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

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

#151

Post by junofan »

fendy3002 wrote: post #145
highwaylights wrote: post #96

This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people but.. care less. You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today , so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company. Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. I…

The thing is, it's Management's objective to keep productivity high and prevent burnout in the first place. They've failed to do so, now that you're taking care of yourself, consider that you're doing their job.

If you’ll read the post you’ll see poster is drawn to being a manager.

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

#152

Post by Sparkenstein »

I am a generic programmer, the most ordinary one and I absolutely love my work (Not job). I often get this from co-workers and friends that they are in "burn out". while I understand it's a real situation and common among developers but I never faced it. The reason for that is I never overexert myself. The people who tell me they are in burnout are the same people I see working day-and-night, when company asks them to implement x thing, they will work at night, over the weekend, in their free time to implement X + Y + Z thing. I never understood why! impressing your superiors might give you a feeling of achievement but it's not hard to understand this is extremely temporary. better ways to achieve same things are actually working on things that you love, including and excluding programming. contribute to oss, go on hike, get a dog, draw or paint what's the point of converting a Proof of concept into a production ready code by investing your own personal time for which you are not even getting paid overtime?

just wanted to vent

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

#153

Post by samatman »

papito wrote: post #138
consp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't know. I just lost my job and I have fewer savings than I wanted (six months just about), and I am feeling phenomenal. I started finally working on my own long-neglected passion projects, and I feel excited about coding again. Started drinking way less, stopped stress-eating, etc. Granted I was planning on doing this anyway (just a bit ahead of schedule for me), I needed to be ejected from the hamster wheel by…

If you're anything like me, this will have enduring positive benefits on both your personal happiness and lifetime earnings.

A sabbatical is an investment in yourself, and by definition not a cheap one. Although depending on who you are and what you want to do with it, it doesn't have to come 100% out of one's own pocket.

A great sabbatical would be teaching children, or underrepresented adults. That will affray expenses, and gets you in on a group buy for health insurance, for those of us stuck with that problem.

Still, it's not available to everyone, I don't want to dismiss that. I'd like to see it possible for more of us. This is not an industry which is short of wealth, and a nonprofit which helps match mid-career software people with sabbatical opportunities, scholarships, and so on, would be a welcome addition to the landscape.

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

#154

Post by b112 »

highwaylights wrote: post #96

This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people but.. care less. You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today , so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company. Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. I…

This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people

I'll chime in here with more of this.

1) Make sure all work related correspondence goes via specific email aliases, logins, etc, etc. And turn it off when away from work.

2) Probably, get a personal phone, and just turn off your work phone after hours.

One way to burn out, is to never, ever have work, and work related issues, out of your mind. Unless you are on-call, there is no reason at all someone needs to reach out to you after hours.

And one needs, absolutely needs to not think of work after hours!

Of course people will burn out, if every waking second is filled with work thoughts! Just glancing at status messages -- thinking of work.

Get rid of it. Decouple 100%, completely, totally from work when not there.

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

#155

Post by stingraycharles »

fendy3002 wrote: post #145
highwaylights wrote: post #96

This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people but.. care less. You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today , so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company. Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. I…

The thing is, it's Management's objective to keep productivity high and prevent burnout in the first place. They've failed to do so, now that you're taking care of yourself, consider that you're doing their job.

I don’t think it’s that black-and-white. Sometimes mistakes just happen anywhere, be it with management of developers or whatever. It’s also highly personal the types and amount of stress each individual can cope with. Burnout also happens across many professions, including the managers themselves.

How the manager responds to you having a burnout, however, is what’s important. A good manager will manage to accelerate your recovery, and come up with some plan to prevent it from happening again in the future.

I also believe that in the end, stress management is something that in the end, it’s best you take your own responsibility for. Learn to say no, learn to communicate about your limits, and learn to walk away / push back in case those limits are crossed.

I went through a few burn outs through various phases of my life, and almost always it was a combination of multiple things at once. While a manager can help, in the end I am responsible for my own mental well being.

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

#156

Post by bsenftner »

sethammons wrote: post #120
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize, illegal work environments and unreasonable expectations on developers is "best practices" in software development. As a society we need to end illegal best practices that require developers to work so hard they have physically damaged brain issues from the overwork and stress afterwards.

> You do realize, illegal work environments and unreasonable expectations on developers is "best practices" in software development. This doesn't match my decade+ of experience. 35-50hr weeks and open communication on project statuses and timelines. I've had two or three crunch-times. Worked at a startup that went unicorn.

Perhaps my ambition exposed me to the worst of our industry: Apple Macintosh pre-release developer (everything in Assembly), OS dev for both the 3D0 and the original PSX game consoles, was at E.A. during the E.A. Spouse Era, managed a game studio for several years while also coding on titles, was a director of R&D for the first Internet live video infrastructure provider, worked in feature film VFX across 9 features while earning an MBA, failed at a very ambitious VFX/Advertising startup, and worked more recently as principal of a leading facial recognition developer. Across all these specialties, I've had a career composed of 7 day 60-80 hour weeks for over 4 decades.

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

#157

Post by derekbaker783 »

aswanevelder wrote: post #112

I have been here before myself, what helped was not changing my job but rather to live a healthier lifestyle. Get up at 5am, jump in the pool/shower, spend some time being grateful, meditate, journal, then hit the gym and start your day. Make sure you take enough supplements to combat a vitamin deficiency and eat better, cut out sugar, dairy for a month+ and see how you fair. I went vegan for a 3 months and it really…

Personally, getting up at 5AM would be detrimental, unless I was asleep by 9PM (unlikely).

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

#158

Post by joanfihu »

ASD and manager. Congratulations for dealing with neurotypicals. That’s a big achievement by itself. You should be proud.

I’m ASD too. I’m engineering manager and tech lead. Management drains energy, coding refuels energy.

Maybe you should aim to just being an IC? ICs are well paid.

You could try quiet quitting for a bit and see if the sparks comes back.

Hyper-fixate on something else for a bit?

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

#159

Post by stingraycharles »

junofan wrote: post #151
fendy3002 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it's Management's objective to keep productivity high and prevent burnout in the first place. They've failed to do so, now that you're taking care of yourself, consider that you're doing their job.

If you’ll read the post you’ll see poster is drawn to being a manager.

Managers have managers, though. But perhaps they’re expected to be more self-sufficient in this regard.

I wouldn’t want to be a manager precisely for this type of thing, the ability to absorb stress / pressure from within the organization and relay it in an orderly fashion to your team.

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

#160

Post by _madmax_ »

Yeah I did come back and love what I do. Here's how I did it.

1. When I came back I managed expectations and made it clear I would be taking things slow

2. I was assigned on a backburner project with an old timer who was in the same situation as me and we hit it off.

3. We did not care about the project, but we cared about the craft. You know what I mean ? Despite the project, the teams, the arguing and the practices and the bad managers and [...], ..., etc.

I hope it helped. I since then changed job and I realized my former work environment was toxic and extremely incompatible with my personality type.

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