Maybe talk to your boss about your situation?
that's a fantastic way to get fired immediately.
Maybe that's a blessing in disguise.
Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#52Burnout doesn’t really come from too much work, you can be swamped to the brim and feel no burnout. Or you can be sitting bored for 8 hours at your desk stretching out 1 hour of responsibilities to last all day and feel super burned out. The real cause of burnout is toil for no reward. It sounds like whatever used to motivate you to get shit done isn’t there anymore. Any amount of work you don’t believe is worth the…
> Or you can be sitting bored for 8 hours at your desk stretching out 1 hour of responsibilities to last all day and feel super burned out.
Can confirm, this is exactly how I burnt-out at my first professional job. I've burnt-out of 3 jobs, and I honestly think make-work / work-stretching burnout was the worst, or at least the most soul crushing. (Though, to be fair, it was also the first for me, so I was least equipped to know what it was / deal with it.)
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure but that just doesnt gel with also getting burned out.
Deadlines aren't why I'm burned out, but organizational malaise sure is.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Go on holiday. At least two months. If the OP is US based, then this may pose an issue as I'm not aware of any employer that would allow this, and presumably his family's livelihood and health insurance is dependent on his employment. A lot of that is an assumption, but quite a common situation.
The employer doesn't have to allow it if OP uses FMLA.
I've encouraged a friend to do this for reasons of burnout, but he seems to think it's not feasible. I really don't know how realistic it is. For me, getting laid off with a decent severance and then finding a nicer (not so much in the money, but I do OK enough) employer has been really helpful for my burnout, but it has taken years to really get better.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#55I had a kid in early 2021 and was in the throws of burnout at work at that time. I'm out the back end of it now and didn't have to make any drastic changes. Here's what worked for me (most important first):
- Lowered my expectations for fulfillment/advancement at work during this period. It's OK to just make a sincere effort at work and put your career in maintenance mode for a few years. It'll still be there when you come back. Also, work doesn't have to be a source of great enjoyment or fulfillment in life, it's OK if it's just a job (again, that can be temporary too).
- Shift into a lower stress role at work. For me I work in research and part of my burnout was feeling the weight of needing to innovate continually. I shifted into a more well-defined engineering focused role for a while and rapidly felt relief from the pressure.
- Took care of my health. Slept when I had opportunity, ate well, cut back on booze, exercised (but without pressure to achieve anything in particular).
Overall though, I'd definitely say you've got to look at the whole picture. Having a young kid is probably not independent from the burnout, so you probably can't feel better purely by focusing on career changes.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#56I asked for a raise this summer and they wouldn't accommodate that so I quit. I was burnt out and the company was asking for ridiculous things like 24-hour incident response without being on-call and paid for it.
Right now I am mostly playing gigs and running sound. A lot of pushing boxes and a little "figure out why the mic isn't sounding right". It's cold in Colorado, but boondocking in my truck at these remote gigs is kind of a fun challenge for now and knowing how has opened up a lot of possibilities for other fun sounding travel.
Most of my time is off, and I am spending that time writing and making music with the folks I like, and doing little experiments with analog electronics just to try and learn a bit.
On one hand, the only reason I feel okay just working intermittently like this is that a) my kiddos are grown and I don't want more b) I have enough in the bank that I can jut bum around doing these gigs indefinitely and c) my living situation is simple and doesn't have a lot of costs. I'm 45, my kids are graduating college this year, I'm not married, etc. "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose" and all that.
I've also have had a couple careers, as a teacher at a university and as a programmer for the web.
One of the realizations I've had is that my agency job didn't pay an amazing amount more than, say, bar tending at a good bar.
My day rate as a stage hand / sound guy is quite a bit more than my "day rate" as a programmer, but I couldn't block out any of the 5 days a week I was working to just go and do whatever I felt like. The trade off is that I don't get anywhere near as many days of work.
All that is to give some context to a point: a lot of the folks I know let their fantasy of who they are override the material reality of what they are actually doing with their time.
In that my "professional" careers as a programmer or educator, I was getting a lot out of identifying as a programmer or teacher. There is some value to that.
What I did not realize was that these identities weren't really worth much. Being a good father and respected musician (neither of which are worth any money) are both worth more to me.
Or, to put it a different way, I really wasn't getting paid as much as I was thinking I was, especially compared to other, similarly competent folks in the service industry and trades.
Giving up a bunch of freedom so I could worry about problems with my software 24/7 was neither fair to myself nor even all that necessary.
I can't comment on your specific situation, but I can say that "switching careers" really hasn't been all that much of a problem once I realized that most of what I was getting were idealized notions of "stability" and a rather class-inflected notion of my position in the labor pool, neither of which is ultimately worth very much at all.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#57Can you "retire" yet? If you had 15 years at BigCo, that should really be a yes, but with startups it depends a lot more. By "retire" I mean that you can pretty safely coast by with your annual living expenses set to (depending on your risk appetite) 4% to 10% of your investments. If you can do that, pull the trigger and quit. Commit to only a few years gone, if "indefinitely" is too scary or you don't feel confident in long term market increases. Your professional associates will still be around at various places when and if you decide to work again, making a "resume gap" all the more something not worth worrying much about. After a while, you might explore doing something on your own, or doing consulting, or just teaching yourself some new skills because you suddenly get an intuition about what it is you want to do next. But it should be driven by desire and not a sense of obligation to be generating an income.
If after a year you still have no clue or worse still can't really bring yourself to work like you used to, it might be something else that's not quite burnout that's causing you to struggle.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#58My 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 de…
This has one disadvantage: You will be working with people who don't want to work, do everything to waste your and their time and will drag you down. If you are fine with that everything is good, but if you have at least a bit of drive to achieve something great you will be very very unhappy.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#59Can you "retire" yet? If you had 15 years at BigCo, that should really be a yes, but with startups it depends a lot more. By "retire" I mean that you can pretty safely coast by with your annual living expenses set to (depending on your risk appetite) 4% to 10% of your investments. If you can do that, pull the trigger and quit. Commit to only a few years gone, if "indefinitely" is too scary or you don't feel confident…
I think the hook here is employer-provided healthcare. It may be possible to thread the needle through the ACA marketplace if you get your investment income correct and can get subsidies, but trying to keep healthcare for a family in that circumstance seems quite stressful.
Re: Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
#60I suffered some extreme burnout that disrupted everything in my life for years. I managed to stay employed and even advanced in my career, but it was through sheer willpower alone. I won’t go through the details of how horrific my life was and the suffering I endured.
What helped me the most was meditation, specifically vipassana (insight mindfulness) meditation, grounded in Theravada Buddhism, as taught by Gil Fronsdal. In fact, not only did it help me recover entirely from my burnout, I am happier and more involved in all aspects of my life with a clear focus on the things that give me pleasure. I can only say as further fallacious appeal for this method there’s a reason Buddha - a normal man with no magical powers or claim to godhood, not offering magical immortality with your best friends forever, or really anything other than a way of meditating and thinking about life - has a major world religion and his teachings have spanned thousands of years. It’s not a religion, it’s a guidebook on how to have a human mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Fronsdal
Introduction to meditation:
https://www.audiodharma.org/series/introduction
Good luck! I’m sorry you’re experiencing this, but for me at least it was a gateway to a richer life.