Ask HN: Has anyone managed to find enjoyment in their work after burnout?

> Can you afford a sabbatical?

I would definitely not want to have no income for half a year (or more). Especially considering the current economic downturn. It would probably stress me out even more.

Have you tried taking a long break (months, not days/weeks) or did you dial back the hours and keep going?

I've burned out a couple of times and the fix was to stop working and do other things (e.g. travel, music, photography, pottery, sport) until I naturally drifted back to coding. Obviously not an option for a lot of people, but with 14 years of experience maybe you have money in the bank.

Finding enjoyment in work feels like a slightly different topic, I try to find some sort of interesting technical challenge or new learning opportunity in every project - though not just adding unnecessary stuff for the sake of it, of course. I kind of disagree with people who say "get a meaningful job", there aren't nearly enough of those to go around. Redefine "meaningful" instead.

I am part of a group of CEOs that meet with a coach to work through company issues, and one of the things they continually drill into us is that employees need to buy into the mission of the company in order to be most effective. The reason they are most effective is that they are happy when working on something that means something to them. So I think it's good advice the other way as well. Find a company with a mission you can get behind, which should help motivate you to excel, and thus have a sense of accomplishment, and ultimately be happier. I think this is different than working on something that overlap with your interests. You might be interested in cars but an auto parts outlet and Tesla have very different missions. Also, if you don't like management, don't be a manager.

Yeah, it's your coworkers/manager — exercise is a requirement (should be required by the company).

Code is code, but if you have a cool manager and coworkers it can make it enjoyable. Particularly, for myself, I liked management that gave me autonomy, trusted me to write a framework without feeling the need to hand-hold.

Exercise breaks (I started out running, switched to walking when I got older) were something I used to feel guilty about — going out for a run/walk in the middle of a work day. I always wanted to be the guy who always had their nose to the grindstone.

As I got older (and more seniority, I suppose) I got over the guilt by just saying fuck 'em, health is more important. In fact though my productivity and ... code fidelity? ... likely improved. Often I left on the 20 minute walk with my head in a programming fog, returned with a succinct plan on how to proceed before the next programming hurdle reared its head.

People talk mainly on exercises (that are important).

But the central point is taking care of yourself. Finding tools that work with you.

For instance, I'm finding more and more that music is great, even being a bad player, just by playing a few notes here and there I found myself interested in the math and logic behind. SoMe2 movement on YouTube helped me find this.

Then I started doing simple programming exercises with different languages. Not the ones the market thinks are the most important ones. But ones that can bring back the "hacking" joy. Being a craftsman again.

For instance, I tried to start a side project with Elixir. It didn't work well so far. So now I'm just using exercism.io to do that. Basically, finding the smallest piece that you can handle, truly.

At the same time, you need to find people that you can talk about openly. You'll be surprised that people around also don't take their time to think about them.