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Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
111–120 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#112Quit my first job (software engineer) after 5 months. I was burned out, not only from the work, but from spending my entire life following orders - from school to the workplace. So I quit my job after 5 months despite the fact that that's considered sacrilege, with maybe $13k in my bank account. I spent the next 3 months pursuing nothing but my hobby at the time (music production). The first month was possibly the be…
Do you enjoy coding when you do it for fun outside of work? If so, what about doing freelance work where you either work by yourself, or with people you actually enjoy working with?
Not anymore. It's not that I don't like coding, it's more that the most important problems to me right now that I want to work on are all non-coding problems. What I'm most passionate about right now is ending wage slavery, and I think the first step to getting us there is implementing a universal basic income. So I'm more interested in political activism.
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#113Quit my first job (software engineer) after 5 months. I was burned out, not only from the work, but from spending my entire life following orders - from school to the workplace. So I quit my job after 5 months despite the fact that that's considered sacrilege, with maybe $13k in my bank account. I spent the next 3 months pursuing nothing but my hobby at the time (music production). The first month was possibly the be…
I suggest having a plan before you take the year off. Doing what you want to do is fun, but not rewarding if there is no goal or plan to meet it. You burn a year and a bunch of cash and end up back where you started, thinking about how you could have used the time better.
Definitely, that's great advice.
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#114I pushed the idea of clusters at Sun. I was the guy that designed Sunbox, which was a bunch of small cheap servers in a rack with an Kalpana ethernet switch in front of them and some vlan like stuff that made it appear like all the servers were on all the subnets (no router overhead, this back in the days of 20MHZ sparc chips, you actually noticed the router in the mix.)
Here's a picture of it, written GNU pic (I say GNU because I got James to put in a construct called the `i'th so you could do for loops. So the picture is adjustable, I can change the cpus variable and it will draw the picture with the new number of cpus. That's GNU pic unique.)
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/sunbox.pdf
It was a big failure. For lots of reasons. Scott (ceo) insisted that it ship with Solaris rather than SunOS, nobody wanted Solaris (somewhere I have a tape of me presenting it at the Moscone center and someone was beating me up about the Solaris issue, I finally lost it and said "I know, I hate Solaris too, I was forced into it". My boss said "find all copies of that tape and destroy them". Yeah Solaris).
Sun was focussed on SMP machines, they thought that would solve all the world's problems, clusters just couldn't do it. Which completely missed the point. Sunbox shipped with SMP machines in the rack, I think 4 processors sparcstation 10's.
I pushed it along through sheer will power. It was like a little dude pushing on an oil tanker, I actually pushed Sun a degree or two off their stated path. But there was a ton of "Larry is trying to kill SMP" fud.
But it was too much. I burned out and my boss, Ken Okin (fantastic dude for many reasons), said "Go home, I'll call you when I need you". When I say "too much" I mean it. I was either in, or about to be in, a nervous breakdown and Ken saw that. I came back in after about 3 months and Ken took one look at me and said "I said I'd call you, go home!". Just to be clear, Sun was paying me to stay home.
So I did, for almost a year. My job became playing pool, but that's a story for another day (and probably boring to this crowd).
I did see my product manager years later, up in Tahoe skiing. He came over, bought a beer, and said "I guess you were right about that cluster thing". This was after google did 10,000 machine clusters that worked really really well, way better than any single SMP machine hope to do. Kudos to him for admitting it even if it was obvious.
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#115Happened to me and currently in the midst of it.
What happened : A disastrous startup failure. While the people I worked with were nice, everything we did failed so completely and utterly, that I lost my mind. Part of it was a seriously underperforming founder, partly just really bad situations. We could not achieve even 10% of any of our goals. Everything was a miserable failure, we were living together in an apartment and since the other founders left after the failure, I lost my home too and had to go crawling back to my parents' place to recover mentally. I had no desire or strength to do anything at the time.
The worst part was, that it was a decent idea that has already worked in some markets and I saw myself as the ideal customer. Our team, on paper, was strong and had diverse skillsets. I had put all of my hopes into making this a win.
Now, I am left with no idea of what to do next, and still no motivation to do anything either. The only thing I always wanted to do, is a door that is permanently closed now (due to age. I'm young, but that path closes at 25. I didn't pursue it because I used to be a dumb kid who wasn't mature enough to make hard decisions early on in his life).
My GRE score expires next year, so I am considering a higher degree and a move to the US or Canada. Maybe even a Phd, since I did some research work in college and liked doing it. But I am terrified of a big commitment now.
The quality of startups in my country is really low, and while I have interviewed with a few, nothing stuck out.
A few good, big companies are there, where I SHOULD apply, but haven't. I have failed in everything I have done, even prior to my startup. Nothing has worked, and nothing has amounted to anything. So why even attempt right?
/meaningless rant
Advice to others : Do what you REALLY want to do, and stick to the most proven/established way of accomplishing it. Startups should be attempted ONLY if there's no other way at all of doing what you love. That precludes 99.999% of the cases.
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#116PhD dropout. There was a rotating door of students joining for a year and then quitting, but I stuck it out for 3. By the end I was nocturnal, experienced my first panic attack, broke up with a long relationship, and my file organization went to shit. A few professors were betting behind my back whether I'd quit. We met 7 days a week, and I was expected to have progress everyday. Depression and stress evolved to new levels. Considered ways to relieve stress, like smoking, self harm, therapy, drinking. Tried some. Finally, decided if I didn't quit, I was headed down a very dangerous path. Spent the next 6 months playing video games and recovering, with the help of drinking alone, and trying to date again.
After 6 months, I was more or less better again, but picked up some minor bad habits I still haven't really kicked. Quitting PhD was the best thing I ever did for myself.
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#117Quit my first job (software engineer) after 5 months. I was burned out, not only from the work, but from spending my entire life following orders - from school to the workplace. So I quit my job after 5 months despite the fact that that's considered sacrilege, with maybe $13k in my bank account. I spent the next 3 months pursuing nothing but my hobby at the time (music production). The first month was possibly the be…
I couldn't care less about Javascript frameworks A lot of us have had that experience! I've realized that I will never be happy in a traditional job. Being subservient and following orders is not in my nature. This is a good thing to realise, but on the flip side do be aware that it's possible to work with a team without being subjected to a top-down, prescribed style of management. A collaborative team environment c…
Definitely, and that's a great point. My current job used to be pretty good in that nature, but it's recently gotten worse with the hiring of an authoritarian person at the top and the politically-oriented sycophants coming out of the woodworks to entrench their own power, but I'm doing what I can to keep the work environment democratic like it used to be.
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you talk a little more about "the prison of an office" and why you consider an office this way? You say that you're tired of taking orders, and I can relate to this... but do you feel so oppressed from above that you absolutely must be "butt in seat" at 9:00 AM Or Else Death? I felt this way when I was younger fresh out of university and not so much anymore, and I don't believe I've become Institutionalized to su…
I don't understand how people manage to be in an office with their boring-ass jobs from 9-5 Monday through Friday till eternity (excluding their measly 2-3 weeks of vacation). I honestly think most people lack consciousness. For one, it's boring, monotonous, and soul-sucking. Which might be manageable, except with commuting and such you're looking at 9 hours/day wasted, and the bulk of your mental energy drained. Add…
You make some good observations and it's true that commuting overheads, US holidays and 9-5 are over the top. Many people here on HN eventually wind up with remote gigs and swear by them. I worked remote for many years too. Right now I am founding my second startup, which being hardware-focused basically requires physical presence. That said, everyone knocks off at 4PM, being foodtech-focused we do lunch together and try to maintain a collaborative environment where people can work on their own stuff but communicate frequently. It helps us all stay on one page and minimizes needless formal project management / messaging / issue-tracking muck. Probably a totally different environment to many startups or larger companies, definitely more creative, and definitely more attractive to people like yourself who reject needless formalism. It's probably largely a response to my own experience. I guess there's always a few companies like ours carrying the torch of (in)sanity: find one, or start one!
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#119I pushed the idea of clusters at Sun. I was the guy that designed Sunbox, which was a bunch of small cheap servers in a rack with an Kalpana ethernet switch in front of them and some vlan like stuff that made it appear like all the servers were on all the subnets (no router overhead, this back in the days of 20MHZ sparc chips, you actually noticed the router in the mix.) Here's a picture of it, written GNU pic (I say…
> My job became playing pool, but that's a story for another day (and probably boring to this crowd).
You were being paid to do whatever you wanted to do. Doesn't sound boring to me! Would you share that story?
Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
#120Lawyer. 8 years in IT/privacy/compliance consulting, mostly startups. Tired of ratrace. Applied to armed forces to become JAG officer. Took all thier apptitude tests. "Want to be a pilot?"... hell yes. Now a 2lt finished basic and waiting for flight school. Of i fail as pilot ill become jag. Never felt more relaxed.