Ask HN: Burned out 21 year old software developer, what's next?

You have not yet begun to work.

It's one life time and the universe doesn't care, so figure it out.

You can stay on a treadmill of 1-2 years where you find a new project and get bored and move on. You can pick a project to work on for 10 years and be "the guy who knows all". Whether it's a Daily WTF or a great project that spawns research papers is partly up to you and partly up to the people around you.

Realize that this is fine.

As you're doing this treadmill, develop some hobbies, and some friends. Buy random people drinks at random bars and go home with them. Realize that's totally fine. Hang out with co-workers and listen to their complaints about the software. Don't go home with them. Realize that's totally fine also because you'll see them again at some future job. Be as weird as you want, just don't be weird about it.

Being able to write software is a skill that lets you be in interesting places and work with interesting (and very demanding) people. Realize that's totally fine. You've got the choice of being the solid reliable guy they can always call on, or being the totally flaky genius that they call on anyway, or the hack that gets the crap job but doesn't care. Half the time you'll pick the wrong job and get fired or watch a company fail, and that's totally fine too.

Take a break, sure. You'll find a new job. Fine tune your crap detector. If you can take a little bit of crap at the right place you can make out pretty well. If it's the wrong place, take no crap from anybody and you'll find your phone ringing later. Just be competent and don't be an asshole, and you'll be fine. Exercise left to the reader.

I'd recommend option 4. At 21 there's no need to rush things. Gain other perspectives, soak up a bit of real life!

I know I previously enjoyed working at a games company as an employee because I valued the process of making something people would enjoy. Even though I was working 12 hour days 6 days a week I still enjoyed most of it.

I suppose my example mostly reinforces your point. To prevent burnout you really need to derive joy in the day to day rather than some external situation you can’t control.

I've been where you are (although I was 22). Going to university and, more importantly, studying something other than computer science was what really helped me. First it opened my eyes to all kinds of interesting areas where my programming skills could be applied. Secondly I found that being a pretty good programmer with solid domain knowledge in something other than computers (math and economics in my case) opened up a whole bunch of interesting jobs that weren't really available to someone who was just a pretty good programmer.

edit: One caveat is that I'm in Europe so university was pretty cheap for me. I have no idea how I would have reasoned if going to university had cost me an additional $20k+ a year.

I don't think there are many people around who get satisfaction from writting enterprise-software. In the beginning you might get some, because it was all new, shiny and you had responsability and could learn new things? But now you reached the basic level of grind, and there is no fun in this. So basically you are bored.

What you should do is to find something fresh, something enriching, something distracting, something valuable. Many developers have side-projects for this. Or are trying out new things. Doing this at work is a bit problematic, so you should be careful what you actually do there. But automating your work, enhancing your workflow and learning to spark up your worklife is always accepted if you get your work done.

The other option to take a longer vacation. 4 Weeks, 3 Months, depends on your situation. And don't overwork yourself of course. 7-8 Hours a day is more then enough. A human can't code for longer then 4-5 hours a day without losing it anyway.