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Take a break

robinrendle.com

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Re: Take a break

#121

Post by scruple »

greymalik wrote: post #14

> 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…

Yeah, same, minus the phone bit. I absolutely hate the fucking thing. I keep it around because I need an app for communication with my twins preschool and it's undeniably a better point and shoot camera than most actual point and shoot cameras.

We have 3 kids, 3 years and under. I'm honestly more regimented in my personal life today than I was when I was active duty military. Things in (all of) our lives fall apart if I fall behind or start to slip. So I've become a sort of machine. I honestly think it's just a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that I've had to abandon entire categories of my self identity. I have 2, maybe 3 hobbies today. I get between 30 and 60 minutes of actual free time a day, but I like / want to spend time with my wife. I can't find time to maintain any relationships outside of my immediate family. I can't even really be more than 30 minutes from the house at any given moment, because my wife is still in recovery from the birth of our last child.

It's just very, very hard. We have little help, and most of the help we get is neither reliable nor consistent. My parents are visiting right now, from very far away, and this morning is the first real break that I have had in over a year. I stepped away 45 minutes ago and was able to get some much-needed cleaning done in the office. I plan to give my wife a break when her and our 1 year old wake up from their nap. That'll be the first time I've been able to do that on a weekend in longer than I can remember.

Re: Take a break

#122

Post by bitL »

GrigoriyMikh wrote: post #75
bitL wrote: 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.

Also, I forgot to mention avoid sun exposure when taking B2 as it reacts with sunlight producing toxic substances in the skin. Winter seems ideal for taking it.

Iron is also helping tired people but nobody knows why, so you might try that as well (for a short time period).

Re: Take a break

#123

Post by fitch321 »

goodpoint wrote: post #97
brudgers wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working productively all night is a skill. Just like avoiding meetings. Just like achieving flow state. The all-nighter that results from not-wanting to stop the creative process is not the all-nighter of the deadline death march. Deltas between effort and outcome aren't negative in the flow-state. The are positive and non-linear..that's what flow-state is. And the hard part is that grinding out metaphorical-all-nigh…

The parent is clearly talking about death marches, not enjoying flow state.

Another problem is contempt for "walking deads". I used to work 70 hours on average per week. Did so for 3 years. I received contempt for that "lack of productivity" I was showing by working all those long hours, because my colleagues had no way of evaluating my productivity if not by some kind of self-reassuring comparison to themselves. The same thing happened with respect to code Simplicity, another fetish to put on the list. In the end, although I decided nothing, I was in charge of all the shit they had not to deal with, so of course what needs to be done and how it should be done can be easily shrinked down. Because that's what matters to the workers. The wage being fixed with respect to how much is produced the only way they can optimize is by working less and this is what's hidden behind the logos of productivity coming out of the worker's mouth. Productivity means "productivity of the wage". Ditto for simplicity. Simplicity means "ease".

In fact my colleagues were pissed by the amount of code I was outputting and by its "sophistication". One weekend I decided to do a marathon and reimplement what I was on working on. I did in that weekend what we did in 3 months for 30 times less locs. I was also made aware of secrets negotiation of some of my colleagues to raise their wage, rendered jealous by the new, super-lazy, super-paid new hire. So I left. 3 months later, I received a call from my pair-buddy, the other backend pillar in the company. He decided to left. They found replacements, but I learnt what was planned to be done in 2 weeks by the two of us took 6 months. So what did managment do ? They distributed overtime work to everybody, including the 2 frontend lead devs that did not work on Friday. They left after 6 months too. That's when I received a call from HR, offering to come back at the condition that I behave (not kidding you). Well that guy got fired eventually and replaced by a pawn from the holding company. His CFO loyal friend followed him.

Re: Take a break

#124

Post by badpun »

throwaway394875 wrote: post #65
badpun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have any savings after 20 years of working? What happened?

Not the person you're replying to, but I can relate to them. I've been working more than 20 years and currently have negative net worth. Shitty clothes, no car, no home, almost no pension, child on the way and I don't even know where we're going to live. Being entrepreneurial and bootstrap-minded with big, bold visions can go poorly. Doubly so when unexpected caring responsibilities appear in your life. Grief when yo…

> I'm always a bit irked when I see here on HN people suggesting that it's impossible to end up poor if you're a skilled developer. Shit happens, despite the potential for earning well.

It's pretty hard to end up poor as skilled developer, unless you spend many years chasing entreprenual ideas or otherwise engage in activities that don't guarantee income. But, if you just do paid work and are responsible with your money (assuming you live in a developed country), it's impossible to be broke after 20 years of working without a huge amount a bad luck.

Re: Take a break

#125

Post by scruple »

bertr4nd wrote: post #58
slics wrote: 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,…

Are you me? This is precisely what my life feels like. Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels basically untenable with both of us working. I love my kids profoundly, and I think in the long run I will be happier than if I’d not had them and focused on work instead (work tends no…

> Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels basically untenable with both of us working.

We have 3 kids, 3 years and under. Our twins are 3 and we have a 1 year old. I'm a Staff Software Engineer and my wife is a Senior Software Engineer II.

I feel like I'm perpetually treading water. There is a tug of war happening between my personal life and my professional life and it's frankly obscene. The professional life will lose if push comes to shove, and that will actively damage my employer, but my management team doesn't seem to give a shit.

I've become very Peter from Office Space about it all: I just don't care. When I feel my work-anxiety levels rising, I let it all out with a heavy sigh and stop caring. Work is work. I get my work done, but I prioritize higher quality and bug-free as much as possible. If work doesn't like this (and they don't, they really just want me to blast through my tasks -- despite the fact that some of them are extremely ambiguous at my level, things like digging through code no one has touched in 8 years to sort out performance problems; "So, you'll have that done by Thursday, right?") then that's their problem to deal with.

Re: Take a break

#126

Post by nathias »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

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…

hehe yea, nothing makes you learn to rest better than seeing the 'progress' you made when coding in the negative productivity zone

Re: Take a break

#127

Post by theGnuMe »

atemerev wrote: post #36

I wish I was productive, my life is nothing but a series of breaks. How you all are able to enjoy working? How are you so productive?

Identify the right things to work on.

80:20 .. Find the tasks that give 80% of the return.

Re: Take a break

#128

Post by DenisM »

pavlov wrote: post #17
nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

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…

There was a time a dozen years ago when I was working alone on my (over-elaborate, uncontrollably sprawling) graphics software product. One time I wrote a multi-thousand-line refactoring of existing code into a new class and felt very happy about getting it done. The next day I discovered that I had already done the exact same work the previous week, just as a slightly differently named class. That wasn’t an isolated…

Working alone could be the reason too.

Re: Take a break

#129

Post by derwiki »

mbrodersen wrote: post #51

Super productive people usually only work a few hours a day. The rest of the time they think about how to solve the problems more efficiently with more automation and less work. Doing the thinking part properly can make the difference between a project that takes 3 years and one that takes a few months.

Since having my first child, I've found that I have more time to think and less time to do, and it's definitely made me feel more productive (or maybe intentional is a better word). Both in non-work and work life.

Re: Take a break

#130

Post by nonbirithm »

goodpoint wrote: post #97
brudgers wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working productively all night is a skill. Just like avoiding meetings. Just like achieving flow state. The all-nighter that results from not-wanting to stop the creative process is not the all-nighter of the deadline death march. Deltas between effort and outcome aren't negative in the flow-state. The are positive and non-linear..that's what flow-state is. And the hard part is that grinding out metaphorical-all-nigh…

The parent is clearly talking about death marches, not enjoying flow state.

I've personally spent too many long hours up through the night in flow state without realizing how much time had passed until I could finally recognize the fatigue. The difference between pervasive engagement in an enjoyable hobby and a "death march" isn't as cut and dry as I used to believe.

It has served as a warning to me to never take the advice of "so long as you're happy you'll be fine" literally. Now I can't stay up past midnight without waking up fatigued for hours in the morning.

I was having so much fun and feeling a sense of personal fulfillment that I don't think anything short of a physical intervention would have stopped me. Words like those in the OP's post simply glanced off my consciousness for years, as I had believed I had found a decent activity to be interested in. Some consequences can only be appreciated by experiencing them in reality, and no amount of words can effect change on some personality types.

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