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Take a break

robinrendle.com

101–110 of 171 posts

Re: Take a break

#101
It's best, when you can take a break and know money is still flowing in. That requires a separation from hours worked to the money you earn.

Imagine most people could live off passive income (like dividends) - we could all work less, I guess.

Re: Take a break

#102
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try megadosing B1 (2000mg), B2 (1000mg+) and take NAD+ boosters like Niagen (300mg) for a month - a few of my friends/colleagues recovered from burnout/panic attacks with these. Your body needs NAD+ and B1 for energy, your brain needs FAD+ and B1 for energy (FAD+ comes from B2). You might be just low on basic energy elements and replenishing those might help you quickly. In general, it's a good idea to add multivitam…

Thanks! I will read on these things first. You mentioned glucose -- actually i feel much less anxious right after i eat something sweet.

Magnesium supplements might be helpful, too. They helped me be calmer and to think more clearly again in a bad time in my life.

Re: Take a break

#103

> small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation, I notice fewer jokes, fewer attempts on my part to make people laugh. My memory goes to all hell too and I can’t seem to concentrate on prolonged amounts of anything. Books fall off my radar, I stop listening to music. My phone is in my hand at all times, scrolly-anxiety-inducing apps become impossible to avoid. This describes me perfec…

My one year old is relatively easy compared to other kids. She’s generally not fussy unless teething, very happy and playful, can play by herself well (if necessary), etc.

My wife was out of town for a week and I had to single parent… even an insanely “easy” baby is so exhausting. I have mad respect for single parents.

I basically had to give up work during the day until she went down for naps and for the night - which meant my sleep was awful because I’d work at least until midnight each night just to catch up.

Parenting is surprisingly hard (wouldn’t trade it for anything, though).

Re: Take a break

#104
post #52

As a developer and a parent with young kids, it is nearly laughable at the amount of stress one deals with everyday. Wake up at 5:30, get all things ready for kids, wake up kids, get their breakfast ready, check my (work phone - who decided work phones are a good idea). Take kids to school, get back to work, meetings and more meetings ( countless meetings are a waste of time but they still have them) Time for lunch,…

how the hell do you manage to survive that, being a dev and being a parent is separately challeging good lord.

Re: Take a break

#105
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true but also dependent on your "other circumstances". The US is decidedly a bad place to be a parent from what I can tell. Parental leave, even when graciously granted by the company is short and frowned upon nevertheless (generalizing here of course but this seems to be the overall majority of cases). Taking a few months of parental leave right at the beginning was such a big help. All of the above becomes…

Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine! Baby wakes up at 6:30am like clockwork. Your move, parent. Not to be a stick in the mud. You’re of course right that having additional responsibilities further increases the stress & difficulty.

Which in the case I described is not a big issue and basically entirely my point. 1.5 hours of sleep. Usually a killer. In the above mentioned situation it will still not be great, you'll be tired, groggy, irritable. But you won't snap at your PM for the 10th time in a row during standup and be cited to the boss' office or a formal warning or something.

As in I'm talking proper parental leave, meaning both parents can take 3-6 months off at the beginning, no questions asked, everyone is OK with it and it's totally normal. And you still get a reasonable amount of salary - in our case here in Canada from the parental leave part of E.I. meaning government guaranteed. Of course if I look at SV salaries, the maximums you can get under that program are laughable but here where we are it was totally workable at the time in our lives when we had kids.

Contrast that to what I hear about SV companies (I won't cite company names as that will draw the ire of the down voters here on HN, but I have inside knowledge i.e. new dads in such companies) where even if officially it's possible, nobody really does it. Sort of like "unlimited vacation", which sounds like it's better than the 30 days you get as a dev in most European countries but that in reality just ensures that nobody wants to be "the guy" that takes the most vacation and you still don't get more than you used to. If you were one of the "lucky ones" that had more than the minimum, you're now probably taking less time off than before.

Re: Take a break

#106
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years in. I started to have panic attacks last year. Took a a few 2 weeks vacations. They help only temporarily. Now i'm out of vacations, trapped in a foreign country without usual citizen rights to take a many-months break from work and without an option to return home(because of war). Feel trapped without any light ahead.

Try megadosing B1 (2000mg), B2 (1000mg+) and take NAD+ boosters like Niagen (300mg) for a month - a few of my friends/colleagues recovered from burnout/panic attacks with these. Your body needs NAD+ and B1 for energy, your brain needs FAD+ and B1 for energy (FAD+ comes from B2). You might be just low on basic energy elements and replenishing those might help you quickly. In general, it's a good idea to add multivitam…

This are very strong claims. Got any reliable research papers to share?

Re: Take a break

#107
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true but also dependent on your "other circumstances". The US is decidedly a bad place to be a parent from what I can tell. Parental leave, even when graciously granted by the company is short and frowned upon nevertheless (generalizing here of course but this seems to be the overall majority of cases). Taking a few months of parental leave right at the beginning was such a big help. All of the above becomes…

Go to bed at 5a.m. knowing you don't have to get up to get to work and be expected to have a fresh mind. You just fall asleep, exhausted and wake up for lunch time and it's fine! Baby wakes up at 6:30am like clockwork. Your move, parent. Not to be a stick in the mud. You’re of course right that having additional responsibilities further increases the stress & difficulty.

[deleted]

Re: Take a break

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the solution is to figure out how to put in long hours effectively, not to throw it away. That's an excuse. Do you want to be rich, or not?

Nobody gets rich by doing a lot of work. You get rich by taking the value generated by other people's work.

If you aren't born rich, breaking out of the working class, even the top tier of it, requires significant effort and enormous luck. It's usually time and effort wasted in pursuit of something no one should want. However, if you dream of sitting atop the pyramid but you weren't born there, you better get on that grind.

Re: Take a break

#109
post #44

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

Completely in agrement with you. We are fundamentaly biurnal, you wake up, (in whatever state you prefer), and then do your thing with a limited (daily provided) resources that are awailable to you. Repeat.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2278827/

People are biurnal? No, people are diurnal. People who try to be nocturnal or biurnal are fooling themselves and screwing up their lives and probably negatively affecting the lives of those around them.

Re: Take a break

#110
post #18

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

I am not sure about that. There are always tasks that can be done without having to think too much about it. The more time you put into them, the more of those small tasks you can complete. I wouldn't start building new features or change important parts of the code base after a 10hr day for sure, but there is a lot more that can't "break everything".

There’s also personal aspect to that: working when your mind already fails - sucks. It feels like wandering in a deep forest only occasionally seeing the light. Or clicking randomly through windows management consoles in hope it works. Very uncomfortable, boring and demotivating, even if nothing goes wrong in a project afterwards.

This probably has no economical benefit even. I believe in most cases a second shift would do this work much quicker than an exhausted team that spends most of this time squeezing last drops of sanity at overtime rate. [laughs in corporative]

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