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

This is great advice, but a mile without stopping is a huge achievement if you haven't been a runner before.

Yes absolutely.

I wrote an entire book that was basically "I'm fed up with the world and my job right now, there's got to be more to life than this".

I found more meaning in my work as I got to know myself better. Similar to an oxygen mask in an airplane, I had to put myself first before I could for others(or work for that matter).

The only advice I'd give someone in this situation is to work on yourself everyday until you gain enough clarity to make your next move. Don't panic or do anything drastic until you're in a stable mindset.

Hey, just wanted to mention that your path is pretty similar to mine. No college, jumped into gamedev to get out of high school, ended up burning out hard and doing nothing for a solid year after that job. I was playing Heroes of Newerth (a dota clone) all day every day. The game was super buggy, which annoyed me – I knew I could fix the bugs if I was given access to the code. Long story short, managed to get a job there and fixed all the bugs.

My point is, there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying. One would not expect that playing dota all day for a year would lead to the next phase of your programming career. But it did, and (acknowledging luck) I firmly believe it was because of that brain reset you mentioned. So I wanted to underscore your words with an example.

Bu your last paragraph is why I’m writing to you. My professional output wasn’t too impressive either. My first manager said “If you were a Carmack, I think we’d know it by now”; I forget how it came up, but I remember how disheartening it felt to hear.

Fast forward to present day, and I’ve done a bunch of stuff I’m proud of (including collaborating with Carmack for a few weeks on AI). The reason I got here was because of the other rehung you said: you love programming, and so did I. (Also Prozac was pretty important, in hindsight.)

So please don’t stress about whether you’re impressive or whether you measure up. You impressed me. You’re good enough to do whatever you want to do. And you’ll find your path if you keep looking.

Ditto for whoever’s reading this wondering if they’ll ever recover from burnout. You will. Don’t worry. It ends.

I've had burn-out a few times over the last 30+ years of working for various reasons both personal and environmental. Take it as a given that everyone responds differently and there is no One True Way(tm) to recover, but I can at least offer the solutions that worked for me in the past. These days I can detect the symptoms of an oncoming bout and proactively work to avoid it now.

If the burnout is not yet crushing and putting me into a black dog bitter mentality I've found that taking a leave of absence for a few weeks can often lead to recovery. That leave means dropping all work, all work-related communications, all browsing of tech-related news/info, and anything else that will lead my mind back to a work mentality. If the company caught on fire and burnt to the ground, I would only know about it when I returned from leave. I try and change up my routine and stimulus during that leave; taking long walks in areas I've not visited, trying an entirely new and alien hobby, or generally seeking out experiences that are unfamiliar. It's basically an intentional effort to get my brain to context-switch.

Once I return from leave, I sit down and write out what led me down the path of burn-out and then work with my direct reports to minimize or eliminate those things in order to ensure my long-term employment. If they are unwilling to cooperate, I quit.

I did have a bout of burnout 15 years ago or so that was seriously deep, and in that case I left the tech industry for a few years and ignored it with great enthusiasm. Eventually my interest re-ignited and I spent a couple of months getting back up to speed and re-entered programming.

One thing I can tell you is that walking away for a few years isn't a fatal decision for your career. Despite the FOMO hype and paradigm-of-the-month tone of most tech news and vendors, if you've got the mentality, experience, and skill of a good programmer returning after a few years hiatus requires a fairly short on-ramp for getting back to whatever the current hotness and "state of the art" may be.

I can say that pivoting from one burnout situation to another potentially stressful environment (your unease with management certainly qualifies) is a quick way to an even worse case of burnout and degraded mental health, or at least it has been for me.

Good luck and I hope you find some useful guidance in the many replies I'm sure you'll receive here on HN.

> Find a company with a mission you can get behind, which should help motivate you to excel, and thus have a sense of accomplishment

I'd say that having realistic expectations about work (you're not "changing the world", you're just building a product that's useful for some people and makes you and your employer some money) and having reasonable working hours (no more than 40 or whatever is in the contract) can be more important.

If you identify too much with the product or company, that can be a sure path to overwork, caring and investing too much time and effort without getting any recognition and neglecting your own needs.

But of course, given equal conditions, prefer working for a company with a good mission. Just don't expect too much.