There Is No Cure for Burnout

I tend to be really intense about my job, and as a result I've left almost all of my jobs due to burnout, usually related to frustration that my dept isn't prioritizing what I feel is important to be successful, and that my time isn't well spent.

I recently went through this at my current gig, despite having good pay, good manager, and as close to a non-toxic environment as I think is possible. In other words... I couldn't easily scapegoat the org. The problem probably had to do with me. So I tried a new thing: to actually salvage the gig and fight to get my needs met instead of throwing my hands up and abandoning the whole affair.

It took a few months of failed compromises before I resorted to being totally upfront about it. I tried to ask for things like "one sprint on, one sprint off" and hearing that "we don't have bandwidth" until I finally said "look, i'm not having a good time, my productivity is on the floor, i have no morale and things that should take 10 easy minutes take a miserable week. i'm gonna take a month, and when I come back, i'm gonna work on other stuff (with a large, thorough doc of what "other stuff" should be: the intersection of things i find valuable/interesting + would also be valuable to the team).

Management was on board this time. I think they could tell that I was pained enough to walk if I had to, like most of the people in these stories. We also have a new engineer that unlocked some bandwidth. They asked me to move my month off to December instead of November, but greenlit my new work effective the next sprint.

The turnaround was astonishing. Overnight, my output went from unusually low to unusually high. I wake up excited to work on stuff, and care enough that I can be self-directing without needing to be fed tickets or have a PM prioritizing goals. My demos hit heavy, I feel great about my job, and I haven't even taken the vacation yet. I'm still taking it, but it no longer feels like I'll have a breakdown if I don't.

Point is: sometimes burnout comes from feelings of helplessness, arbitrariness, lack of autonomy, and misalignment of personal and company goals. Then you get bitter, and fatigued by constant bitterness, and the hole deepens until you can't see a way out anymore.

But if you can recognize whats got you down, come up with a viable alternative, set and defend boundaries on your time, and fight for them with adult conflict resolution skills... that crippling dissatisfaction is VERY actionable.

"Burnout" is a catch-all term for many nebulous forms of psychological fatigue. The idea that there's no cure for any of those things is pretty silly to me.

Eventually you'll decide whether or not it's a good idea to keep going in that direction. You'll also get a clearer idea of what you actually want to do, and get rid of those weird "strong morals" that people tend to have, that really do limit their options (for example, "I'll never be able to leave this job" or when addicts feel there's no way out and they're too scared to quit, even though everything about their situation objectively sucks).

(i am only an armchair therapist, not a real one)

My thoughts while reading this are... can you imagine if she had a family to support?

I think the cure for burnout is time off and thinking about all the things you do have and not about how unfair the world is. It's always been that way and always will be. Millennials are burned out at a much higher rate due to the fact that they are the most entitled generation entering the workforce.

If it's truly occupational, I think one should find a new job. To quit with nothing else lined up except a dream, that's just irrational behavior. The world owes us nothing and our ancestors had it much much worse.

Also, she hasn't even had 3 months off. The general rule is at least half the time you've been burned out to truly recover. At least that's what I hear from people who we're actually able to recover, the ones without children to feed. For this guy, it's not a reality. I have to grind and it's just the way it is.

Pacing yourself is a great concept, however, management pushes harder and harder and they don't see you as a person, they see you as a replaceable piece of meat. Developers today lack a solid seat at the corporate table and the situation has only gotten worse in recent years due to the importation of so many H1Bs who are desperate to earn money and stay in the US. The importation of people who can't/won't push back or ever say no puts everyone at health and financial risk.

Here is a ground-level view of corporatism in all its Satanic glory. If corporations do end up ruling us, once again becoming able to project violence, regular people are in for a very hard time.