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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?

#291

Post by danesparza »

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. Also: Find friends outside of work that don't have to do with your field of work. Find them in meetups that have to do with your hobbies.

The real question you're answering is:

"What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?"

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

#292

Post by samatman »

jofer wrote: post #248
adamsmith143 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a software engineer that has been working for 7+ years and don't have enough savings to survive 6 months off work or are so behind on retirement savings that this would seriously impact your future I think you should work seriously on getting your finances in order.

It's less that and more that you're not maximizing retirement savings at that point, which is something that stresses a lot of folks out. Also, even within software, I can't imagine trying to find a job with a 6-month gap on my resume. I'm not in the bay area, and even working remotely, competition is brutal. A gap on your resume is a great reason to get immediately rejected by wherever you're applying to. Not all of…

This is well worth replying to, it surfaces some culture/class things which are worth making explicit.

Being responsible about the future is important, but let's phrase the goal as "savings upon retirement", rather than "retirement savings".

A sabbatical can help with that in a few ways, but first let's talk about the gap.

A sabbatical is not a gap in one's resume, it's a sabbatical. What's done with that time is open-ended, but one of the things it does is provide a useful line item.

This is in fact a class thing. People of independent means will take time off to improve their careers. Real talk, I can't stress this enough: don't buy a sabbatical, or a Porche, if you can't afford it.

They don't put this on their resume, but rather, on their C.V.

I'm not from those people, but growing up in a university town, one gets to know them.

A sabbatical is good if: you can write an open-source library in your niches which solves a problem, if you expand the breadth of your expertise, if what you're doing has a significant philanthropic angle. All of these can set someone up for a higher tier of job, something with better prospects.

It's good to have a comfortable nest egg, and it's even better if when you do, you have the kind of respect and stake in your field where you don't actually retire. Emeritus is a wonderful Latin loanword. May we all merit emeritus.

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

#293

Post by hirvi74 »

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #18
FearNotDaniel wrote: post #8

Yes, it's possible. Give yourself time to recover, as long as it takes, and time after that to rediscover the joy. That may mean, for a little while, grinding away at some kind of unsatisfying but low-stress job while doing your own little "joy" projects in your spare time, or training in a new platform/language just to remind yourself of the fun of starting again from scratch. Nobody says you have to be a manager, o…

Also, like me, you may have to accept that you are getting older and can't rely quite so much on having that super-sharp working memory to hold an entire codebase in your head and stay focused for hours on end. A lot of my burnout came from putting unreasonable expectations on myself. Once I started taking a lot more notes, drawing a lot more diagrams, and asking a lot more questions I actually found I became more ef…

I am starting to realize that if I don't write things down, then they won't stick around.

I've procrastinated writing things down because it would take more time and effort than its worth -- If I just think a bit longer and harder, then the solution will come, and I won't have to waste all the time it takes to write everything out.

Recently, I have noticed this usually fails, and when I end up writing things down, then I come to the realization that actually writing things down would have saved more time in the first place. It was merely my assumptions, laziness, and arrogance that cost me more time.

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

#295

Post by hirvi74 »

larve wrote: post #52

Autistic here as well, tremendous burnout and trauma from my last job. It took me a lot of writing / reconnecting with why I love technology in the first place, and a 3 months sabbatical at the recurse center to… feel like I’m back. A big part in this is also the very privileged fact that I have total freedom and trust at my current work, which allows me to follow my holistic way of thinking and not having to do hier…

> - reconnect with writing code for fun. Programming is legitimately the one activity that fully calms me and replenishes me. I stopped doing any side-programming for 10 years, and reviving that atrophied part of myself has been absolutely invigorating.

I'm struggling with this right now. I have not worked on hardly anything on the side in many years as well. Either I find some excuse not to, lack the confidence/knowledge to do it, or I just do not have any ideas on what to work on.

I actually enjoy programming, but I just struggle with motivation and focus issues which makes things much harder to get started.

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

#297

Post by gretch »

I started working after I graduated in 2012 and was severely burned out in ~2016 for about a year.

Changing jobs really helped me. Gave me new perspective on what matters and what didn't matter (and I had inflated some things needlessly in my head).

One thing that really helped me was that I was trying to be a hero in the past - I realized that systems built on the back of heroes is not healthy because eventually the hero has to leave and the system decays rapidly. Rather, it's much better to have a system that works well when it's operated by average people doing a reasonably good job. That really took the pressure off of me when it came to my own mind.

That advice may or may not apply to you - it sounds like you've done some thinking but I would try to isolate the problems into a couple different categories: is the people? is it the domain of the work (e.g. are you making games, or e-commerce, or saas, etc)? the type of work (you mentioned you don't like coding)?

Lastly, remember that it's a big world out there. You don't have to pick between 'coding' or 'manager'. You can always move to a beach in Indonesia and be a fisherman or something. The world is wide open.

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

#298

Post by hirvi74 »

gigantecmedia wrote: post #86

I was in burnout pretty bad while working for a big bank in my country. The work was very stressful, lots of office politics even though they paid pretty well, and my boss were nice (with a lot of pressure lol). I just thought I was not a good employee because I was tired all the time, then I started my company. My gosh, the work was (and still is!) 1000 times longer, harder, everything is so so bad and need addressi…

I'm in a weird loop where I am so burned out/depressed that I struggle to get anything completed, thus I procrastinate a lot, and since I procrastinate a lot, I have "make-up" my lost time. In order to make up for lost time, I have to work extra. Working extra fuels the burn out even more, and then the next iteration of the loop begins.

I do not have the money for a sabbatical, and I sadly work in the lowest-stress programming job possible (which is reflected in the relatively low income: 6 YOE @ x < 80k). I feel like I am suffocating and can't get out.

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

#299

Post by hirvi74 »

varjag wrote: post #82
sbf501 wrote: post #70

Burnout always happens, in every job. Solution? Well, first, not everyone has the privilege to do something about it, but you're in tech so: Vacations. Sabbaticals. Gap year. Change jobs. I've had 35+ years in tech and done all of the above. I routinely "burn out" (aka, get bored) after about 5 to 7 years and move to a new group or company. Still love coding, still love leading projects. Just need to change it up.

Getting bored is not a burnout.

I've heard there is a secondary condition called, "bored out" which is similar, but not a 1:1. I mean, pathologically speaking, I am not sure if bored out exists, but as far as buzzwords for a bundle of emotions, then I think it's quite valid.

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

#300

Post by mikesabbagh »

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…

I was having burnout, the team I was in was not as challenging. Simple features took me weeks to finish. It got so difficult for me to turn on the laptop in the morning. Internally I asked to be moved to another team, but it did not improve.

What did I do?? I did not take vacations or time out. I just changed companies, and made sure the job has variety, and a lot of customers, and asked for a good raise. All the symptoms disappeared after 1 day. Like magic.

I feel I am more respected and more critical in their team. If there are no customers, and they pay you a little, you feel worthless, and treated as a second class dev. Start looking outside, you may find a good opportunity

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