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Good tips for preventing burnout before it happens! Anyone have any tips for how to recover from burnout _after_ it has already happened?
A month in south East Asia. Then another month simply learning something new. Get excited about programming again. Make programming your hobby again, and not just your job.
I always thought this is what people referred to when they spoke about burnout?
"(thankfully I'm not a Javascript programmer)" As being a js programmer, i had to laugh at this :) Nice article anyway, the sad part is, that i nearly had all those points at once, at one job(unpaid overtime, the management part, and so on...). The last 3 months i spent there was only because they asked me, and i was dump enough to say yes (they actually offered a 'bonus' to stay, but don't think anything big). Somet…
I am currently with a company that pays overtime at 1.5 and commensurately accelerates vacation accruals during overtime hours.
But the problem is that now we're working overtime at a higher rate. To put it another way, imagine a higher salary but with unpaid overtime. It's the equivalent of a job with unpaid overtime and better vacation accrual except that if you don't work overtime your salary gets docked.
So the problem with overtime is not the pay but that you don't have time to live your life, and this is particularly a problem if the management has been given carte blanche to pay overtime to its employees. (That is, management has no disincentive to pay its workers overtime.)
The burnout I'm struggle with is cognitive fatigue. I love programming but find my mind can only handle so many hours. Answer is simple, take some time off and exercise but easier said than done. I always thought this is what people referred to when they spoke about burnout?
Good tips for preventing burnout before it happens! Anyone have any tips for how to recover from burnout _after_ it has already happened?
The burnout I'm struggle with is cognitive fatigue. I love programming but find my mind can only handle so many hours. Answer is simple, take some time off and exercise but easier said than done. I always thought this is what people referred to when they spoke about burnout?
I think coders in general are useless outside of a 7 hour window of programming. Sure, there's exceptions. Crunch time or when you're particularly inspired.
But my experience is that any place that insists on 9+ hour days is really just encouraging their developers to "veg out" for those hours past the healthy 7 hours.
What I wonder about is how to be a programmer for 30 years and not become an architect or worse.
I didn't take a break during the first one, which took a toll and probably had a hand in my subsequent divorce. The second time, I stuck around as long as I could until I got health issues, so I quit for a year. That was the best thing I've ever done and I wonder if I'll ever get a chance like that again. I spent probably $50k in cash and lost out on $100k net income after taxes, so delta in money was large, but worth it for my sanity and overall career. It helps having a supportive spouse with a great job/health care and good savings.
During my break, I programmed for 8 hrs a day 5 days a week, except on things that I loved, and it was worth it. I did things like spend 3 solid weeks improving the accuracy of my OCR system using OpenCV/Tesseract from 90% to 98%, something I never could have done without all the freedom or time. I regained my love for programming as well as my self-esteem, and so far so good. Hopefully I can ride this current wave out until I retire, but if it happens again, I have enough fuck you money saved to take more than a few months off.
What I wonder about is how to be a programmer for 30 years and not become an architect or worse.
Been working for me for years...