Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?

> Taking a less glamorous job to make space in your life for other pursuits is not bad. Even if it's just for little while to reset.

Agree. Quit the startup grind and find a middle-of-the-road position at a big company where you can take it easy, then work the minimum you need to feel OK with yourself. For example, 4-6 honest hours a day; if you're coming from an overwork startup culture, you'll still be out-working most of your peers even at that rate. If it's not done by 4 PM, then tough shit, it'll still be there tomorrow and someone else should've planned the project better. Then find other things to do with your newfound free time.

By a bad manager maybe, a good manager would figure that you're going to be unreliable moving forward and slowly manage you out of their team / key milestones until you eventually quit.

My honest advice: Get out of the Hacker News hivemind.

The folks on this site act like every programming job is either at a FAANG/MAGMA company, a startup, or not in tech. They are wrong.

If you are willing to look outside the valley (but still in almost any big city or suburb), there are oceans of tech companies that work in like, financial compliance dashboards or healthcare documentation or if you’re OK with it defense contractors. You can make $150-250k easy. Your life will involve waking up, attending a standup on Google Meet, adding an endpoint to a REST API, sending it off to be tested, then around 2 you fix whatever the testers found, send it off again, then clock out once there’s nothing else in your swim lane (possibly before 5).

You won’t get equity, and you won’t have the outlandish salaries people are always talking about on HN, but you’ll also have the freedom to not think about your job outside of work hours. If what you want is to leverage your skills into a comfortable life where you can spend time with your kids, this is the move.

I’ve seen people burn out and try to leave tech for greener pastures, it often doesn’t turn out as well as they expect. In other fields, you’ll be a lot more fungible and you’ll come to realize how much cushion and leverage developers get from being a somewhat scarce resource.

Work with your hands / physically: woodworking, gardening, re-build an engine, build some custom handlebars for you bicycle.

IME it's trading one pressure cooker for another.

There's less time pressure but more organizational inertia and sickness blocking doing _any_ meaningful work.

If you're the kind of person that can just punch a clock and not give a shit, fine, but someone used to working in startups is someone used to taking responsibility for things and that's career death in big orgs or asking for further burnout.