21–30 of 138 posts
It's important to find that balance between what you love and what keeps you healthy. Some people here may go on the defensive and read it as "I don't work every waking hour and you shouldn't either", but hopefully they'll take a deep breath, release the kung fu grip on their copy of "Design Patterns" and remember to just grab a decent night's sleep every so often.
That's true... but there's also the flip side to the coin. Finishing things is good; but if you have a project you want to finish, you'll never finish it if you halfheartedly look at it once a week for an hour. If you spend more than certain amount of time not looking at something or not working on it, you forget how it works and it takes all of that available time you have to get into 'the zone' where you're actuall…
What do you do if chilling out is not an option ? If your day job is maddening (and you feel like any other job would probably be maddening too) and the only alternative you have is to start your own company ? What do you do if you need to keep the day job to pay bills and work on your own product in the evening and the week-end until it can bring money ? When it seems that you can either burn out or succeed ?
> A few years ago I wanted to know everything. I spent the day at work thinking about what I would do when I got home and then spend the evening studying various things as hard as I could. I would stress over how there werent enought hours in the day to do what I wanted to do. There was rarely an hour in the day where I wasnt productive in some way. Oou, this resonates with me. For the past year I've been trying to o…
From someone in his 30s for whom this also resonates: The list never gets smaller. If anything, it not only gets longer, but the list items themselves grow even more ambitious and far reaching. I've done great things. I've started sustainable companies, released a prodigious amount of code, and some of it has shifted the course of industry and secured my position in it. At the same time, I'm exhausted. I'm tired of n…
Well put. Just wait until your 40's. Or wait until you have kids! (If you plan on that). Sure, the list may get longer, but once you have that feeling of time is running out - that's when it gets freaky.
My wife and I had this discussion over the weekend. There's the rotten underbelly of tech that is overload and burn out. Personally, I'd love to walk away from tech. It has great money attached to it, but a lot of the time it's not worth it. If you're single with no responsibilities, it can be the best thing ever. You can meet like minded people who don't want to leave 'campus' and everyone can build their life around the job.
But if you have a family, it's probably not the best industry to be in. Sure, some places recognize this and allow for 'flexible hours'. But for most of the companies I've come across that are 'family friendly' this means working late into the night, which means you're tired the next morning. Rinse and repeat.
If I could give the 20 year old me some advice it would have been to apply at Netscape when I had the chance. :)
> I might not be as good today as I would have been if I had kept grinding away. That is my overriding problem. If I stop, it means possible stagnation. There is no greater fear than becoming irrelevant.
Burnout is a syndrome that happens from a series of failures, resulting in your brain automatically associating work with failure. The cure for burnout is a series of successes. You need to retrain your brain to associate work with success. Start small. Don't take on more than you can handle. Quit trying to make the uber server app and write a few simple command line utilities that work and work well.
I see countless people attribute "failures" that had nothing to do with themselves to them just so they feel like they have some control over the situation and then wind up feeling burnt out when they're accepting the responsibility for the entire companies success or doom. Then they're asking why they're feeling so burnt out and can't completely their daily responsibilities that they actually have.
Burnout is a syndrome that happens from a series of failures, resulting in your brain automatically associating work with failure. The cure for burnout is a series of successes. You need to retrain your brain to associate work with success. Start small. Don't take on more than you can handle. Quit trying to make the uber server app and write a few simple command line utilities that work and work well.
When you've been working too hard for too long, small problems can feel like big issues because the cumulative weight of all the stuff going through your mind.
Clarity is tough to maintain.
> I might not be as good today as I would have been if I had kept grinding away. That is my overriding problem. If I stop, it means possible stagnation. There is no greater fear than becoming irrelevant.
> A few years ago I wanted to know everything. I spent the day at work thinking about what I would do when I got home and then spend the evening studying various things as hard as I could. I would stress over how there werent enought hours in the day to do what I wanted to do. There was rarely an hour in the day where I wasnt productive in some way. Oou, this resonates with me. For the past year I've been trying to o…
From someone in his 30s for whom this also resonates: The list never gets smaller. If anything, it not only gets longer, but the list items themselves grow even more ambitious and far reaching. I've done great things. I've started sustainable companies, released a prodigious amount of code, and some of it has shifted the course of industry and secured my position in it. At the same time, I'm exhausted. I'm tired of n…