Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

There really should be support groups for this sort of thing - message boards don't quite help it.

Lost major supplier responsible for about 1/2 our gross profit at about the same time our broad market entered recession, two key employees were mired in divorce proceedings, and another key employee left to fight CNS lymphoma. Three years and about three soul crushing false recoveries later we emerged with a lot of work ahead to rebuild and reduce debt.

The advice... expect nothing. Don't let the highs carry you or the lows crush you. Recognize circumstances outside your control and shut the door on them when it comes to your opinion of yourself. Earthquakes rock the brilliant and dullards al the same and sometimes having survived the experience is accomplishment enough.

I poured everything into that role, shunning personal relationships with all but a few very close friends.

I made the calculus that, like others in the same company before me, I'd put my time in and after 5-7 years I'd downshift roles. Write some papers, some patents, put everything I'd learned into product and service development.

Thing is, I didn't appreciate how much the company and company culture was changing even as I was helping drive that change.

The company changed from focusing on experience to certifications. Personal loyalties were almost frowned upon. If you were a technical professional you had to demonstrate that you filed for multiple patents per year (in my role I was actively discouraged from filing patents for corporate politics reasons…I could always file later).

In very short order I lost my team and lost my role. It turned out that while I was excellent at "internet stuff", I sucked at corporate politics. Once real money started being spent on infrastructure and applications I grew a target on my back large enough for its own corporate task force.

Multiple executives pulled me aside to tell me bluntly that I had no future at the company, but I didn't listen, I'd been there close to a decade, doing "internet stuff" most of that time, how could they throw that all away?

I got a consolation role in another organization at the company which lasted a year and then the entire organization was disbanded.

In parallel in my limited personal life, both of my parents were dying, with their deaths bracketing 9/11 by months on either side.

9/11 destroyed the neighborhood I had been living it.

By 2002 I walked away from all of it.

And I've mostly stayed away since then. I made quite a bit of money in the 1990s, not enough to be a VC, enough to semi–retire.

Every now and then I resurface and work with a startup for awhile, but I just can't pour myself in anymore the way people expect. It's just a job. I hope the startup does well, but I've become too jaded.

I briefly tried raising money, but found VCs were turned off that I walked away from the 7x24 lifestyle and my conservative approach to growing a business did not comport with their goals for portfolio returns.

So, yeah, it was a meh experience. I remain surprised that I survived the final year of working insane hours for the company even as I knew that they would jettison me as soon as I was no longer capable of working 18 hour days 6 days a week.

I'm in a much better space mentally, but it took over a decade after that experience before I "felt better".

My family and personal relationships take priority, and I actively turn down gigs and new work if they conflict with that choice.

I don't really have any advice. I feel like I wasted a decade creating capital value for a company way out of proportion to my compensation. And another decade wasted "recovering" from rejection from that company.

I guess my only advice would be, when you do burn out figure out an acceptable cover story if you decide to ever return to tech. Recruiters & head hunters, let alone hiring managers, will avoid at all costs anyone who admits to having burned out.