Burnout Is Real

I have always been remote since I started but it was, for me, more the economic stuff of my clients defaulting and there being this doom and gloom atmosphere.

I have worked in retail, dealt with some of the rudest people. Sometimes, I still get angry about it. But my job satisfaction was certainly higher back then. At the end of day, I was tired but I didn't had to think of work anymore. Sure I met some assholes, but I also met some great people, some are still my friends.

Other jobs I had were tutoring, security guard, IT helpdesk. All these jobs had higher satisfaction and they ended at the end of day.

Now my dev job never really ends, I am constantly thinking about work related problems even while playing with my kids. The stuff that I work (storage) on is used mostly by advertising industry based on our clients. I am not making the world better, just making myself and some people richer. I might be burning out too, not sure if I was in retail for 10+ years, if I would feel same way. But when I worked with older people in retail, none of them ever complained about burn out like we programmers do.

I agree somewhat but I think many people in some lower paid jobs aren’t as miserable in them as you might imagine. I’ve met quite a few who are content with them - as the work doesn’t follow them home and has almost no mental game to it. It’s very adjacent to manual labor.

I didn’t start experiencing truly large amounts of job dissatisfaction until I worked in software. Jobs before then were never fantastic but I wasn’t upset like I get now and they never followed me home.

In 2009, I experienced burnout. I had just turned 30 and was doing management consulting for software teams. I thought it was the coolest job in the world at first - people paid to fly me to their dev standup to tell them how to build software better! And although I didn't really have the experience necessary to be really good at it, I was capable enough to make it work. But after a fear years, I got absolutely burned out.

I thought maybe the problem was that software wasn't the industry for me. I still liked to code, but I just couldn't stomach the idea of being in another standup, having another conversation about how long a sprint should be, or discussion about why some team refuses to track defects effectively. So I decided to leave the software world behind to start a my own business. As fate would have it I ended up spending the next decade building, running, and eventually closing a sporting goods retail business.

I still wrote some code during that time that solved a few of our business needs. That code resulted in real competitive advantages that contributed to our success. And because old habits die hard and it's a useful practice in a variety of circumstances, we even had a standup to start each workday!

The experience of running my own business taught me a lot. I matured over that 10 years. And I gained enough experience and perspective to realize my burnout had nothing to do with writing code or managing software teams and everything to do with understanding what type of work I enjoyed.

I enjoyed building things. I enjoyed the camaraderie of being on a team and sharing in successes and failures with coworkers. But I definitely didn't want to spend all of my days in retail and managing retail personnel. So we closed the retail business and I have been back in software a few years now.

Looking back on why I got burned out in the first place, I realized I stayed on too long at the consulting firm. The money was great, my boss was great, the other consultants were great (although our paths didn't cross very often). But I loathed client work. I loathed never being a part of a team and delivering software. I loathed spending so much effort convincing my client to let me help. I loathed the travel. I loathed spending one day of the week at a client site sitting in their security department waiting for a badge. I loathed airport security lines, shitty airport food, late planes, luggage lines, and rental cars. I loathed cubicle hell. And I conflated all that, to my detriment, with the act of writing software.

Figuring out what really makes me tick has resulted in being as satisfied in a work situation as I've been in my entire career. My current employer isn't perfect. Business is challenging. I don't have enough budget, processes need improving, timelines are too aggressive, and priorities change too often. But now that I know what I enjoy (and what I don't) and have enough breadth of experience to better triage my frustrations. That's made it much easier to find satisfaction and be content.

I hope denvercoder is able to do the same. If he finds out that he's truly satisfied detailing cars and creates a successful business doing so, fantastic. Maybe he finds out it's just another stepping stone on a bigger journey. But as the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. And life is too short not to be happy.

> and helped sort things out

How?

Being overloaded for a long time is also sometimes a sign that the business is failing.

Which is horrible: It is when a founder is the most tired that he has to deal with the most unknown part of the work. For a simple project manager, it is often when you miss a deadline that you have to write reports and deal with stakeholder dissatisfaction, which cascades into missing other deadlines and having to implement more and more damage control to perform.

Sometimes the only way is to walk away and let it all crumble.