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

This may be good advice, but for some, finding positive purpose can be stressful in itself.

An alternative approach is to modify the scale or direction of the reward system. Lowering expectations may diminish both the positive and negative baseline values a bit. Then, when you're happy, allow for some extra positive feedback. When you're down, just wait for things to pass over.

I once heard a story on how depression can be viewed from an evolutionary perspective: A mouse goes out every day to rummage around, gather some food, hoping to run into a possible spouse mouse. One day, it spots a big eagle, and mouse gets terribly frightened and runs back indoors. If it didn't do this, it would be eaten by the eagle and die. Repeat these scary days for some period, and a handy system kicks in: mouse doesn't want to go outside anymore to party. It just wants to stay in bed and do nothing. If it didn't do this, it would waste energy and not get enough food, and die. Until, after some time, the eagle goes someplace else, and our mouse is happy again to go outside.

Replace mouse with you and eagle with society. Unfortunately, for most of us society doesn't go away, but we can attempt a different perspective at it and see if it becomes less frightening.

Meta grinder is the right word. These companies absolutely extract value from the sacrifice of the lowest level workers. Too many managers, all just nitpicking and penalizing their reports. The stress is entirely artificial and arbitrary. It is all about "what does my boss think for the next perf review. Will I be thrown on PIP?" This kind of environment is not healthy.

The smartest people do their stint in these companies and then jump to startups, or start their own businesses these days. The $400k at a FAANG is undervalued for the stress of the job.

>> I completed a pretty complex project. I was there for two years and it felt like a stressful meat grinder.

For years I was doing high pressure projects and getting them launched. I loved it. I hated the part after, where I stopped giving a fuck about work.

I moved to consulting. I only do the crazy parts (and get paid for it), take my praise, and my check, and go home. I dont stick around to do the part I hate.

Give me the high pressure replatforms, the years late projects the burning fires where you need a fix.... I'll grind that to dust. I dont want to be there to ad PM feature 247 so they can get a better gig, for bug fix 80072 cause a customer has some odd behavior from a tool bar they installed... Do call me back if 80073 is data corruption and a rebuild it over the weekend project.

I burned out hard during COVID. Prior to the isolation, I hadn't realized how much my coworkers helped me keep my sanity, and shortly after lockdown, I started to see my interest, my performance and my self care start to crash. At the same time, my first child was born, my MIL passed away, my mother had a brain tumor and my father had a heart attack. All in the course of around 3 years. I finally cracked.

It's been a rough road back, but after grieving and learning to be a decent parent and taking some space for myself, I'm finally starting to love code again.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Some folks I know burned out and stayed burnt. It's awful because you don't know it until it's staring you in the face, at least it didn't for me.

When I've gotten burned out it is generally from one of a few reasons:

- I'm learning less at work. I feel like for me the fun part of work is learning new skills by learning a new technology, working in a product/business space that I haven't before, or a project of larger scope. If I feel like I'm not learning it can feel like groundhogs day.

- There is a mismatch between what I value and the company values. For example you could value shipping velocity and iteration speed and if you are working at a big company they might have very long dev cycles with internal politics. This can end up being a boil the frog situation as you or the company slowly change over time.

As others said reducing workplace stress can be mitigated by enriching your life outside of work. Hang out with friends, exercise, pick up hobbies. Have something to look forward to at the end of everyday that isn't work.