You're being abused by your employer. They need you and yet you think you have no value. You have value otherwise they wouldn't need you on call all the time.
Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
381–390 of 521 posts
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#3821. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…
6. Start not giving a shit about career, helped me a lot
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#383It sounds like you've never spent much time around good programmers. You are trying to learn it all yourself and online content is hit or miss.
Try reading through popular library code on GitHub. Read a high quality programming book, not blogs and stack overflow. Try to get a position at a larger company no matter how junior or low pay, but with good programmers who will mentor and answer questions.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#3841. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…
Do #1 as long as you need. For me it went like this: - month 1 : feeling lost - month 2 : feeling totally lost - month 3 : starting doing things for fun, with the culpability of not working - month 4 : starting to get bored... Staying home alone starts to be boring (it means your health improve 'cos you start wanting to do something again) - month 5 : realizing that I can't repeat the last 10 years of my life. Som th…
How is school going for you?
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I think that at least in tech it was only ever a thing in companies that didn't know better. I mean, I throughout my career I was fired multiple times and at least twice that resulted in a 3-month gap, only one of them being voluntarily that long. I now take them on purpose and collected a total of five over the course of 10+ years. I…
My last job search it came up a lot . I took about 8 months then started looking. Because I could at that time. Since it was the current thing I was doing it came up a decent amount. Took probably double the amount of time to get a job. I finally asked someone why they cared? They said it looks like others were passing me up for some reason and they did not want to pick someone up who everyone else was passing up. Hi…
If I had a voluntary gap like this and I put something like "Sabbatical" on my resume and made a few notes of how I spent my time I wonder how that would go over. The last time I was in the interview process I saw my interviewer as a kind of interviewing pro, it wasn't until I got hired that I realized he was just a guy and he had really only interviewed and on-boarded a handful of people before.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
It depends entirely on the company and how many other candidates they have. If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect - Sorry, I can’t interview or even screen everyone. The resume with unexplained gaps isn’t getting sorted into the top of the pile simply because I have to be aggressive with filtering. On the other hand, if I’m hiring for a difficult position at a less popular company and I’m only…
The converse to this is that a resume gap can often stem from things like family status, or health conditions.
Stuff like this (at least in the US) is supposed to be legally protected, but in practice it's a little useless to bar employers from, say, asking about your medical history if they can push yourself to explain a gap in your resume that was exacerbated by a mental health condition, or caused because some illness or accident or left you physically unable to work. (See also: candidates who have kids)
It's a dumb loophole that enables hiring discrimination -- because you can still fish for information that's illegal to ask about specifically, just by falling back to a catch-all question that's bound to turn up much of the same information a meaningful chunk of the time.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would I even know they are clean? And if they are clean and they presumably have a greater chance of a relapse than other random candidates.
Drug tests are pretty common. If they pass that, there's no reason to prevent hiring. It could even be illegal since it's a health condition. This comment makes me sad. It seems illegal biases in hiring and management practices are rampant. Worker protections seem to be a joke when they're blatantly ignored.
Well... I don't hire people so don't take my comment as proof that any illegal biases are rampant. I was just stating one possible issue an employer might have with career breaks.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 40 years I have only ever put the start and end year of each item on my resume. I guess this dates to when most jobs / education lasted multiple years. But I've stuck with it and no-one has ever questioned it. The couple of jobs I have had which were less than one year spanned a year-end so it never looked odd. When I am reviewing incoming resumes small gaps never bother me. Ocassionally I have seen multi-year gap…
Curious what you would consider an illegitimate career break?
Prison, at least that's how it was explained to me in the mid 90s when I started out.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#389How's your health? The brain fog, in particular, jumps out as something that may have other causes. In particular:
* Are you exercising?
* Sleeping well? Sleeping consistently?
* Eating well?
* Getting enough vitamins? Vitamin D is a common, easily fixed deficiency that can cause trouble concentrating; you can get your doctor to test it with a blood draw.
* Any chance you have long covid?
If you physically don't feel good on a daily basis, I would absolutely dial back your work and focus on getting in shape for, say, 2 months. 70+ hours per week clearly isn't getting you where you want, so aim for 40 and put in a hard cap at 50, and get used to the idea that some stuff won't get done. Once you're feeling better, continue keeping reasonable hours and resume studying then.
Even if everything else is fine, you might just be working too much. I think the vast majority of people would have trouble studying after a month straight of oncall and 12-hour days.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would I even know they are clean? And if they are clean and they presumably have a greater chance of a relapse than other random candidates.
Why should you even know they were not clean at some point in their past. And what about the future? Like the sibling comment, I find this very sad. Perform drug tests if you're worried.
I'm imagining a scenario where a candidate explicitly says that they just had a career break that was due to drug abuse, I think it would be hard to stay objective after that. I don't hire people but that would affect a lot of employers.