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Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

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Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#41

Post by trcollinson »

akulbe wrote: post #33
trcollinson wrote: post #5

I have been coding since the 90s. This year I finally felt really burnt out. It got so bad I was upset, miserable, and lost all passion for working. I have 6 kids and a wife with a chronic untreatable disorder so I couldn’t just quit. And I’m glad I didn’t, it turns out that wouldn’t have helped. Here’s what I did and what I would suggest: 1) after talking to my wife and my doctor I got a counselor. Well really a tea…

One issue I see is that it seems like any mention of seeking the help of a counselor/psychologist/psychiatrist is SOOOOOO stigmatized that folks are repelled by the idea. It's very counterproductive and stops many from doing something that has the potential to completely turn things around.

I honestly can’t agree more. My doctor basically had to say “I’m going to get you an appointment with a counselor or I’m going to lock you in my trunk and you’ll be stuck there until you see a counselor.” Her trunk was quite nice but after a while I let her drop me off at a counselor.

I had no idea what it would be like. I was honestly scared to death to see someone. I was a fool. Rich, my counselor, is a kind, intelligent, and friendly man. I said “what are we doing?” And he said “you’re paying me by the hour to be your best friend. Just let me help guide you into a happy relationship.” He did. I complained. I cried. I got mad. We laughed our asses off. And honestly it helped. He made me feel like I was normal for my feelings. He let me know when I was wrong and how to rethink things. He let me vent. He smacked me emotionally. It is fantastic. It helped almost immediately.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#42

Post by Tade0 »

Congratulations on retaining your passion for so long.

I got myself fired at least once before I realized that what I'm passionate about in programming is not the thing that pays the bills.

My point being: It's a job. You receive money for doing it because it's either hard or impossible for your employer to do it themselves. Most of the time there's really nothing to be passionate about here.

It's enough that you're in the 1% of people who made an effort to learn all this. The vast majority of the population consider our line of work to be immensely boring - so much so that even our relatively high salaries don't attract them that much.

Cold professionalism and tinkering after-hours[1] are the things that I would recommend.

[1] That is - once you'll have the time and energy for that. Currently, you clearly don't.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#43

Post by wott »

ultrasounder wrote: post #14

I have been a Hardware Engineer for the past decade or so. After jumping around a bit this year I got an easy job just so that I can practice coding at work. Go figure. I realized that I have nothing more to do with schematics and PCBs and made a decision one fine day on a leap of faith. Haven't looked back. By the end of this year I hope to start solving Leetcode medium to hard and go through the riggamarole of codi…

I tried to shift into landscape design and park maintenance. I had 2 training periods. I was supposed to work on sites or supervise those works. After a few weeks or months, I ended up drawing AutoCAD plans in the 1st one, and I started developing an interface for a database of green spaces of the local government in the 2nd; so each time it was not long before I was back in an office in front of a computer :-/

Some of us are leopards who cannot change their spot...

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#44

Post by shams93 »

trcollinson wrote: post #5

I have been coding since the 90s. This year I finally felt really burnt out. It got so bad I was upset, miserable, and lost all passion for working. I have 6 kids and a wife with a chronic untreatable disorder so I couldn’t just quit. And I’m glad I didn’t, it turns out that wouldn’t have helped. Here’s what I did and what I would suggest: 1) after talking to my wife and my doctor I got a counselor. Well really a tea…

I've been a web developer since 1995 but because where I live developers have 0 social status I haven't been able to start a family. So when I burned out I went to live on a commune for 11 months. Ironically I wound up working with webrtc for the commune which landed me into a different area now where I'm working for a larger company and out of the grind of being a startup employee. Now I own my own side project but I work at it at my own pace and not having to put in 100 hours a week for 40 hours pay. At least in startups for the last 8 years there had been some amazing expectations when it came to unpaid overtime. The equity always turned out to be worthless but that didn't stop them from calling me at 3am on a Sunday over something that could have been handled Monday morning. Being in a larger company we don't do more than 8 hours unless its a genuine emergency like the database failing out in production. Working only 8 hours a day for the last year I find myself slowly regaining my health. I had to drop down to working 4 hours a day for a commune because after working in startups since 1995 my health was able to fully fail at age 44. I was lucky I had my student loans paid and no family so I could drop out for almost a year without a problem and then I was able to effectively drop back into a much better situation.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#45

Post by whitelio »

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Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#46

Post by mooreds »

dabockster wrote: post #15
trcollinson wrote: post #5

I have been coding since the 90s. This year I finally felt really burnt out. It got so bad I was upset, miserable, and lost all passion for working. I have 6 kids and a wife with a chronic untreatable disorder so I couldn’t just quit. And I’m glad I didn’t, it turns out that wouldn’t have helped. Here’s what I did and what I would suggest: 1) after talking to my wife and my doctor I got a counselor. Well really a tea…

The point about seeking professional help is super underrated. Just in the past few months, I would have entered a similar thread on HN to see the OP being brigaded by posts telling him/her to always be coding and to just chug along. This kind of talk completely ignores other issues that may be present and can cause even further damage.

If I were to enter a complicated transaction without consulting a lawyer (raising funding for example) people would say I was crazy.

Yet somehow we think we should be able to work out personal issues (burnout, marriage issues, depression, etc) by ourselves. It's bizarre.

If you can afford help, get it. If you can't, often you can get a discount (sliding scale) or work something out.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#47

Post by wolco »

shams93 wrote: post #44
trcollinson wrote: post #5

I have been coding since the 90s. This year I finally felt really burnt out. It got so bad I was upset, miserable, and lost all passion for working. I have 6 kids and a wife with a chronic untreatable disorder so I couldn’t just quit. And I’m glad I didn’t, it turns out that wouldn’t have helped. Here’s what I did and what I would suggest: 1) after talking to my wife and my doctor I got a counselor. Well really a tea…

I've been a web developer since 1995 but because where I live developers have 0 social status I haven't been able to start a family. So when I burned out I went to live on a commune for 11 months. Ironically I wound up working with webrtc for the commune which landed me into a different area now where I'm working for a larger company and out of the grind of being a startup employee. Now I own my own side project but…

Most stock turns out to be worthless. The things articles never mention.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#48

Post by wolco »

some_account wrote: post #17
poulsbohemian wrote: post #6

Identify _why_ you have lost passion for developing software. I can think of dozens of reasons _why_ you could reach this point, but the answer will direct you toward the next destination.

I'm not burned out but my reason for moving away from coding is simple. It's not fun in a open office environment with "agile" way of working. I got tired of feeling like a factory worker.

I found working in an agile shop for a few months burned me out as well. Agile takes away the art of programming and daily standups forced me to do only work I can summarize quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#49

Post by onion2k »

Insanity wrote: post #36
frfl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a problem you face regularly? Write code to solve it, there's probably a market for the solution.

When you start thinking of bringing something to market, it already adds stress to the 'just coding' part to me. When I write something for fun I don't want to have to think about making it usable for other people and everything that comes with that

Exactly this. I don't write code to make useful things I could sell (that's the day job). Code I write in my "coding every day" thing is more often toys, games or art.

Re: Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?

#50

Post by muzani »

Burnout is usually not caused by exhaustion, but by lack of progress. Progress isn't just about money or working with a good team. It's about doing something worthwhile.

I quit software a few times.

The first was because of low income. I started a cafe. But someone offered me about 5x the money I was making to get back in, and I did.

The second time I was a freelancer. I kept building all these shitty apps that nobody used, that were backed by bad teams and didn't make any money. So I started my own startup to do something worthwhile.

The third one was after I sold my startup. It was doing okay, at 5% weekly growth. But I was tired of people in the "startup community". I was working 100+ hour weeks. I couldn't get any funding even with significant traction, while some fools got lots of funding without even a product. I felt like a failure as a CEO, sold the company and retired for about a year.

Resting did nothing at all to cure burnout. What really helped was when someone asked me to go around the country, training teachers and students in advanced programming techniques.

It was giving back that really helped me out of burnout. If you've been in the industry for a long time, mentoring helps a lot.

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