This is a powerful piece that resonates with my own experience. I went through a period of severe burnout that took me a couple years to recover from. One of my later insights was that burnout doesn't merely entail working too much (although that's certainly part of it); burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc.
A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.
> burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
I authored this comment but can't go back to edit. Given that this sentiment appeared to resonate with HN, I just want to add that I write extensively on this theme in my book "Eating Glass." I just put the chapter titled "Burnout" up for free: https://markdjacobsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/eg-samp...
> burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
So much this. If you are putting in too much effort into something at work just because you care about it, this is a recipe for disaster.
If you're putting in extra work to learn valuable transferrable skills, that's fine - if that's the tradeoff you want to make.
But if you're just working your ass off for no reason, you're setting yourself up for a major let down.
This is precisely why I cringe anytime ANY executive/HR person in a company refers to the team as a "family"
No, areyou going to fucking fire Uncle Joe for being too drunk at thanksgiving and cut him off from the family will and make him sign a non-familial-secrets-disclosure promise?
Fuck that. You are not a family. HR is NEVER your friend.
I was once offered ~8K to non-disparage a company upon leaving.
Yeah - no thanks.
Yeah it's surprising how little control you end up with once you burn out. I got there and thought I could will myself through it. I was not even keeping up with my timesheeting, it took so much will power just to get through a day.
I learnt you have to take holidays, you can't sustain long hours for months at a time and if management is focusing in a different direction than your team it's time to leave.
It helps a lot to think your management knows what it's doing. If you're stressing out on the latest likely "swing and a miss" feature that you think they picked using a dart board and ransom-note cutouts from magazines, you can end up burnt out for a good long time.
I’m surprised by how hard it’s become to motivate myself to learn anything new - I used to read about and experiment with new technology pretty much all the time. Now I can barely work up the strength to learn something new even if it’s actually something that I’m working with.
Yep. I was recently asked by an interviewer what burnout means to me. I said it's a function of energy and reward. High energy expenditure paired with high reward is just rewarding work. It's when there's high expenditure with low reward that causes burnout.
Ah, this is on point. I've been struggling with this for years after having put so much energy in to try and put good work into a major website, only to be totally fucked over by ignorant managers and subsequently internalize this feeling of "why would I ever fucking put extra energy into any work again"
People who haven't experienced this are just lucky. They've been rewarded well for their energy, or they had an early stake, or they just never put much energy in because they were in a space where they could be productive. They've never been fired on their way up. They've never had to rely on savings for an entire year and have to battle algo challenges just to get a phone call while dealing with zero motivation for even writing code.
The reward, for me, also has to be more than just money. I get paid well, but when the work isn't intrinsically rewarding, I still risk burnout. That's why the highest paid engineers in the world still burn out.
(And then there's the guilt of "wow, what is wrong with me, I'm getting paid a bunch of money to do something I'm good at, why am I losing my mind?", but that thought process doesn't help much.)
I think too many people ( ones who did not have kids) threw themselves into work since Covid started.
Companies squeezed every ounce of productivity possible from employees.
I imagine most people who had never worked remotely pre-covid did not understand that you need to clearly demarcate you work and personal life when WFH.
Everyone was just thrust into this. And companies took advantage of the market uncertainty to basically exploit folks.
Shame on them and now the workers are retaliating by quitting en-masse, demanding they be treated better.
It's a paradigm shift with some of the power back in the hand of employees.
I agree with the end effect, but I question the intent on companies side. It feels like Hanlon's razer should be applied "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
My experience is companies/leaders are just other overworked people who fell into the same trap and allowed their employees to fall into the same trap, and a reckoning (increased attrition) is on the horizon.
"Upādāna is a Sanskrit and Pali word that means "fuel, material cause, substrate that is the source and means for keeping an active process energized".[1][2] It is also an important Buddhist concept referring to "attachment, clinging, grasping".[3] It is considered to be the result of taṇhā (craving), and is part of the dukkha (suffering, pain) doctrine in Buddhism."
This has been my experience. I have simply learned to look for emotional fulfillment and creative output elsewhere in my life and am far happier for it. I find I’m actually a lot better at my job when I have some distance from it. It allows me to connect with people — even at work — on a human level because I don’t particularly care about my actual work and basically forget about it as soon as I stand up from my desk.
Time is difficult, but I'm primarily unable to find the energy outside work for anything emotionally fulfilling or creative. I think this is why people are so motivated to find fulfillment in their work. Any time I have tried, my sleep, my work, and my life in general suffers, and I'm soon frustrated by the limited progress I can make.
A good day's work can be so draining as to leave me literally depressed. A good day, mind you - not hard, not bad, not stressful - just one where I am completely focused on work for 7-8 hours. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the nature of coding for a living.
This reminds me of some advice I got from a grad student as an undergrad -- "It's important to not care TOO much when doing research. Most things don't work out the way you expect and you'll always be disappointed or even biased when you are looking at your data."
I’ve seen it in the field as pouring your heart and soul into something and it did love you back but the supreme goal was achieved so it’s difficult to continue. You’re just sort of detached from it all since you got to the top of the mountain and there’s nowhere to go but down. There just isn’t the space to continue doing it like it was and it burns you out. You can only look back on that moment there were love streams.
_ “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”_
I guess you’re right though in that in the end it will never love you back. The wheel must continue to turn.
I have been basically, retired, for the last four years.
I’ve worked harder than I have in many years; all self-directed projects. I’ve been crafting a single iOS app, for the last ten months, and there’s months more to go.
Continuing the figure of "unrequited love", idealization plays a role - a simple misperception or distortion of what the state of affairs actually is. It's no coincidence that a "romance" used to refer to fantasy tales of adventure, like Treasure Island.
OTOH some seemingly impossible things couldn't have happened without a "vision". So... tilt away.
This almost exactly sums up the major issue of the times I've been burnt out. Combination of high passion for the project and a toxic, hostile or unsafe/unsupportive environment.
>"I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc."
I thought this was a good insight, that there are more causes of burnout than simply working too many hours. Thanks for sharing.
I think this conception of burnout rings true for me also after living the best part of a decade in a non-immigration accepting society. Sometime ones executive functioning just wont show up, and you lose the send of how to get more of what you want and less of what you don't want.
This person understands what actual burnout is. You get really seriously fried, like 'can't function in any sense' fried. The references to 'you have to decide what we'll watch on netflix because I literally cannot choose a thing' rang very true to me.
I generally needed more than a couple months but less than a year, and the removal of whatever it was that I'd burnt myself to a crisp trying to control. Over my lifetime that's been everything from overcoming homelessness, starting a business, transitioning the business to Patreon, trying to have a relationship: it's been a lifelong process of learning that I can't have things (even very desirable things) just by pushing harder to earn them. Quite often I just have to give up and not have the thing.
The more I learn that, the less I'm riding the edge of burnout.
I got burned out so bad a few year back (2015-my fist and only time) I was not able to focus on anything for almost 14 months.
Still feels surreal thinking about it. Had parts for rebuild my rack and everything in it and was not able to gather my thought to set anything up. I failed to install even a basic ubuntu server in 1-2 tries.
Apart from tending to the flowers in the garden, cutting grass and cooking... I was good for nothing. Watching a movie? Autoplay on youtube was it. Just sit there until 2AM watching <random>. Shopping for groceries? good joke. Sleeping? I was dreaming I'm in the office half the time. I had a flipping server chasing me down the rail track a few times because it didn't like the transcoding settings. Eh. Not pleasant but I'm counting it as a lesson in life.
I digress. What I'm trying to say is that I envy people that can get out of it so fast.
Got burn out too. I've incredible hard time to have my brain to function properly even after 1.5 years of no work. Non functioning brain means (at 45 years old):
- you understand new concepts (in my case maths) very slowly (that is about 10x times slower than before)
- you memorize very slowly (I can reliably compare myself to 22 years old students, I need about 5 times more time to memorize a course than them; and I was a very good student at their age).
- anything even remotely stressful is tough. Remotely stressful = plan something to do the week end; cook a new recipe (I'm a good cook and I used to love cooking); do paperwork; listen to the kids for more than 15 minutes;...
So burn out is (as said by many) a completely different thing than "exhausted". Burn out means : your brain is fucked up for a very long period of time.
The hardest part for me is to think about the future. I just can't. And that generates a lot of anxiety... And that adds to the very bad shape...
> ...I was dreaming I'm in the office half the time. I had a flipping server chasing me down the rail track a few times because it didn't like the transcoding settings.
That sounds like a full on PTSD! Hope you're feeling better since and the "bad chi" got purged from your internal storage, so to speak.
This is a good opportunity to point out (to everyone, not just this parent comment) that there is a lot of overlap between burnout and depression.
It's a common mistake for people to think that because they can identify the cause of their current state (work-induced burnout from a bad job, for example) that their symptoms can't be from depression. That's not true. They're not mutually exclusive. In fact, they overlap heavily both in symptoms and possible treatments.
The good news is that many of the techniques designed to address depression, such as CBT, self-guided therapy, exercises, and so on, translate quite effectively to helping with burnout, too. In fact, a burned-out person can pick up a CBT book or sign up with a therapist and drop right into helpful exercises to begin restoring a sense of agency, rebuilding autonomy, unlearning negative thought patterns, and other things that contribute to getting stuck in burnout.
Yeah I agree. I always thought burnout and depression were the same thing. How I’ve previously (maybe incorrectly) differentiated is:
Disclaimer: Trying to be concise, I understand depression is a spectrum, different for everyone, and a lot more complex than these few words.
Depression: You’re basically fried and can’t make decisions in any/all “verticals” (i.e. self-love, romance, professional, etc) not even to leave the house.
Burnout / Heartbroken: A subset of depression for a specific vertical in life. Burnout is a depression from a profession, but you still enjoy/can go on dates or hang out with friends. Heartbroken is a depression from romance, but you still enjoy/can work to distract yourself, take up a hobby, etc.
Agreed. Burnout and depression may overlap. In my case, they did not. I’ve been burned out. I’ve been depressed. Burned out is better :) If you think you might be depressed, get some help.
Joking aside, for me the therapy is the same for either. I need to selfishly attend to my own agenda for a while, and build something just because. My workshop is my therapy zone. YMMV.
A quick and dirty way to distinguish between work/stress fatigue and depression would be simply if you don't recover even when removed from work for a significant period of time.
Reading this I'm wondering if I simply lack the willpower to get that burned out. When I start getting miserable and overloaded for a while, I tend to "burn out" in smaller ways and for shorter periods. Maybe I'll just become less productive for a few days or wake up with a massive headache and have to take the day off. I'm not particularly proud of these things but now I wonder if the alternative is worse.
I don't think it's really a matter of willpower. I experienced multiple burnouts because depression was not an option: I was the black sheep of a demanding and successful family which demanded that I play that role for them, but also demanded that I accept I was really a genius capable of anything, and therefore morally at fault for not achieving everything. I was the chosen one… who'd gone terribly wrong.
As such, I was twisted enough that years of therapy was in order, but really could not let go. To me, five minutes not fretting about how I was going to think up brilliant things and conquer the world, was five unacceptable minutes of being horribly lazy. That's not willpower, that's serious mental illness.
Burnout is just more evidence that serious mental illness is NOT good for you or your productivity. More pressure, past some indefinable point, does not make you more productive.
Any healthy person will rebel, balk, drag their feet and call it whatever (no skin off my nose if you call it burnout). A sufficiently mentally ill person will not be able to rebel, or balk, and will HATE themselves passionately for any moment of feet-dragging, and so they will push harder even while they are miserable… but pay a heavier cost.
Think of it as mental rhabdo (for crossfit fans). Because you are so unhealthy you don't respect any of your own limits, you drive your mental muscles into severe organic collapse and end up flooded with poison, and substantially weaker than you were, for a considerable time. It's not failure of will or collapse of attitude, you manage to mentally break yourself until you don't work and can't think or function.
Bad news. Willpower won't get you there because willpower doesn't automatically mean self-destruction. 'burning out' in smaller ways is MUCH healthier and better in every respect.
I would call that a blessing in disguise. From my experience the alternative is indeed worse.
It’s much better that your pressure valve opens at a lower pressure and forces you to take some time to care for yourself. Rather than letting the pressure build until you break and then not much can be done but wait for the slow process of healing to rebuild you.
I feel that, I’m not a lazy slug by any stretch but my company seems to be fine with me and other devs working 40-45h per week. I still get the stress, frustration and weeks of listlessness, then I read these articles about 80h weeks and feel even worse.
When I was in my 20s I feel like I bounced back from burnout in about 6 weeks. At 36 it feels like it's taking quite a bit longer than that. The pandemic certainly hasn't helped.
I'm glad you are doing better. I think the author here does understand what burnout is, and was able to notice the symptoms a lot earlier. It shouldn't get to the point of not even being able to decide what to watch on Netflix. Burnout happens, and I think conditions less serious than yours can still be called burnout.
Again, really happy you are ok. I hope you are working in an environment that is healthy, and that you are able to prevent burning out again.
I think you saw a "doesn't" that wasn't there in the opening line: "This person understands what actual burnout is." The Netflix reference was from the original post.
Thank you :) a number of things helped. Sadly, one of them was the death of my parents (but they were cared for and respected right to the end, and my darker take on their expectations can't hurt them now), and another was cutting ties with some family members.
Another thing that helped was Patreon, honestly, and I'll tell you specifically why: formerly I was making products sold commercially. This produced a lot of pressure to have 'hit' products, and a lot of fear when the ideas weren't coming, or when the idea wasn't selling. Going open source and Patreon-supported changed that to a more distributed system that was less bursty: didn't make as much peak money by a factor of three or more, but it was far FAR more predictable.
The increasing stability of this has been a huge help. I believe if society instantiated a basic income, that too would help many people avoid burnout, and remain productive, for the same reasons. Over-pressure is real, and damages productivity.
A healthy personality doesn't do this. (though that does also mean… a healthy personality doesn't end up being the biggest winner, gold-medal holder, best at what they do)
If your inner voice is that you MUST win or die trying, that's probably not the authentic inner voice, which is more naive, child or animal like, and won't understand why if it's hurting it shouldn't pull back from the flame. I do wonder whether there are guys (typically but not always guys) whose hormonal dissatisfaction and brain chemistry are so biased towards being unable to rest or go along, that they're set up to burn themselves out just following their natural drives and organic sense of what's fitting.
If so, that would count as a condition like ADHD where the brain chemistry is naturally serving as an obstacle, and the authentic inner voice needs a bit of guidance to better serve the overall person. Just because our deepest selves react a certain way doesn't always make it right.
For me, I've started feeling like I'm close to burnout. But quitting doesn't really seem like a helpful option.
Could I actually take months off recovering? No. I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on. And risk having to take a job that pays way less than before.
Which brings me to my main point: I don't see an option where the work ever actually truly ends. There's always more. Always things I need to be doing. And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.
Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
Much of the battle is learning how to assert some control over your life. Burnout comes with significant learned helplessness - A feeling that you don't have any control over your life because previous attempts to take control have failed.
The trick is to un-learn that helplessness by retraining yourself with small steps in the right direction. Jumping straight into hours of Leetcode grinding isn't a good small step. Setting a goal to solve 2 Leetcode problems per week is a good first step. Or even better, maybe skip the Leetcode and start pinging your network for any job openings. Not every job requires Leetcode practice.
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
Time to force some control over your workload. Does your manager try to shame you into not taking vacation? Or do they expect you to accomplish the same work whether your on vacation or not? Time to push back.
If you're burned out and thinking of quitting anyway, what's the worst that can happen? As it turns out, you're not actually going to get fired quickly at most any company for simply limiting your workload to something reasonable. There's a hiring crunch right now and they'd have to replace you with someone else. Then you'd just get another job, which is what you wanted anyway. Time to start setting some boundaries, leading with expectations instead of waiting for them to be applied to you, and forcing some vacation time into your schedule. No one is going to make vacation happen for you, so get it done.
Meanwhile, it's time to find another company. I agree that quitting isn't a great idea if it can be avoided. I've seen enough people quit due to burnout and/or depression, only to spiral further into burnout/depression in the ensuing loneliness and financial stresses. Better to switch to a new job where people actually enjoy working together.
> I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on. And risk having to take a job that pays way less than before.
The former is untrue, in my experience.
The latter is worth it.
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
Work somewhere humane and this really, truly isn't an issue. It isn't. There is sustainable work out there, and you do take a haircut to do it, but it's far from unlivable.
Like--oh, woe is me, I only made a few multiples of the median personal income in the USA last year. I could have made several. But--would I be happier? No.
> Like--oh, woe is me, I only made a few multiples of the median personal income in the USA last year.
This isn't helpful. I thought HN would understand more than most, but a lot don't seem to.
It's more like--great I make a ton of money. now that you're here, try to keep it going.
Taking a pay cut (which would be significant my comp is ~FAANG level), feels like gambling. Is it worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to gamble that my new lower paying job is less stressful?
There are some success stories, but do we hear of people who left their high paying jobs only to be just as stressed in their new positions?
Yeah I feel the same way. I work a stressful job that pays really well. If I leave, its unlikely I can land a job that pays the same. I just dont have the energy for leetcode. I am considering taking FMLA time off, which can be three months of unpaid time off. Just need a note from the doctor. I think three months is about enough to cure mildly bad burnout.
Of course work will not be happy with me, but I have to lookout for myself. They have to honor my position upon return, the question being that my future on the team would be compromised.
A more sinister idea is to take FMLA and leetcode full time for three months, then land a new role. Its kind of unethical, but life is so short.
Have you tried talking about this with your manager? Jumping straight to FMLA is making a lot of assumptions about the company and what they might be willing to do to retain you.
As an example: my SO was dealing with a lot of stress due to health reasons and tried to use FMLA. Her company let her do the paperwork, but ultimately let her take off 3 weeks of paid leave that didn’t count against her PTO. That gave her some room to breathe, but she started crashing again a few months later and tried to hand in her resignation. Welp. Her company is now giving her 6 months of paid leave with no hard obligation to return to work, just a request to be courteous and let them know if she’s not coming back so they can stop paying her.
If the first time that your manager is hearing about your situation is also your request to start taking FMLA immediately or else resign, your manager isn't going to be able to do much for you (and probably won't want to either, given the tough situation you will be putting them in on short notice.)
IMO our industry should really start considering sabbaticals as the next standardized perk. I think they would do a lot to prevent burnout and retain top performers.
Are you sure you can't reach out to your network and get in the side-door of a company without leetcoding? If you have advocates on the inside sometimes you can skip all the rigamarole.
Tell your manager you’re burned out and concerned for your mental health and you might just be allowed to take a paid leave, on which you can leetcode or catch up on TV. I know several people who did this and even one who quit immediately on return.
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
I didn't realize this until somewhat recently. The reason I don't take time off isn't because I don't want time off, or because I'm saving it for something better (like many of my colleagues seem to be). I don't take time off because deadlines don't care about time off and all it does is make the time surrounding it worse.
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
This struck a chord with me. I recently had a “vacation” where I still had to participate in and do work on an RFP and then be in the RFP presentation itself. I ended up working 3-4 hours every day. In addition, when I got back (officially), I was expected to simply “catch up” with the work I couldn’t do during the week I was off. It was actually one of the most stressful vacations I had ever been on because I was torn between trying to relax and spend time with my family and the duty to my job. I justified it by saying to myself that I was at least having some fun, but it actually ended up being worse than if I hadn’t taken vacation at all.
You do not have a "duty to your job". Employers love it when they can get their workers to think that way because it raises the threshold amount they can overwork and over-stress you before you've had enough and quit. You have to protect your personal time and your mental and emotional health. (I have had to learn this lesson a couple of times in 40+ years as a software dev.)
I work with a great manager, she has worked no joke 100 hour weeks for the last 7? months. There have been days she has just broken down. She is finally on a 2 week vacation and she has had to work every day of the vacation so far. It is insane. We work at a unicorn startup.
>But quitting doesn't really seem like a helpful option.
Once you hit full burnout, you'll realize that you don't really have a choice, unfortunately. You will have to stop. Whether that means quitting depends on your situation but, in any case, you won't be able to continue on your current path.
>And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.
This is the trap that pushes us into burnout. By definition, it happens when we get to a place where we're making enough that retirement (or other financial goal) becomes an option on some timeline we think we can stomach. Then, we worry that the cost of improving upon our current situation (or even replicating it) is too high. So, we settle into a game of essentially trying to outlast the misery. In reality, our quality of life is so miserable that it's simply not worth it. We recognize the problem, but we convince ourselves that we don't have a choice.
But, the premise itself is an illusion. There are always other options, some of which are far less costly than we imagine (and certainly less costly than destroying ourselves). It sometimes takes walking away from the burnout situation to recognize our full option-set, so we get stuck in a loop, the confinement and stress of which adds to our burnout.
One way out is to simply say to yourself, "I can no longer live this way" and intenralize that it's really not an option to continue. You will then be able to see new opportunities for change, as well as assign the proper cost to making those changes. In other words, you'll start to gain the perspective you need to move forward.
To underscore this, there's a specific meaning to 'you will have to stop', and it isn't 'you will choose to not work as hard, you will lose motivation'.
You will BREAK. You will be unable to think. The think no work. You no work. Not be fix thing today. Or tormorwo. blah.
Plenty of people in this HN post who are flirting with this. It's a natural outcome of motivation so strong that you'll push yourself to the limit, without flinching or weakening. I don't know where everyone else gets that. Childhood stuff? Social conditioning? Most people don't have it that bad. Most companies aren't SV unicorns.
Success on the grand scale, rides on the back of people like this. Some of them don't break, and some do. If you do, you will break. Not your will, not your motivation… your MIND breaks and you can't think. And then it's the months or years of down-time. You burned out.
> I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on
I hate this so much. I spent three months leetcoding and doing mock interviews to pass the interview and get hired into a FAANG company. After deciding to leave the company after a few years, I went straight into interviewing instead of doing prep first thinking it would be a breeze. I bombed. I could tell from my interviewer's faces that they were questioning the validity of my resume due to how badly I was doing.
I eventually went on to get hired by another company that asked me to solve a small problem prior to the interview and discuss my approach, which went very well. I couldn't bring myself to go practice whiteboarding binary search again.
I'm sorry to hear that you're close to burning out. Having a family definitely complicates the situation. I imagine it's much harder to fly with the wind when you're helping carry others.
If your work is remote, perhaps a change of scenery might suffice? I've been working from Albania, and with timezones, that basically means I get to go to the beach in the morning, then start work at 2PM-10:30PM.
Same here. I joined a company pre-IPO several years ago and even though though Wall-street just punished us (hint hint) I'm still making close to 1m per year due to stock appreciation vs when I joined.
Unfortunately I'm not worth getting paid that much, so my statement isn't a humble brag or anything, it's a realistic observation that my role + work isn't special and I shouldn't be making this amount. With rest/vest I will likely never get this high of a salary + equity package again.
In that sense I feel like I'm currently at my maximum earning potential even though I'm a mid-level engineer. Plus going back to leetcoding? Pfft.
Similar situation here. With full honesty, if they worked me 18hr/day, I'd just have to put up with it until vesting is complete.
Thankfully, most public companies don't seem to have management that will look at your vesting schedule and try to abuse you maximally. I'm really not sure why, they probably should be doing that.
> don't see an option where the work ever actually truly ends. There's always more. Always things I need to be doing. And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.
There's always another possibility: you might die. And then what would happen to the poor work?
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
Terrible way to look at it. The saying “recharge your batteries” is pretty appropriate here, you’re making an investment that when you return you’ll be more productive in the long run.
And further behind…further behind what exactly? Some artificial deadline or some arbitrary release date? That’s not your problem, if management doesn’t factor in people’s vacations that’s on them. Push back a little, get a backbone, and say “no”.
> And risk having to take a job that pays way less than before.
Would that really be so bad? If software dev is burning you out then why try a different career and a cheaper lifestyle. Or simply a lower-pressure job and a cheaper lifestyle (there are plenty of companies that don't do leetcode interviews).
Better to take the time off before you have to take the time off, which will almost certainly happen.
I burnt out at my last job in March of 2020, and that savings I was building up to hopefully one day retire is gone, and that's as a person with no true dependants, minimal bills, and a very frugal lifestyle. I haven't found work since. I took 1 step forward, and 1 step back. This was also true of the previous time I burnt out in 2016; I didn't end up finding work again before I lost my apartment and had to live out of my car for a long time.
Know the warning signs. Leave/change jobs before you destroy your career like I apparently have.
Oh, you could take months off to recover or even quit outright. You could forego the leet code BS entirely. Take a much lower paying job. I think what you mean is you aren't willing to deal with whatever consequences you think taking time for yourself might have. I'll tell you what if I know anything it's that you do need a different job if taking vacation, "puts you farther behind". At the very least a different state of mind.
Mark Twain said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.” Soak on that for a second. You aren't special or different than anyone else in most regards.
Those feelings - anxiety, being trapped, burned out, disconnected... That's your brain telling you what you're doing isn't working. It feels awful. So what if you do take a lower paying job but you actually enjoy it? What if you end up taking a higher paying job and you enjoy it? What if you quit and spend your life pursuing your passions, and make it to retirement with 0 in the bank but your family loves and respects you so much they're happy to help out? Neither of us actually knows what would happen if you decided to do something for yourself, but if you truly aren't happy that's the only course of action that makes sense. Your life can only realistically get better if you try to make it better.
You get one chance to live your life, then it's suddenly over. One chance. Do you really want to squander an opportunity like this because you think something worse might happen when you retire decades from now? I don't think someone with the worldview you just described will ever have enough to retire.
I truly hope you do something that makes you happy tonight, even if it's something small.
> No. I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on.
Then you won't be (thoroughly) burnt-out. One of the hallmark sign of burnout is cynicism and lack of motivation. You won't want to open leetcode, and you won't care if you never, ever wrote another line of code for the rest of your life. You will be done. You get to this stage when you're slightly burnt out and push yourself over the edge, such as by leetcoding. Giving your mind time to recover is the only way to recover from a burnout - if you're still able to put in work or leetcode, you're not burnt out.
It's true that there are always things that need to be done. But vacation does help. A lot. It works on people by the same principle as the burn-out does, as long as we allow ourselves to be drawn in, redirecting and focusing our strong attention onto the vacation context and details.
Does a vacation solve the latent issues in the office? Unlikely. But it can give a stronger chance at finding courage to move on to better pastures with less of a collateral damage or personal injury in the process.
Vacation helps, so does the personal/sick-time. A culture of banking (or shaming for taking) the PTO is outright traumatizing and usually a good indicator of an unhealthy team/organization.
Might be time to cultivate a source of meaning in life that has nothing to do with your work. Volunteering and religion are two timeless sources for this.
This is where Digital Sunsets and using time techniques (Pomodro, getting things done) come in. It won’t fix burnout but does allow you to pace yourself. After that long unplugged vacations work wonders.
That’s kind of a sad statement. Your company doesn’t really care about you personally…if they could replace you with someone better and cheaper, they would. Why should you care so much about them? Why care more about a job than your own life?
I've always had slow days where I didn't want to work. Just give a call that today is one of those days. At most places I worked this was understood and respected. The other places I didn't work at for long.
Sometimes I feel stuck in the morass of legacy apps we're looking after. Then I remind myself how things were when I started here. How we've invested to improve things. That I'm digging around in shit because that's where the work is.
At times I just watch the blinkenlights for a while. With bits flowing and data transformed in quiet concert. Orchestrated by us to serve our fellow humans. I might even read some code that hasn't failed in a year. Sweet comfort to know it's there, working as intended.
Then I grab the shovel again with renewed urgency. Make some red commits. Get them merged.
Such a delight to find prose that shines like a shimmering pearl in a mass of muddy water undistinguished from the silt. We are in dearth of writing that finds beauty in things often thought mundane.
A big factor for burnout, at least for me, is the never ending treadmill that is Agile. There are zillions of different things people call Agile, but the core of nearly all of them is the never ending series of Sprints (side note: I hate that the industry has settled on two week sprints, they make them so unbearable, 1 month is the best sprint, imo). I like a lot of the thing Agile thinking has brought to the toolbox, and before Agile there was a lot of horror and suffering, but what I do miss from that primordial time was when you finished a project you could stop and think and breath for a while. For a few days, even several weeks. Just stop and tinker and think about what you had just done, and what you want to do. When you actually train for running and other athletic activities, and you actually sprint, there is a recovery period where you let your body regain and recover from the effort. It improves performance and it improves your training.
We either need a recovery period built into Agile, or, my preference, get rid of Sprints. Actually, keep sprints around but turn them into a more fitting analogy. Infrequent periods where you focus and work harder on something. "Ok, it feels like we don't have traction on project X, let's do a two week sprint where we push aside all other concerns, cancel all meetings, and just focus on the project."
Right now it feels like I haven't had time to stop and think for 18+ months, it doesn't help to have my family sitting in the house with me full time. No quiet periods, no reflecting periods of recovery.
This is exactly the source of my frustration as well. I'm naturally inclined towards iterative development, frequent steering, and interacting with the people that will actually use the stuff that I'm building. I believe in those aspects of the agile mindset.
What has worn me down over the past few years is the constant refrain that we are "behind" and "don't have time" for a lot of things that appear to me to be essential. We've been in a mode where we don't really have time to explore options. And once we've made a decision, we rarely revisit it even as information changes.
I don't think this has anything to do with agile per se. One could argue that it's Scrum's fault, but even then I don't think you can lay the blame directly there. The point of sprints is to create frequent steering points. As new information comes up, let's make sure that we're still pursuing the correct course. But sprints can easily be misunderstood to be frequent deadlines that must be hit. There's some value there, but I think that misses the mark somewhat.
I think a lot of it stems from a conflict of personality styles. From what I've seen, some people like the treadmill - it gives them direction, purpose, and energy. But for somebody like me, that treadmill is more of a grindstone.
I do think I'm experiencing burn out, but I don't see myself quitting. It's weird.
I feel fine when I have to:
- refactor code
- create some new application code from scratch
- fix some business logic bug
I feel anxiety (and I experience burn out symptoms) when I have to:
- deal with any k8s issue
- incorporate any third-party library like oauth2-proxy
- run some migration in a big table
I don't like "infrastructure" topics, but as a "senior" software engineer I don't have a choice. I love dealing only with application code (e.g., classes, interfaces, modules, business logic, tests, etc.)
Do you feel like you don't like the infrastructure side of things because it's harder to debug problems while being under immense pressure since this usually happens when production is on fire?
Developing code isn't easy but if it's code you've written, you at least always know the problem is with your code or maybe a library you're using. It feels like between Googling and looking at source code or examples there's always going to be an answer. Plus it's a private struggle because this usually only happens in uncommitted code on your dev box while you're working through developing the feature.
With infrastructure issues, it's like you're fully exposed because your site might be down and non-technical people (business higher ups) are being directly affected, and if you're the person responsible for this it all comes back to you.
Plus Kubernetes is Kubernetes. I'm not a veteran with it yet but on a local test cluster I still sometimes run into problems where I end up deleting the cluster and making a new one because after idling for 10 days everything stopped working. That strategy is simply not going to work in production. I'm hoping that's due to kind[0] bugging out and it won't happen on a cloud hosted provider. I'll be deploying a real production workload for a very non-trivial project in the near future.
I am not an SRE but I do know that we are actually able to just throw away our k8s cluster and it will be recreated from scratch.
In fact our dev environments work the same and I literally did this a couple if days ago because I had a similar problem to what you are describing. Throwing it away and letting it reinitialize from scratch fixed it.
You don't _want_ to do that in prod for sure. But it's a great thing to have in your back pocket, if it's tested well (disclaimer: I have no idea if and when they last tried this for prod ;))
I've been through burnout before. A few times. Not fun. Alas, I never had the luxury of being able to take time off (it turns out that children like eating food). So, while I can sympathize, I also can't sympathize since I had to work through it (usually by changing employers).
Out of curiosity, how long did it take you before you felt like you were back to your "normal" self?
I'm currently in the same position, and like the author of this blog, started my "burnout" recognition (followed by recovery) around end of November 2020 (first time experiencing burn out). I've since switched employers, and although I'm still way better than before, I don't feel my normal, creative, resilient and excited self. Minor set backs feel like the end of the world. I'm now having to battle with imposter syndrome, and I'm not sure whether this is part of the journey.
If you don't feel imposter syndrome on a new job, you're probably doing it wrong. :-)
I don't know how long it usually take to fully recover. I've found that a new job changes things around enough that I feel better so I can at least function again. Normalcy comes sometime later.
I kept telling me I was _close to being burnout_. It took me probably 6 months to realise how bad it had gotten and that I was actually in a really bad spot.
If it's literally food on the table at risk, your finances are stretched way too thin and you should solve that separately. And living on the edge like this is probably a big contributor to burnout/stress.
But to try to answer your question: I've wondered if going to work for a slow, boring company would help. Like a bank or just a local place that needs more I.T. type of help than amazing startup code. I tend to doubt this would work though.
Maybe work for a non-profit with a mission that aligns with your values? This is where I would lean.
I'm torn between feeling that I too am dealing with some degree of burnout and thinking that I just simply haven't been taking care of myself. A series of sluggish days leads to a pileup of work, the pile seems to grow exponentially with no end in sight, and my workplace is rather dysfunctional and lacking of a clear vision. It feels like burnout, because even if I am productive and aspects of the work are interesting, it doesn't feel like progress is being made. Motivation goes down even when productivity is good.
But I'm also staying up too late. I have poor sleep hygiene. I'm on screens until well after midnight, and a significant amount of that time is spent reading "news" - not consciously reading to stay abreast of what's happening in the world, but habitually clicking and clicking and clicking. I can't really blame my job for the need to work late, because I seem to take hours to really get on a roll in the morning, and the work demands necessarily shift into the late evening after the kids go to bed. It's a vicious cycle. I'm working, e-mailing and Slacking on weekends when I don't need to be, and I'm not maintaining clear boundaries at all. Personal relationships are suffering as well.
So though I kind of relate to the burnout narrative, to really frame it as such seems like a cop-out for me. Working from home is a tremendous privilege, and doing so in a functional way requires a lot of discipline. Maybe the regular hours, commute and confines of cubicle or office walls make it a lot easier to maintain that discipline.
Hearing all these anecdotes compels me to try and figure this out. Somehow I don't think taking time off will be the answer...
I'm at the end result of your situation now. I wish I'd gotten out from under it so much sooner.
The death spiral really kicks off when you start losing efficiency (as you've described) and as a result there's always more work on your plate than you have the capacity to do.
There's a paradox: the usual solution if you have extra work is to just push through it with some extra effort; once it's done you could theoretically go back to the usual routine. But your current predicament is because you've been working extra hard for too long already. You just go backwards if you try it.
I've spent weeks and weeks trying to "catch up" on my current project - and the previous two projects - working after my kid has gone to bed, working again first thing in the morning, working weekends - it only gets worse if you keep doing it and you wind up with worse results (I've just now blown past a deadline myself). Trust me. My mental and physical health is fucking shot, I've got skin rashes, putting on weight and I've been giving too much parenting work to my wife... I'm probably going to be mentally fucked for weeks now.
The solution is to reduce the workload. Drop some of the spinning plates, tell your boss you can't do XYZ in the allotted time, or just straight up quit.
Readit News
So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc.
A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.
I authored this comment but can't go back to edit. Given that this sentiment appeared to resonate with HN, I just want to add that I write extensively on this theme in my book "Eating Glass." I just put the chapter titled "Burnout" up for free: https://markdjacobsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/eg-samp...
So much this. If you are putting in too much effort into something at work just because you care about it, this is a recipe for disaster.
If you're putting in extra work to learn valuable transferrable skills, that's fine - if that's the tradeoff you want to make.
But if you're just working your ass off for no reason, you're setting yourself up for a major let down.
No, areyou going to fucking fire Uncle Joe for being too drunk at thanksgiving and cut him off from the family will and make him sign a non-familial-secrets-disclosure promise?
Fuck that. You are not a family. HR is NEVER your friend.
I was once offered ~8K to non-disparage a company upon leaving. Yeah - no thanks.
I learnt you have to take holidays, you can't sustain long hours for months at a time and if management is focusing in a different direction than your team it's time to leave.
People who haven't experienced this are just lucky. They've been rewarded well for their energy, or they had an early stake, or they just never put much energy in because they were in a space where they could be productive. They've never been fired on their way up. They've never had to rely on savings for an entire year and have to battle algo challenges just to get a phone call while dealing with zero motivation for even writing code.
(And then there's the guilt of "wow, what is wrong with me, I'm getting paid a bunch of money to do something I'm good at, why am I losing my mind?", but that thought process doesn't help much.)
Companies squeezed every ounce of productivity possible from employees.
I imagine most people who had never worked remotely pre-covid did not understand that you need to clearly demarcate you work and personal life when WFH.
Everyone was just thrust into this. And companies took advantage of the market uncertainty to basically exploit folks.
Shame on them and now the workers are retaliating by quitting en-masse, demanding they be treated better.
It's a paradigm shift with some of the power back in the hand of employees.
Heh, even the ones with children.
My experience is companies/leaders are just other overworked people who fell into the same trap and allowed their employees to fall into the same trap, and a reckoning (increased attrition) is on the horizon.
"Upādāna is a Sanskrit and Pali word that means "fuel, material cause, substrate that is the source and means for keeping an active process energized".[1][2] It is also an important Buddhist concept referring to "attachment, clinging, grasping".[3] It is considered to be the result of taṇhā (craving), and is part of the dukkha (suffering, pain) doctrine in Buddhism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up%C4%81d%C4%81na
A good day's work can be so draining as to leave me literally depressed. A good day, mind you - not hard, not bad, not stressful - just one where I am completely focused on work for 7-8 hours. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the nature of coding for a living.
_ “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”_
I guess you’re right though in that in the end it will never love you back. The wheel must continue to turn.
I have been basically, retired, for the last four years.
I’ve worked harder than I have in many years; all self-directed projects. I’ve been crafting a single iOS app, for the last ten months, and there’s months more to go.
It’s been wonderful.
OTOH some seemingly impossible things couldn't have happened without a "vision". So... tilt away.
I thought this was a good insight, that there are more causes of burnout than simply working too many hours. Thanks for sharing.
I generally needed more than a couple months but less than a year, and the removal of whatever it was that I'd burnt myself to a crisp trying to control. Over my lifetime that's been everything from overcoming homelessness, starting a business, transitioning the business to Patreon, trying to have a relationship: it's been a lifelong process of learning that I can't have things (even very desirable things) just by pushing harder to earn them. Quite often I just have to give up and not have the thing.
The more I learn that, the less I'm riding the edge of burnout.
:)
I got burned out so bad a few year back (2015-my fist and only time) I was not able to focus on anything for almost 14 months.
Still feels surreal thinking about it. Had parts for rebuild my rack and everything in it and was not able to gather my thought to set anything up. I failed to install even a basic ubuntu server in 1-2 tries.
Apart from tending to the flowers in the garden, cutting grass and cooking... I was good for nothing. Watching a movie? Autoplay on youtube was it. Just sit there until 2AM watching <random>. Shopping for groceries? good joke. Sleeping? I was dreaming I'm in the office half the time. I had a flipping server chasing me down the rail track a few times because it didn't like the transcoding settings. Eh. Not pleasant but I'm counting it as a lesson in life.
I digress. What I'm trying to say is that I envy people that can get out of it so fast.
- you understand new concepts (in my case maths) very slowly (that is about 10x times slower than before)
- you memorize very slowly (I can reliably compare myself to 22 years old students, I need about 5 times more time to memorize a course than them; and I was a very good student at their age).
- anything even remotely stressful is tough. Remotely stressful = plan something to do the week end; cook a new recipe (I'm a good cook and I used to love cooking); do paperwork; listen to the kids for more than 15 minutes;...
So burn out is (as said by many) a completely different thing than "exhausted". Burn out means : your brain is fucked up for a very long period of time.
The hardest part for me is to think about the future. I just can't. And that generates a lot of anxiety... And that adds to the very bad shape...
That sounds like a full on PTSD! Hope you're feeling better since and the "bad chi" got purged from your internal storage, so to speak.
Dead Comment
It's a common mistake for people to think that because they can identify the cause of their current state (work-induced burnout from a bad job, for example) that their symptoms can't be from depression. That's not true. They're not mutually exclusive. In fact, they overlap heavily both in symptoms and possible treatments.
The good news is that many of the techniques designed to address depression, such as CBT, self-guided therapy, exercises, and so on, translate quite effectively to helping with burnout, too. In fact, a burned-out person can pick up a CBT book or sign up with a therapist and drop right into helpful exercises to begin restoring a sense of agency, rebuilding autonomy, unlearning negative thought patterns, and other things that contribute to getting stuck in burnout.
Disclaimer: Trying to be concise, I understand depression is a spectrum, different for everyone, and a lot more complex than these few words.
Depression: You’re basically fried and can’t make decisions in any/all “verticals” (i.e. self-love, romance, professional, etc) not even to leave the house.
Burnout / Heartbroken: A subset of depression for a specific vertical in life. Burnout is a depression from a profession, but you still enjoy/can go on dates or hang out with friends. Heartbroken is a depression from romance, but you still enjoy/can work to distract yourself, take up a hobby, etc.
Joking aside, for me the therapy is the same for either. I need to selfishly attend to my own agenda for a while, and build something just because. My workshop is my therapy zone. YMMV.
As such, I was twisted enough that years of therapy was in order, but really could not let go. To me, five minutes not fretting about how I was going to think up brilliant things and conquer the world, was five unacceptable minutes of being horribly lazy. That's not willpower, that's serious mental illness.
Burnout is just more evidence that serious mental illness is NOT good for you or your productivity. More pressure, past some indefinable point, does not make you more productive.
Any healthy person will rebel, balk, drag their feet and call it whatever (no skin off my nose if you call it burnout). A sufficiently mentally ill person will not be able to rebel, or balk, and will HATE themselves passionately for any moment of feet-dragging, and so they will push harder even while they are miserable… but pay a heavier cost.
Think of it as mental rhabdo (for crossfit fans). Because you are so unhealthy you don't respect any of your own limits, you drive your mental muscles into severe organic collapse and end up flooded with poison, and substantially weaker than you were, for a considerable time. It's not failure of will or collapse of attitude, you manage to mentally break yourself until you don't work and can't think or function.
Bad news. Willpower won't get you there because willpower doesn't automatically mean self-destruction. 'burning out' in smaller ways is MUCH healthier and better in every respect.
It’s much better that your pressure valve opens at a lower pressure and forces you to take some time to care for yourself. Rather than letting the pressure build until you break and then not much can be done but wait for the slow process of healing to rebuild you.
Again, really happy you are ok. I hope you are working in an environment that is healthy, and that you are able to prevent burning out again.
Another thing that helped was Patreon, honestly, and I'll tell you specifically why: formerly I was making products sold commercially. This produced a lot of pressure to have 'hit' products, and a lot of fear when the ideas weren't coming, or when the idea wasn't selling. Going open source and Patreon-supported changed that to a more distributed system that was less bursty: didn't make as much peak money by a factor of three or more, but it was far FAR more predictable.
The increasing stability of this has been a huge help. I believe if society instantiated a basic income, that too would help many people avoid burnout, and remain productive, for the same reasons. Over-pressure is real, and damages productivity.
Genuinely curious: if one is listening to their authentic inner voice, would they ever do this to themself?
A healthy personality doesn't do this. (though that does also mean… a healthy personality doesn't end up being the biggest winner, gold-medal holder, best at what they do)
If your inner voice is that you MUST win or die trying, that's probably not the authentic inner voice, which is more naive, child or animal like, and won't understand why if it's hurting it shouldn't pull back from the flame. I do wonder whether there are guys (typically but not always guys) whose hormonal dissatisfaction and brain chemistry are so biased towards being unable to rest or go along, that they're set up to burn themselves out just following their natural drives and organic sense of what's fitting.
If so, that would count as a condition like ADHD where the brain chemistry is naturally serving as an obstacle, and the authentic inner voice needs a bit of guidance to better serve the overall person. Just because our deepest selves react a certain way doesn't always make it right.
Could I actually take months off recovering? No. I'd have to immediately start leetcoding and remembering what all those trees are for so that I could become employed again later on. And risk having to take a job that pays way less than before.
Which brings me to my main point: I don't see an option where the work ever actually truly ends. There's always more. Always things I need to be doing. And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.
Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
The trick is to un-learn that helplessness by retraining yourself with small steps in the right direction. Jumping straight into hours of Leetcode grinding isn't a good small step. Setting a goal to solve 2 Leetcode problems per week is a good first step. Or even better, maybe skip the Leetcode and start pinging your network for any job openings. Not every job requires Leetcode practice.
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
Time to force some control over your workload. Does your manager try to shame you into not taking vacation? Or do they expect you to accomplish the same work whether your on vacation or not? Time to push back.
If you're burned out and thinking of quitting anyway, what's the worst that can happen? As it turns out, you're not actually going to get fired quickly at most any company for simply limiting your workload to something reasonable. There's a hiring crunch right now and they'd have to replace you with someone else. Then you'd just get another job, which is what you wanted anyway. Time to start setting some boundaries, leading with expectations instead of waiting for them to be applied to you, and forcing some vacation time into your schedule. No one is going to make vacation happen for you, so get it done.
Meanwhile, it's time to find another company. I agree that quitting isn't a great idea if it can be avoided. I've seen enough people quit due to burnout and/or depression, only to spiral further into burnout/depression in the ensuing loneliness and financial stresses. Better to switch to a new job where people actually enjoy working together.
In The Netherlands, most jobs don't.
The former is untrue, in my experience.
The latter is worth it.
> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.
Work somewhere humane and this really, truly isn't an issue. It isn't. There is sustainable work out there, and you do take a haircut to do it, but it's far from unlivable.
Like--oh, woe is me, I only made a few multiples of the median personal income in the USA last year. I could have made several. But--would I be happier? No.
This isn't helpful. I thought HN would understand more than most, but a lot don't seem to.
It's more like--great I make a ton of money. now that you're here, try to keep it going.
Taking a pay cut (which would be significant my comp is ~FAANG level), feels like gambling. Is it worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to gamble that my new lower paying job is less stressful?
There are some success stories, but do we hear of people who left their high paying jobs only to be just as stressed in their new positions?
Of course work will not be happy with me, but I have to lookout for myself. They have to honor my position upon return, the question being that my future on the team would be compromised.
A more sinister idea is to take FMLA and leetcode full time for three months, then land a new role. Its kind of unethical, but life is so short.
As an example: my SO was dealing with a lot of stress due to health reasons and tried to use FMLA. Her company let her do the paperwork, but ultimately let her take off 3 weeks of paid leave that didn’t count against her PTO. That gave her some room to breathe, but she started crashing again a few months later and tried to hand in her resignation. Welp. Her company is now giving her 6 months of paid leave with no hard obligation to return to work, just a request to be courteous and let them know if she’s not coming back so they can stop paying her.
If the first time that your manager is hearing about your situation is also your request to start taking FMLA immediately or else resign, your manager isn't going to be able to do much for you (and probably won't want to either, given the tough situation you will be putting them in on short notice.)
IMO our industry should really start considering sabbaticals as the next standardized perk. I think they would do a lot to prevent burnout and retain top performers.
Also, interviewing and quitting after leave isn't unethical. Do it, take care of yourself.
I didn't realize this until somewhat recently. The reason I don't take time off isn't because I don't want time off, or because I'm saving it for something better (like many of my colleagues seem to be). I don't take time off because deadlines don't care about time off and all it does is make the time surrounding it worse.
This struck a chord with me. I recently had a “vacation” where I still had to participate in and do work on an RFP and then be in the RFP presentation itself. I ended up working 3-4 hours every day. In addition, when I got back (officially), I was expected to simply “catch up” with the work I couldn’t do during the week I was off. It was actually one of the most stressful vacations I had ever been on because I was torn between trying to relax and spend time with my family and the duty to my job. I justified it by saying to myself that I was at least having some fun, but it actually ended up being worse than if I hadn’t taken vacation at all.
This is not a job for humans.
You got used by your employer.
They owe you comp time equal to the length of your "vacation". You deserve that and should not hesitate to ask for it.
Once you hit full burnout, you'll realize that you don't really have a choice, unfortunately. You will have to stop. Whether that means quitting depends on your situation but, in any case, you won't be able to continue on your current path.
>And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.
This is the trap that pushes us into burnout. By definition, it happens when we get to a place where we're making enough that retirement (or other financial goal) becomes an option on some timeline we think we can stomach. Then, we worry that the cost of improving upon our current situation (or even replicating it) is too high. So, we settle into a game of essentially trying to outlast the misery. In reality, our quality of life is so miserable that it's simply not worth it. We recognize the problem, but we convince ourselves that we don't have a choice.
But, the premise itself is an illusion. There are always other options, some of which are far less costly than we imagine (and certainly less costly than destroying ourselves). It sometimes takes walking away from the burnout situation to recognize our full option-set, so we get stuck in a loop, the confinement and stress of which adds to our burnout.
One way out is to simply say to yourself, "I can no longer live this way" and intenralize that it's really not an option to continue. You will then be able to see new opportunities for change, as well as assign the proper cost to making those changes. In other words, you'll start to gain the perspective you need to move forward.
You will BREAK. You will be unable to think. The think no work. You no work. Not be fix thing today. Or tormorwo. blah.
Plenty of people in this HN post who are flirting with this. It's a natural outcome of motivation so strong that you'll push yourself to the limit, without flinching or weakening. I don't know where everyone else gets that. Childhood stuff? Social conditioning? Most people don't have it that bad. Most companies aren't SV unicorns.
Success on the grand scale, rides on the back of people like this. Some of them don't break, and some do. If you do, you will break. Not your will, not your motivation… your MIND breaks and you can't think. And then it's the months or years of down-time. You burned out.
I hate this so much. I spent three months leetcoding and doing mock interviews to pass the interview and get hired into a FAANG company. After deciding to leave the company after a few years, I went straight into interviewing instead of doing prep first thinking it would be a breeze. I bombed. I could tell from my interviewer's faces that they were questioning the validity of my resume due to how badly I was doing.
I eventually went on to get hired by another company that asked me to solve a small problem prior to the interview and discuss my approach, which went very well. I couldn't bring myself to go practice whiteboarding binary search again.
If your work is remote, perhaps a change of scenery might suffice? I've been working from Albania, and with timezones, that basically means I get to go to the beach in the morning, then start work at 2PM-10:30PM.
Unfortunately I'm not worth getting paid that much, so my statement isn't a humble brag or anything, it's a realistic observation that my role + work isn't special and I shouldn't be making this amount. With rest/vest I will likely never get this high of a salary + equity package again.
In that sense I feel like I'm currently at my maximum earning potential even though I'm a mid-level engineer. Plus going back to leetcoding? Pfft.
Thankfully, most public companies don't seem to have management that will look at your vesting schedule and try to abuse you maximally. I'm really not sure why, they probably should be doing that.
There's always another possibility: you might die. And then what would happen to the poor work?
But my family, who needs my financial support, would be in a much much worse position.
Terrible way to look at it. The saying “recharge your batteries” is pretty appropriate here, you’re making an investment that when you return you’ll be more productive in the long run.
And further behind…further behind what exactly? Some artificial deadline or some arbitrary release date? That’s not your problem, if management doesn’t factor in people’s vacations that’s on them. Push back a little, get a backbone, and say “no”.
Would that really be so bad? If software dev is burning you out then why try a different career and a cheaper lifestyle. Or simply a lower-pressure job and a cheaper lifestyle (there are plenty of companies that don't do leetcode interviews).
I burnt out at my last job in March of 2020, and that savings I was building up to hopefully one day retire is gone, and that's as a person with no true dependants, minimal bills, and a very frugal lifestyle. I haven't found work since. I took 1 step forward, and 1 step back. This was also true of the previous time I burnt out in 2016; I didn't end up finding work again before I lost my apartment and had to live out of my car for a long time.
Know the warning signs. Leave/change jobs before you destroy your career like I apparently have.
You get one chance to live your life, then it's suddenly over. One chance. Do you really want to squander an opportunity like this because you think something worse might happen when you retire decades from now? I don't think someone with the worldview you just described will ever have enough to retire.
I truly hope you do something that makes you happy tonight, even if it's something small.
Then you won't be (thoroughly) burnt-out. One of the hallmark sign of burnout is cynicism and lack of motivation. You won't want to open leetcode, and you won't care if you never, ever wrote another line of code for the rest of your life. You will be done. You get to this stage when you're slightly burnt out and push yourself over the edge, such as by leetcoding. Giving your mind time to recover is the only way to recover from a burnout - if you're still able to put in work or leetcode, you're not burnt out.
It's true that there are always things that need to be done. But vacation does help. A lot. It works on people by the same principle as the burn-out does, as long as we allow ourselves to be drawn in, redirecting and focusing our strong attention onto the vacation context and details.
Does a vacation solve the latent issues in the office? Unlikely. But it can give a stronger chance at finding courage to move on to better pastures with less of a collateral damage or personal injury in the process.
Vacation helps, so does the personal/sick-time. A culture of banking (or shaming for taking) the PTO is outright traumatizing and usually a good indicator of an unhealthy team/organization.
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Sometimes I feel stuck in the morass of legacy apps we're looking after. Then I remind myself how things were when I started here. How we've invested to improve things. That I'm digging around in shit because that's where the work is.
At times I just watch the blinkenlights for a while. With bits flowing and data transformed in quiet concert. Orchestrated by us to serve our fellow humans. I might even read some code that hasn't failed in a year. Sweet comfort to know it's there, working as intended.
Then I grab the shovel again with renewed urgency. Make some red commits. Get them merged.
We either need a recovery period built into Agile, or, my preference, get rid of Sprints. Actually, keep sprints around but turn them into a more fitting analogy. Infrequent periods where you focus and work harder on something. "Ok, it feels like we don't have traction on project X, let's do a two week sprint where we push aside all other concerns, cancel all meetings, and just focus on the project."
Right now it feels like I haven't had time to stop and think for 18+ months, it doesn't help to have my family sitting in the house with me full time. No quiet periods, no reflecting periods of recovery.
What has worn me down over the past few years is the constant refrain that we are "behind" and "don't have time" for a lot of things that appear to me to be essential. We've been in a mode where we don't really have time to explore options. And once we've made a decision, we rarely revisit it even as information changes.
I don't think this has anything to do with agile per se. One could argue that it's Scrum's fault, but even then I don't think you can lay the blame directly there. The point of sprints is to create frequent steering points. As new information comes up, let's make sure that we're still pursuing the correct course. But sprints can easily be misunderstood to be frequent deadlines that must be hit. There's some value there, but I think that misses the mark somewhat.
I think a lot of it stems from a conflict of personality styles. From what I've seen, some people like the treadmill - it gives them direction, purpose, and energy. But for somebody like me, that treadmill is more of a grindstone.
I feel fine when I have to:
- refactor code
- create some new application code from scratch
- fix some business logic bug
I feel anxiety (and I experience burn out symptoms) when I have to:
- deal with any k8s issue
- incorporate any third-party library like oauth2-proxy
- run some migration in a big table
I don't like "infrastructure" topics, but as a "senior" software engineer I don't have a choice. I love dealing only with application code (e.g., classes, interfaces, modules, business logic, tests, etc.)
Developing code isn't easy but if it's code you've written, you at least always know the problem is with your code or maybe a library you're using. It feels like between Googling and looking at source code or examples there's always going to be an answer. Plus it's a private struggle because this usually only happens in uncommitted code on your dev box while you're working through developing the feature.
With infrastructure issues, it's like you're fully exposed because your site might be down and non-technical people (business higher ups) are being directly affected, and if you're the person responsible for this it all comes back to you.
Plus Kubernetes is Kubernetes. I'm not a veteran with it yet but on a local test cluster I still sometimes run into problems where I end up deleting the cluster and making a new one because after idling for 10 days everything stopped working. That strategy is simply not going to work in production. I'm hoping that's due to kind[0] bugging out and it won't happen on a cloud hosted provider. I'll be deploying a real production workload for a very non-trivial project in the near future.
[0]: https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/
I am not an SRE but I do know that we are actually able to just throw away our k8s cluster and it will be recreated from scratch.
In fact our dev environments work the same and I literally did this a couple if days ago because I had a similar problem to what you are describing. Throwing it away and letting it reinitialize from scratch fixed it.
You don't _want_ to do that in prod for sure. But it's a great thing to have in your back pocket, if it's tested well (disclaimer: I have no idea if and when they last tried this for prod ;))
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I'm currently in the same position, and like the author of this blog, started my "burnout" recognition (followed by recovery) around end of November 2020 (first time experiencing burn out). I've since switched employers, and although I'm still way better than before, I don't feel my normal, creative, resilient and excited self. Minor set backs feel like the end of the world. I'm now having to battle with imposter syndrome, and I'm not sure whether this is part of the journey.
I don't know how long it usually take to fully recover. I've found that a new job changes things around enough that I feel better so I can at least function again. Normalcy comes sometime later.
I kept telling me I was _close to being burnout_. It took me probably 6 months to realise how bad it had gotten and that I was actually in a really bad spot.
I'm saving up to do it again in a few years.
But to try to answer your question: I've wondered if going to work for a slow, boring company would help. Like a bank or just a local place that needs more I.T. type of help than amazing startup code. I tend to doubt this would work though.
Maybe work for a non-profit with a mission that aligns with your values? This is where I would lean.
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:)
But I'm also staying up too late. I have poor sleep hygiene. I'm on screens until well after midnight, and a significant amount of that time is spent reading "news" - not consciously reading to stay abreast of what's happening in the world, but habitually clicking and clicking and clicking. I can't really blame my job for the need to work late, because I seem to take hours to really get on a roll in the morning, and the work demands necessarily shift into the late evening after the kids go to bed. It's a vicious cycle. I'm working, e-mailing and Slacking on weekends when I don't need to be, and I'm not maintaining clear boundaries at all. Personal relationships are suffering as well.
So though I kind of relate to the burnout narrative, to really frame it as such seems like a cop-out for me. Working from home is a tremendous privilege, and doing so in a functional way requires a lot of discipline. Maybe the regular hours, commute and confines of cubicle or office walls make it a lot easier to maintain that discipline.
Hearing all these anecdotes compels me to try and figure this out. Somehow I don't think taking time off will be the answer...
The death spiral really kicks off when you start losing efficiency (as you've described) and as a result there's always more work on your plate than you have the capacity to do.
There's a paradox: the usual solution if you have extra work is to just push through it with some extra effort; once it's done you could theoretically go back to the usual routine. But your current predicament is because you've been working extra hard for too long already. You just go backwards if you try it.
I've spent weeks and weeks trying to "catch up" on my current project - and the previous two projects - working after my kid has gone to bed, working again first thing in the morning, working weekends - it only gets worse if you keep doing it and you wind up with worse results (I've just now blown past a deadline myself). Trust me. My mental and physical health is fucking shot, I've got skin rashes, putting on weight and I've been giving too much parenting work to my wife... I'm probably going to be mentally fucked for weeks now.
The solution is to reduce the workload. Drop some of the spinning plates, tell your boss you can't do XYZ in the allotted time, or just straight up quit.