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Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#121

Post by drdeadringer »

nulagrithom wrote: post #82

I had spent the day up in Omak, WA trying to install a new router at one of our offices. Omak is nowhere -- about an hours drive from the Canadian border in central Washington. Both the fiber company and the ISP had screwed up, and I ended up drinking my lunch at a bar. I was really pissed off because I knew there was no way they'd fix it any time soon, and I'd have to spend hours driving back up to that god-forsaken…

I find this an amazing story, and at the same time cannot help but consider it a real-life version of Office Space.

A part of me lives to meet such people, the type of person who has a completely different history than you think they have.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#122

Post by dragonwriter »

gotthemwmds wrote: post #103
dragonwriter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AA is controversial not only for it's religious content, but also because it's empirically both far less effective than it claims and less effective than alternatives. See, e.g, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr...

How can anyone make an empirical statement about AA -- an organization that does not collect any sort of statistics about itself what so ever?

AA not collecting statistics doesn't prevent other people from conducting studies of recovery in addicts that include people in AA.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#123

Post by thesagan »

AnonyBrah wrote: post #112
adamzerner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DUDE. Me too.

Looking at the latest wealth distribution data, the wage slavery thing is getting out of hand and we have a growing population without the infrastructure necessary for it. Yet we have the resources to tackle the problem if appropriate attention were given to it.

I'd absolutely love to find a way to break into community organization while also feeding myself, because I see a lot of work that must happen but it's not compensated work at the moment. Lots of urgent needs don't have "market demand" right now because those needs don't have dollars behind them. (And the dollars are increasingly flowing away from needs of the masses and into the wants of the 0.1% as I'm sure you know)

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#124

Post by middle334 »

kirse wrote: post #86
middle334 wrote: post #46

Drank for the first 25 years of my career. High-functioning alcoholic, I guess. You've definitely heard of the products I have a bunch of code in, and the companies I worked for. I don't know how I managed getting blasted every night and still write all that code. As things got worse I started working for smaller and smaller companies, and wound up essentially jobless and alone and drinking off of my savings in a Sil…

[AA is controversial, I know] AA is controversial among a tiny minority of anti-religion internet blowhards. For the vast majority of reasonable folks, it really isn't. Glad to hear it has worked for you.

I just didn't want to derail things into another "AA is bad because it's religious" discussion. To paraphrase Heinlein: If solemnly rubbing blue mud in my belly button would have gotten me sober, I would have done that. If something like Rational Recovery had been an option, I would have gone. But AA is free and there are meetings everywhere, nearly all the time.

It is kind of dismaying to get out of nearly a month of expensive treatment and then be told, "Welp, pretty much all we've got for you at this point is for you to attend a crapload of AA meetings, good luck." But I figure that desperation is an important part of staying sober, at least until you've fleshed out some kind of support.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#125

Post by audiometry »

bonniemuffin wrote: post #9

About a month before my dissertation defense, I had already accepted a postdoc offer across the country, put in notice on my apartment, signed a new lease and arranged my cross-country move, but I had an absolutely impossible amount of work left on the list of things my dissertation committee claimed I needed to do before I could graduate, and my experiments just weren't working. It was clear that the work was imposs…

How did they justify (to themselves) how their laundry list of must-do's became can-skip's?

Did it make a meaningful difference to the conclusions or strength of conclusions in your thesis?

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#126

Post by pengo »

kespindler wrote: post #77
pengo wrote: post #75

I have my own software development company. My clients use a purpose-built framework for managing funding applications and grants online. As a sole operator my workload varies: when I add a new client, customisations can keep me at full capacity for several weeks, at other times maintenance can total less than twenty hours a week unless there are requested enhancements or I'm adding new features. Late last year while…

Could I get your contact information to chat with you more about government contracting? It's a space I'm doing a lot of research in, and very curious to learn more about!

Bear in mind this is government contracting in New Zealand. You're welcome to contact me if that's still relevant: leigh at else dot co dot nz will do the trick.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#127

Post by dilemma »

emerongi wrote: post #66
AnonyBrah wrote: post #28

Quit 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 can relate. I took a year off university for medical reasons and am not sure whether to return. I felt miserable in uni, but I got a decent job right now and am truly happy for probably the first time in my life. On the other hand I would be putting my future in jeopardy by not getting a degree. I'm not sure wtf to do to be honest. School has not been my thing since like 9th grade, I barely even attended the last g…

School is horrible but make sure to get your degree. It's a requirement for various things, for example moving abroad, and not having it would limit your future in many ways.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#128

Post by antisthenes »

AnonyBrah wrote: post #107
drdeadringer wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

> The whole "butt in seat" 10-5pm obsession is stupid and ridiculous. We're not manual laborers - productive mind work doesn't necessarily follow a 10-5pm schedule. If I can get all my work done by 2pm, why can't I just leave?

This is the most important point that hits home. I've been constantly looking for a job that recognizes this.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#129

Post by rangibaby »

BlackjackCF wrote: post #94
atdt wrote: post #7

I am in the midst of one. It has been about a year and a half, plus or minus, and it has taken a tremendous toll on my well-being. I find it especially difficult to deal with the mismatch between my sense of what I can do, which is calibrated to my former self, and what I can actually deliver. I desperately need to believe that what I am going through is a temporary perturbation, so I keep trying to "shake it off", a…

Oh god. You're describing exactly what I'm feeling. I felt that way about being in lighting design after a while. I had worked 60-80 hour weeks consistently, and towards the end I completely lost interest and felt that I can't deliver. I swapped into software engineering and I've been pounding the pavement for almost 3 years, and I'm hitting this point. It's not like I don't love what I do... I just sometimes feel li…

When I start feeling like your last couple of sentences I break my work up into a list of smaller easier tasks, do a couple then go and take a break for 30 min-a few hours. Go for a walk outside, have a shower, drink coffee at a cafe, have a nap, etc. anything that is away from my phone and computers. That usually calms me down enough to work more.

Re: Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

#130

Post by fweespeech »

wellboy wrote: post #37
fweespeech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. I don't need to care about the reactions of strangers on the internet. If you act like someone who needs to be called out, I'll call you out. I genuinely don't care. Lol.

Then don't comment on threads to strangers online if you genuinely don't care.

Normally I'm not attacked for it. And why does indifference mean silence exactly?

Do you genuinely care about every word that you speak and every action you take? Seems tiresome.

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