Ask HN: How common is developer burnout? Have you ever been burnt out?

When I graduated from college I found a job working for a Fortune 500 where I completed a pretty complex project. I was there for two years and it felt like a stressful meat grinder. The experience was so bad that I quickly pivoted to a less stressful role, and have been there for quite some time now.

This has got me wondering: how stressful do people find the software industry at large? There seems to be a big draw for young developers to try to go FAANG, but honestly, these companies just sound like another high-performance meat grinder. You get paid a lot but are constantly under scrutiny. And smaller companies are all going pseudo-agile to try to squeeze every last ounce from their developers.

This makes me wonder if finding a low-key, sane culture is the key to sustainability in the industry, and avoiding burn out.

> This makes me wonder if finding a low-key, sane culture is the key to sustainability in the industry, and avoiding burn out.

Finding a culture where you feel that you are being treated as a human being and feel properly rewarded for what you do seems to be the key to avoid burnout long term. I think it's in the nature of SWE that there is a substantial pressure on everyone to treat themselves (and unconsciously their peers) as if they were machines. Depending on the context you are working in, the factors that play into that can vary. Start-ups are especially high pressure in my experience.

I went from a FAANG to a twenty-ish person local business. I found out that what matters to me is not money or status. It’s a short commute, work that ends at the same time every day, liking my coworkers, and working directly with the people I help. Some mix of these might be right for you, assuming the bills are covered.

My job has less (no) global impact. What I did previously affected far more people. I told people what project I was on and they thought that was cool. But I don’t hate my life or job and I very much did before.

Strangely I see the opposite sometimes: the work is not so bad but constant politics, management issues (and lately layoffs) are affecting mental health a lot. That still leads to the burnout when you're not interested in coding anymore even for a side projects

When I experienced burnout in my career, it was never from the technical work itself, but rather from people and process acting in ways that were entirely unrealistic and unfair. As in, it isn’t my problem that you oversold when this feature would be delivered, but somehow it is in fact now my problem without recourse. Cases where you know you or others are being mistreated will burn you out quickly.