Burnout Is Real

You know you're in one such company when your responsibility is no longer limited to writing good code, but at the table deciding what should be built, and what the future plan is for the company or the product area.

I also suffered burnout at a job, but I didn't realize it until I was receiving therapy related to my anxiety. I don't know anything about meds or ADHD since that isn't anything I have experience with, but I think it's worth doing some introspection on one's self to see if there are thoughts or tendencies that are also there underneath the burnout.

I don't know your situation in detail, but I have caught myself feeling like this in the past and it was completely self-imposed. I want to believe that my work is adding value (even putting aside big-picture questions of whether it's valuable to the world overall, just providing immediate value to the business & clients can be rewarding), and since you have so much leverage as an engineer to impact the experience of thousands or millions of users with your code it's easy to let that feeling expand into an unhealthy amount of pressure to put on yourself.

I have found that stepping back and being explicit about my expectations for myself and my work has helped a lot. There are some things that are entirely out of my control, so I definitely shouldn't let myself get stressed about those. There are other things that could be within my control but don't fall within a reasonable set of constraints that I choose to set for myself. I don't expect myself to never make a mistake, or to work 80 hour weeks. This latter category is less black and white and I still struggle with it sometimes. I do want to be committed to my job, I do want to be seen as valuable, and work my way toward promotions, but you can still do that in tech in while still maintaining some work/life balance.

Being a founder for a few years also helped my outlook on this a lot. As a founder, or I imagine a CEO, this type of intense self imposed pressure is seemingly very necessary in order to succeed. As an employee, you see a much smaller reward if things go well, and you should allow yourself to feel a much smaller amount of pressure/stress when problems arise.

My parents constantly refrained how I "wanted a good job indoors with air conditioning", with the rationale that I wouldn't have to worry about my body breaking down (hilarious after I experienced cubicle life prior to starting a regular workout routine). This was reinforced by that the large amount of extra-curriculars I was (mostly) pushed into during high school, under the assumption that I could just handle it on top of AP/honors schoolwork. "Taking a break" was something you did for 30 minutes, maybe an hour at most before getting back to whatever the task at hand was.

My "teenage rebellion" was fights with my parents over doing nothing but playing video games on Saturday after working the equivalent of 14 hour days Sunday-Friday, all in the name of the big college in the sky. The notion of "mental burnout" didn't even enter my lexicon until college, although I was almost certainly suffering from it for most of high school. I know a lot of my classmates had similar experiences.

On the professional front, a lot of managers and executives (though not all) also promote this "sleep is for the weak" mentality as an article of faith. Likewise I've heard multiple snide remarks from blue-collar workers who don't know any better about how "cushy" those tech jobs are, and how if they had one they'd totally just work 100 hour weeks because "how hard is it to sit at a computer all day?"

So there is a widespread notion out there, at least in the US, that intellectual labor isn't really laborious, and if you claim fatigue from it you're just weak. These posts are largely a (rightful IMO) rebellion against that notion. If everyone took your perspective then yeah, they'd be rather trite. Unfortunately it never ceases to amaze me the self-destructive things people tie their identities to, and then try to pull other people into the same habits just for the validation.

You're not allowing yourself to be bored. You can't do creative hobbies if you're just going on autopilot and spending your time doing the absolute lowest common denominator timesinks like Reddit and Netflix.