about tech in the first place; but I have become very protective of my time.
MY TIME is just that, and not for sale, and non-negotiable.
I don't mind not being the best in the room, and I feel it's better that my younger colleagues get a chance to take charge while I provide support when needed.
Focus on the important things, family, hobbies, friends, building your network, and enjoying your free time. In tech you can always have a nice career and a nice salary, even if you're not at "the top"... learn to chill and enjoy your career and the wonderful opportunity you have in this golden age of technology because it won't last forever.
I decided to make a change in my work-life. I decided to only take jobs/contracts that I'm excited to work on. For me, that largely means graphics and game-engine programming. It's a tremendous amount of work to learn those skills, but when I'm working on graphics programming I feel like I'm programming for myself 90% of my day's.
I guess my advice here is (if you can) walk away, take some time off to recover, and you'll remember why you started programming.
Twenty five years ago I began working on a large project that had no chance of success because of an impossible schedule. I was one of just a few senior people who had been asked to support it, while most of the team consisted of new-hires. (The reason for this was the classic "they won't know that it's impossible, so maybe they can do it" strategy.) After about a year and with some success, things began to go wrong. In order to get things done faster, the team had neglected documentation on the first build (of 13). So even though the first build was mostly on time, the whole team was so burned out that most of them had left. (Attrition was over 60% and many engineers became so disillusioned with their career choice that they switched to something else.) The new team was left with no documentation and no experience, but the impossible schedule remained. Management began having daily morning meetings (two hours) as part of our 12 hour day. Every morning we would re-plan the schedule and every day it would slip.
After working in this environment for almost two years, I moved on. Before I worked on this project I had a strong commitment to schedule and I would do whatever it took to make sure things were on time. After working this project I found that I never took any schedule seriously. I would do what I could to get things done, but I wouldn't work excessive hours or stress myself about being late. This coping mechanism has (mostly) helped me both in work and in life, but some program managers have viewed my attitude as insubordinate.
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2001-06-29-Boeing-Built-ICO-Sat...
https://casetext.com/case/boeing-satellite-sys-intl-inc-v-ic...
Unfortunately for your situation, I have almost never seen a dev fully recover from extreme burnout. If your case isn’t too severe you should immediately get away from code for an extended period of time until it becomes attractive to you again. Otherwise, don’t blame yourself but transition into a different field. Management is possible for individuals with ASD if you can put in the focus to learn social cues.
Companies tend to look at someone who's good in their role and say 'surely they'll be good at managing people in the same role'. But perhaps you're not suited for management due to any number of factors. Experiences bears out that I'm good at training. But I find training all day long and work travel incredibly exhausting. So moving to trainer wouldn't have worked for me.
I'd suggest trying to find an adjacent position to what you currently do while still being an individual contributor. Or maybe look for companies wanting principals or tech evangelists. Maybe that will put you onto something less draining for you.
That said, coding for fun recovered separately from that. When I was burned out, I did not find joy in writing code for fun anymore. Through Advent Of Code, I recovered that aspect.
Today (years later), I don’t get to code at work anymore, as I’m an Engineering Manager. Partly made the switch because I was burned out on coding again. And by not doing it as part of my day job, I find myself enjoying it more after work again. I now only code things that I actually want to - without deadlines etc.
I think what I have come to understand is that it’s a cyclical thing for me. At times I really want to write code, other times I just had enough of it for some months.
I worked very hard for a long time, whilst also trying to start my own SaaS products, and basically ended up not being able to do anything anymore. I couldn't bring myself to do any work. No amount of logic, rationale, money or anything was able to get me to care. I never took any leave, so I had something silly like 12 weeks of leave pay when I left. That plus savings, I took a 6 month break, and slowly got into freelancing as money was starting to run out.
Freelancing let me engage with work in a way that let me slowly build my enjoyment back up, and during this time I was able to build up new hobbies, start caring about old hobbies again, and start engaging with life properly. I did some cheap travel, I was always a gym nut but I got into mountain biking too, I was outdoors a lot.
I was fairly adamant I'd never work a 9-5 again. Then the pandemic happened, and work was good, but I was looooneley. I missed the hustle and bustle of the city, banter with workmates and after-work pints at the pub.
So this year I started another office job, I don't do a full week, and I clock in and out on the dot. I doubt I'll be in the office forever, but it is really great right now and I'm enjoying caring about the work again. Eventually I'll move on as everyone does, and hopefully it'll be to something not in an office.
It has also helped to have goals outside of work, during my time away from full time work I was able to dig deep and really consider what I wanted my work-life to look like in 10, 20, 30 years. Knowing what that could look like gives me a purpose to work toward, and I find that takes a lot of the FOMO/anxiety out of work. One burning question I always had during burnout was "Is this all life is?" and it was important to take the time to figure out that the answer is no.
Everyone's financial / family / etc situation is different, so do what works for you, but I think there's actually a pretty broad range of options you've got:
- Do nothing but reconnect with family/friends for an entire month - Do something, but not programming, and compensated if you need it, for N months - If situation allows, travel to a place you never expected to live
My guess is you'll end up with one of two outcomes, both good:
- You'll spend 2-3x the time you'd planned, because you're loving it so much - You'll end up rushing back into your engineering career, because you've hit on an idea or opportunity that you can't pass up
I didn't heal from burnout. I went into mgmt. And found some room to grow there. Only for it to be taken away by higher up.
Now I am looking for career change.
Your high intensity feelings are built on three pillars: growth in your work; time with community; and work on your spiritual side.
If you are agnostic, spend time volunteering and seeing the fruits of your labor for spirituality.
If you cannot grow in your work, start looking for new kinds of work. Could be a new subject. And Or a youtube channel.
If you don't have a community in person, you are in trouble. Find someone. Anyone.
Upward trajectory in any of the three subjects lifts spirits.
And don't ever get so excited again that you give it more time than its worth. Coding has the tendency to do that.
A couple jobs ago, I worked for a company in the Education disruption space and COVID essentially killed the culture. It was always a big "political activism" company, but the rhetoric got cranked to 11 with COVID and it was incredibly hard to get work done in the same way I used to. The cure here was to give myself more time, I realized here I had been sacrificing a lot for employers who didn't give two shits about me.
> whenever I’m coding, it just feels like an enormous effort to get anything done
What does feel effortless and get you in the flow? If the answer is "nothing", get checked out for depression. If the answer is something else, then maybe you've simply outgrown coding as a pleasurable activity. It happens.
Within an org or job type after making a change. Yes.
I learned long ago to maintain hobby's that scratch certain itches that my career also does (ie: engineering, problem solving, analytical thinking etc), but work with different levels of 'criticality'.
I also matain hobby's that work different parts of my brain (ie: music/creativity and fishing/hunting/no tech).
Combined they help with burnout.
What i have noticed in the last year or two is that I am burning out on life, not work. Work is fine. But people in general are burning me out. Again, that has had me focus more on the isolating type hobbies as an escape (ie: fishing/working on things in the house etc)
I suggest to you just coast by for a while and focus on health. Go to gym, swimming, sauna, walk in the morning, squash, yoga, dance, mtb, play social pc/board games etc. Best of it’s something active and social.
I am very ambitious by nature and have to resist attempting too big steps and actively care about my health/balance.
I really encourage physical movement to manage stress and have healthy energy levels then some social hobby.
EDIT: you may need this https://youtu.be/YHxwY3Fz2gU
Like many said, caring less can be good, but only if that means you don't take things at a personal level. It's never about ourselves, it's about the others. Greatest truth I've ever learned.
Overall, a great hack in life is to develop some faith in the fact that things work out by themselves over time.
Invest in yourself however you can, that means doing some sport you love and/or go see a therapist. What I'm realizing is that I have a lot of power over how I feel, way more than I previously believed. Make a conscious effort to let go of negative thoughts when they arise.
Make sure your house is in order, it's an extension of yourself. Do whatever you need to feel satisfied, it's your life. It is a mistake not to live it the way you want to. Be kind and patient with yourself.
Good luck.
I joined a start-up that was okay with taking as much as they could, and I hadn't yet developed the skill or mind-set to say no and draw clear boundaries between work and my personal life. I consistently worked evenings and weekends.
I then left that job for a 'promotion', which ended up being a worse company and an even worse team. I also gave them everything that I had to 'prove' myself in my new job, and carry the load, and then they ended up laying me off, just before covid.
I was off work for a few months 'recovering' (free-time without the enjoyment of it). I told myself that I would never give work everything that I had again, ever.
After landing a new job, I followed the promise that I made to myself, even when I was certain it looked 'bad' that I was leaving on time every day. However, after delivering on projects, my team and company grew respect for me and it never once became a discussion point. I spent the next couple of years enjoying the new free time, spending it with friends, family, and on hobbies, etc. I believe that my ability to deliver in the normal work window was a product of a good team, and good leadership (the lead engineers did a great job in how they built the architecture, so the developers can work and deploy mostly independently and autonomously - we're remote).
However, side projects still felt like work, so I converted my desktop from Windows to EndeavourOS (arch), and now, when I am enjoying leisure time on my computer and feel a spark of interest, it's quick and simple to open up vscode and start hacking away. Often, when I feel like 'playing a game', I actually just want to be creative, and it's allowed me to start programming projects that inspire me without thinking too much about it. I think this was a key move to re-inspire me to code on my own time. Another cool thing, is that at work you're typically locked into a certain set of tools (often older), so it's fun to pick up shiny new toys and tinker with them, with no deadline or formal requirements.
However, I switched jobs to a startup where the work I do feels like it matters. I work with a small team and my love for development/engineering has returned. I don't burn myself out by working 10+ hours a day and genuinely enjoy going to work.
My advice might not be what you're looking for, but switching jobs into a small company with a mission that is acceptable (no ad-based jobs for me, please) has been a huge benefit for my mental health.
It worked for me every time.
* daily meditation practice, with a serious meditation tradition.
* fortnightly therapist appointment, weekly if you're running hot at any point
* meditation retreat every six months
When I say 'serious meditation tradition', I mean one that has a few thousand years behind it. Tibetan Buddhist was the path that worked for me, but there are lots of others. 'Mindfulness' meditation, detached from a tradition, is a waste of time for your purposes.
Happy to answer questions, but this cleared up burnout (and lots of other internal friction sources!) for me.
You have to be doing something you are interested in, and have full control over, so you can rediscover what programming used to be like for you.
Take things slowly, and your capacity for work and motivation will increase over time. In the beginning you will still have days where you can’t bring yourself to work, but just allow yourself those days, and eventually you will recover.
There is a section on burnout in this talk that I found helpful: https://youtu.be/CCVVLAs9mJU
1. When I came back I managed expectations and made it clear I would be taking things slow
2. I was assigned on a backburner project with an old timer who was in the same situation as me and we hit it off.
3. We did not care about the project, but we cared about the craft. You know what I mean ? Despite the project, the teams, the arguing and the practices and the bad managers and [...], ..., etc.
I hope it helped. I since then changed job and I realized my former work environment was toxic and extremely incompatible with my personality type.
After some time I could enjoy the challenges at work, but I've almost stopped programming at home. I still do some embedded firmware programming for my electronics projects, but programming is no longer my main hobby.
It was weird at first, but at least this way I can enjoy work and enjoy going home.
I've been burned out a few times, some I didn't think I'd recover from at all. Each time though, learning something new is what brought me out of it.
Good luck.
I tried everything I could imagine and read about, no matter what I did the two most important ingredients were “time” and “therapy”.
I guess “exploring other things that I enjoy” would be a third ingredient. E.g. I started playing music again for the first time since college. Music eventually led to (necessary) MIDI hacking which got me programming again.
If the burnout is not yet crushing and putting me into a black dog bitter mentality I've found that taking a leave of absence for a few weeks can often lead to recovery. That leave means dropping all work, all work-related communications, all browsing of tech-related news/info, and anything else that will lead my mind back to a work mentality. If the company caught on fire and burnt to the ground, I would only know about it when I returned from leave. I try and change up my routine and stimulus during that leave; taking long walks in areas I've not visited, trying an entirely new and alien hobby, or generally seeking out experiences that are unfamiliar. It's basically an intentional effort to get my brain to context-switch.
Once I return from leave, I sit down and write out what led me down the path of burn-out and then work with my direct reports to minimize or eliminate those things in order to ensure my long-term employment. If they are unwilling to cooperate, I quit.
I did have a bout of burnout 15 years ago or so that was seriously deep, and in that case I left the tech industry for a few years and ignored it with great enthusiasm. Eventually my interest re-ignited and I spent a couple of months getting back up to speed and re-entered programming.
One thing I can tell you is that walking away for a few years isn't a fatal decision for your career. Despite the FOMO hype and paradigm-of-the-month tone of most tech news and vendors, if you've got the mentality, experience, and skill of a good programmer returning after a few years hiatus requires a fairly short on-ramp for getting back to whatever the current hotness and "state of the art" may be.
I can say that pivoting from one burnout situation to another potentially stressful environment (your unease with management certainly qualifies) is a quick way to an even worse case of burnout and degraded mental health, or at least it has been for me.
Good luck and I hope you find some useful guidance in the many replies I'm sure you'll receive here on HN.
Right now though, I’m not in a position to take time away and I’m in a little rut. But the cure will again be some small wins and exercise to move me forward again.
I was severely burned out in the past year and was very much in your situation few months ago. What helped me was reducing the scope of my work and taking the slow lane until I feel fine. Exercising, power naps and meditation also helped big time. I'm now in a much better shape and I would recommend it to anyone who's in the similar position.
I found a new job that pays more, lets me code more, and interrupts me less. Now I'm much happier to go into work even if it's just CRUD APIs.
It takes a lot of time to recover from burnout, but it's definitely doable.
I’m ASD too. I’m engineering manager and tech lead. Management drains energy, coding refuels energy.
Maybe you should aim to just being an IC? ICs are well paid.
You could try quiet quitting for a bit and see if the sparks comes back.
Hyper-fixate on something else for a bit?
The solution is often very similar.
First, take a medical leave.
Second, let time heal your wounds. Even if not visible, the suffering from depression can be worse than when it's physical. And it take way more time to heal.
Then, once they went through this process, most people leave their job and do something else or go somewhere else.
I think a bunch of people here advise to "care less", but in my case I realized it was hard for me to care more because I was in pain... (emotional, physically tired, etc).
Things started to change when I paid closer attention to my environment.
.Make sure you pick your friendships carefully. A crisis is a good chance to see who's reliable in your life. When receiving good advice, it is easy to ignore it or dismiss it. Really pay attention to trustworthy advise.
.Maybe controversial but... I stopped “giving for free”. You may not be standing on a place where you can be so generous. It can be draining to be selfless. So, still help people, be kind and generous, but do it for people that deserve it. Giving while being con, manipulated, or gaslighted depletes your energy and resources.
.Don't be controlled by your emotions, but also don't ignore your gut feelings ... factor them in while making decisions. Avoid extremes.
.Remove people from your life that may be harming you. Gaslighting has become a buzzword but for a reason... Beware of this and other kinds of psychopathic behaviors [1].
.Cut off whatever is not helping your main objective. Avoid having too many goals, projects and hobbies at once.
.Get rid of “ambiguous friendships": If you ever asked yourself, is this person really my friend? ... I'd say, it is likely they aren’t.
.Some side activities may not be bad per-se, but avoid exposing yourself to an energy draining environment. Say, belonging to some sort of team, like sports or dance, where nobody ever is on the same page. Even “good” activities like fitness related ones, could be consuming too much time? Perhaps refocus is needed.
In short, my environment was draining me of my ability to feel engaged at work. Some things in my life were not even bad per-se, but it was a problem of lack of focus: I identified my main source of stress (my lack of engagement with work), but found that removing all the energy drainers and distractors made it a lot easier to engage with work.
Find a healthy environment with a truly meaningful mission and work with people who are sincere, care and are not there for the money.
It is possible to get joy back into your working life.
Burnout for me was caused by feeling like I had no control over the amount of stress and pressure I was under.
Enjoyment came back when I felt free to pursue leisurely interests and work wasn’t the centre of my life. There was a long process of recovery after removing myself from the situation contributing to my burnout.
Working towards becoming a pianist now.
Tutoring prospective students as well remains interesting, provided there’s genuine interest on their part.
If you can't afford to we have plenty of work to do and are hiring engineers - breck@pldb.com
Also, watch Caddyshack on repeat.
Also LeetCode grind was mind-numbingly-demotivating but unfortunately that is part of the deal now. The good news is that once I decided that I am leaving my previous job, I felt great overall.
Maybe you enjoyed building a website with html? That's not really coding, but just do that. Build a small little website, only html for fun and see where it goes.
1. Do only what's necessary working or the bare minimum if people don't mind;
2. Enjoy your time outside work: play games, watch series/movie/tv, read, etc;
3. Learn new things outside work from the field of your profession;
4. Try to practice these new things in your work;
5. Repeat until vacations or new plans.
I had the really same experience (except only 13 years in). What I found helpful is having autonomy over the project. Having the autonomy allows me to achieve better results with less effort. Maybe that is something that could help you as well.
I remember reading a post on HN where a person said they took them close to decade to be close to feel mostly fully functional after a major burnout. I'm sure some people recover faster, but I would agree that it can take even longer.
I had a massive burnout about 8 years ago and only now feel like parts of "me" are coming back. My recovery took longer because I had to keep working and I was at the age where I think a lot of people naturally become jaded with corporate structures. So it was a work induced burnout that later overlapped with a natural philosophical crises.
First of all, I don't think I'll ever "love" what I do again. At every job I've had after my first few entry level ones, my job responsibilities are ever increasing and a lot of those responsibilities are organizational things I have to do, not stuff I actually enjoy doing. What's there love in that?
>If so, how did you manage to do it?
1. Time, Time and more Time. Be patient with yourself. Forgive your own failings and the forgive yourself for not recovering at the speed you feel you should.
2. If you have to keep working, find the right job with the right management with goals you agree with. This can take a few job changes. Changing jobs is tough and that in itself can add to the burnout. I did a few job changes and eventually took a step back career and salary wise, but that was the best decision I made for my long term sanity.
3. Highwaylights already said this, but learn when to care and when to not care. Too much caring = burning out
4. When you are ready, try to find the joy in your personal hobbies without any timeline pressures. There's this Richard Feynman letter or article where he talks about how he felt burned out on Physics and found the joy again by doing physics for fun in his free time, not for work or for publishing another paper. Work on stuff without pressure. Take a year to go through a technical (or non-technical) book/course that would take a month under other circumstances. Finding a tiny bit of joy somewhere is the first step to finding more of it.
5. Realize that you may never fully recover and maybe that is a good thing. Feeling like something permanently broke in you helps with caring less.
6. I feel like I've got some sort form of PTSD against a certain type of manager/management. Certain personalities and keywords really upset me. Finding ways to manage that has helped me a lot as I learned I need to be more confident with setting boundaries.
7. Did I say Time already?
Perhaps it always was, but in the past you were brute-forcing the solution to the problem by throwing more hours at it and now you're not.
It's usually solely about meaning.
If there's no meaning for you, your body and subconscious will scream about it sooner or later.
Personally, I recommend the bouldering. It's an intellectual puzzle using your body.
I just quit when I got like this. There’s always another org.
It is an ongoing thing, but I found friends with the same values and we are trying to change the environment that cause the burnouts. At the same time I have to convince myself that coding and managing is not the actual root cause of the burnout.
Having friends who share the same sentiments helps. But the most important thing was to identify what exactly is the root cause and bash it.
Talking about it to your manager will help alot if your manager cares. In my case, my manager talked and get the head of department hire a veteran that becomes my mentor and take over some of my workload.
Hiring properly actually helps! It lets good people in. Once onboarded, they alleviate your burdens so you could think of strategies that to change the environment so it's better for everybody. This changed my mind about hiring people, since I previously had a bad experience with hiring when my company was in a hypergrowth phase.
In my case the cause was the classic pm-does-not-know-technical-stuffs-yet-plan-everything-ahead-behind-closed-door-and-say-the-final-decision. Fixed deadline, immature product desig that doesnt account for technical limitations. So often either we had to: 1.) Propose a fix now and add more to our plate so we crunch, or 2.) Not propose a fix and risk ourselves getting woken up in the future.
We kind of had to learn a bit of PM-ing so we "understand their language" and have the ability to persuade them into understanding what happens on the other side and making changes that beneficial for the whole team.
Things are changing slowly. Processes changes within the orgs for the better. Some external influences still could reverse the progress. But a celebration for small steps is in order! Party with the people you care and cares about you.
I have since quit that job, and have been at my current company for the past year. When I started at this company, in the beginning, I still felt the burnout from my last job. And then I stopped caring, and all of that burnout feeling went away.
At this company I'm at now, I'm still an SRE. We are severely understaffed, working on containerizing our apps and deploying to Kubernetes, and management continually puts unrealistic timelines on our OKRs. There is too much work and not enough people. So I no longer care. I no longer care about longevity at a company. I put in my 40 hours a week, and I clock out and spend time with my family and doing things I enjoy. Life is too short to care so much about a company that would likely not think twice about laying me off/firing me if the situation deemed appropriate.
tldr; try not caring as much and see how liberating it feels.
I spent 6 years at a startup before realizing it was never going to be successful and I walked away (I was the founding engineer and mostly handled the PM work, it felt like walking away from significant other). I was doing the same, crazy 70-100 hour weeks sucking up all my energy. I had no energy or doggedness to get to the bottom of even the simplest issue. That was 2012. I'd been an engineer for 15 years, and I figured I was now too old to keep up. I gave up.
Since then I've been working Product/delivery roles, which I enjoy very much, but there are frustrations (no EM likes a technical PM looking over their shoulder). I tried to code in my spare time on things but the doggedness to learn/fix complex stuff just wasn't there anymore. Also life gets in the way. There are always more important things to do when you've got kids than spend time noodling with code.
Fast forward 7 years I was trying to get a game running for my son, an old 90's Win95 title. I started noodling with Docker and python. Very simple scripts. Suddenly, one night, I found it was still there, all that excitement about code, all that interest and inquisitiveness that had previously been hidden/suppressed came out bursting out. Before long I was pouring code out like hot coffee.
I'm still working my confidence back up to a place where I feel I could interview for a JOB doing it - but for putting time into my side-projects and noodling with Apps, I have all the energy and focus in the world.
TL;DR - I burnt out and changed roles, continuing to support engineering teams. A few years ago I did some code and concentrated on learning, not delivering, and that seemed to unblock me.
Nope
I got pretty burnt out in my second last role. A change in tech leadership saw the arrival of someone who took to shitting on everything, suggesting instead the combination of several OTS products. They were gone before the project even really took off, but the effects were already in full swing; culture destroyed, us vs. them mentality, job insecurity, loss of autonomy due to Committee For Improvement, high turnover, backfilling with anyone with a pulse. All of these problems were left to fester, or worse in some cases, exacerbated; project devs started to leave, so they upped project dev pay.. guess what that did to the morale of non-project devs.
There was no escape; I couldn't simply put my head down and keep doing good work. Material was being disseminated by the org to justify the big project, and it specifically called out my team's applications as unfit for purpose now and into the future. Particularly frustrating were the outright lies in the material about my team's applications, presumably used to build a narrative that the big project was the only way forward. The big project was penny-wise pound-foolish; they could send 100 staff on multiple team-building days, but refused to furnish their team with a key piece of $2k equipment (sorry for vagueness: trying to stay anon here), instead demanding my team share ours. There were ridiculous exercises mandated where developers had to document "how" to do their job so that it could be compared with "how" a developer job would be performed, post big project. But I think worst of all was that myself and my team were no longer able to work with smart people; the product owners were backfilled with imports from the org's call center. Every day seemed to be a fight just to write good software and keep the product afloat for the 100,000+ individuals using it.
Leading up to this, each year I used only about 25% of my yearly leave; I worked hard, took work home with me, and genuinely wanted to grow myself. When the big project rolled around, I felt my investment going south. All the knowledge, rapport, and comfort I'd established was about to evaporate. The value of my team's work was being actively undermined by the org, and any new work inherently had no real value. Before I left, we quietly completed a 5+ year project consolidating our legacy platforms, and we got a 10-second mention in a unit meeting.
In the last year I was starting to get physical manifestations of stress; headaches, unpleasant pangs in my chest, anxiety, grinding my teeth in my sleep. This was all a first for me. I took a month of my leave, but that didn't help. I took another month, 2 months later, but that didn't help either. So I quit. It took several months before the 'symptoms' eased, but I still get some of them when I get stressed.
I thought I'd be ready for another job in 3-4 months. It's been 16 months and I'm still dreading it. I took a job about 7 months in, but it was shit in its own unique ways so I left after a couple of months.
In my time off, I've built a couple of little things for fun, consciously trying to fight any thoughts saying I need to make progress, or I need to build something worthy of publishing, or I need to learn a new technology so that my time off wasn't a "waste" in some recruiter's eyes. It infuriates me that the developer is expected to spend close to 100% of their time generating value for an employer OR improving their ability to do so. It has actually been good to work on these little projects, and has confirmed that I do love writing software, but I'm starting to believe my career will kill my passion for writing software.
OP, I found this to be helpful in understanding my burnout: https://commoncog.com/g/burnout/. My post certainly doesn't have any answers for you, but at least you know you're not alone.
After reflecting on an incident with my friend for a long time, I came to realize that taking days off every once in a while is not enough, and what maybe have saved me from burnout all these years is my habit of taking time off every day.
I have lots of activities out of work, for example, going to the gym three times a week, writing this blog, making Youtube videos, running my farm fishing business, reading consistently, and running my own SaaS and Open-source projects. Those are all self-imposed restrictions to get out of work on time and put my mind and body into different activities. Every day, I do something out of work for at least 2 hours, and I restrict work for the time it needs to be restricted. Once I started doing that, my productivity increased drastically even tho I started working fewer hours.
Worth noting that all my other activities outside of work are not time-sensitive, which means I can do them when I have time, and if I need more dedication for something, I can easily make it fit into my agenda. For that, I use the 2 days rule (I am allowed to skip any of that activity once but not twice in a row). This is important because having a hard agenda can increase your chances of burnout. The only hard activity I have in my schedule is to work 8 hours 5 days a week. The others I can move to best fit my needs that week.
My life hack to do it to Have a daily “Hour of something.” Having a personal routine helps you achieve goals out of work on a daily bases. I recently introduced two new routines in my day.
One hour of cleaning where every day. For this hour, I will clean or organize something in my house. This one hour helps my digital detox and cleans my mind. I liked the cleaning because it is practical and infinity and it gives me a sense of compliment, as a side effect my house is cleaner and neater.
The next, I am still incorporating, but I call the “hours of reading,” and it is 30 minutes at the moment. After lunch, I take 30 minutes to read a book instead of jumping back to work. This moment is when I calmly sit in the middle of the day and turn off my mind not to think about work; with that, I can keep up with my reading and learn something new.
These two routines grantees me at least 1:30 hours a day of not working and gets my mind and body back to a normal state. I usually do my “cleaning hour” after work, so I use it as the commute back home time. Since I work from home, it takes me 30 seconds to disconnect from work, and I do not want to bring to my personal life any stress I collect over my day of work.
The idea that anyone should sustain focus and interest on any given thing for years on end, whether you're "neurotypcial", or ADHD, or ASD, is pretty ridiculous. We are more or less designed to be able to specialize but also grow into other things. The problem I see with tech is that we like to pretend that there's a variety of roles to grow into, but they're all more or less the same, and we're not all destined for management. Coding jobs fundamentally suck once you get beyond junior level because it's not the juniors companies need to fix bugs but seniors. Yet no one became a software developer because they wanted to fix bugs for a living. Sure sure, we all work on features at one point or another, but even those features are fraught with the caveat of navigating all the mounts of fixes to keep an insanely complicated system running. It makes about as much sense are having a committee write the next great American novel all while having two-week sprints and Jira tickets for plot holes.
At the same time, as an industry, we've made things very hard for ourselves. I'm of the opinion that all the tooling we've invented and all the "gee whiz" we've added to our apps kills the efficiency and enjoyment of working on them in the long term. The more tools we add, the more disagreement over those tools we can have, hence everyone is constantly in a flux of learning and considering tools that were written just yesterday "obsolete" or "antipatterned." Way too much time is spent on stupid shit like making web apps appear native, SSR, test coverage, preprocessors, transpilers, package managers, runtimes, whether a thing should be rewritten in Rust, whether a codebase should go back to vanilla JS, and so much more. To be fair, this probably isn't as true for iOS developers, but I'm sure they have their own self-imposed challenges.
So how do I manage it? I stopped caring so much. Jobs are supposed to have a level of suck, else they'd be hobbies rather than jobs. If you can tolerate the level of suck at a job, and the pay is worth that suck, then don't beat yourself up when you can't perform any better than you already are. Yes, you'll probably have to face that fact in performance reviews. But performance reviews are usually bullshit. Why? Because there's "always room for improvement." I've never experienced anything meaningful from a performance review. Whether the manager knows it themselves or not, performance reviews mainly exist to keep employees gaslit into thinking they've got to try harder. So I mostly ignore them. And if a company wants to let me go because I'm not productive enough, well, fine then. I'm actually trying my hardest. My hardest may not be good enough for them, so I'll take it elsewhere. I just don't have the drive to perform highly anymore because the "burnout" is here to stay. I can't restart my brain back to the state it was in when I got my first coding job. It is what it is.
Transitioning into another career is always an option, though it may be the most difficult option.
Don't apologize at all... that's what this website is for... free expression.
I'm on the autistic spectrum too, by the way, I just had a fistful of THC pills.
And just so we're clear... how do you define "work"? That's a loaded word.
I was nearly recruited into the CIA around the same time as Joshua Shulte and I'm approximately the same age as him. Here's a publicly available article about him:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-ca...
I've been burnt out since I had to make a joke about this not being high school at a yet another K Street cocktail event back around 2016.
Imagine someone being purposefully wrong in the same sing song tone bullies used to say "You can't be aggressive in school." and how their faces go white and their hands shake when you just smirk and go "we're not at school" and eye the letter opener you put on your desk after Charlie Hebdo -- it's like there's this set of people who repeat the same rhetoric as the 70s/80s/90s, with the difference being there is no draft, no great war, no big evil forcing anyone to make... so many choices people made between when I got my first job as a sandwich artist until today.
I haven't really finangled ending the burnout, found happiness, nor held a full time w2 role for a full year since the Obama administration... but I do have a weed card and a bunch of cash in my credit union's checking account after selling out of my IRA for a third time, because some folks in the autism community are less helpful about connecting you with full time roles if you prefer... adults.
Like for example, I did one interview with the Texas Department of Public Safety, who acknowledged they'd have hired me but had to hire someone else due to... veteran's preference?
Maybe I should have explicitly said I'd prefer to work someplace in private industry, for more money? I was raised Catholic, and Iraq was a war crime, so I'm limited in my options.
It was pretty frustrating being told that there are people who will misunderstand on purpose to the point you should alter your creative pursuits, and on a long enough timeline that starts to appear purposeful, especially paired with not connecting you with more practical roles.
I probably shouldn't be so sarcastic, but I'm unemployed and it's the weekend, so I don't really have much incentive to self censor in my replies to questions posted on the internet, especially when yet again my phone or whatever is acting up during spooky season -- the last time I felt this uncertain (and this annoyed that I shouldn't), I was telling people at a dinner that I don't want to help kill brown people with robots... but I'm hoping for a bit of a restart.
Anyways, I'd try to go for a hike or something if it's warm enough OP -- maybe go get yourself a cute little cortado and have a sit someplace you wouldn't normally go? It's the weekend... try not to think about "work". I've seen soooo many places during covid have one employee be rude to me as another sits in the corner doing nothing... and then the store closes (along with the whole company sometimes).
You might be getting overly anxious... try to chill out.
(And sorry if this comes off rude, I wrote it on the spot while cleaning out my little black book.)