Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

We pay all our developers by the hour, and I think it's super important.

To correct your first misconception, we don't count peoples hours, people just tell us how many hours they worked each pay cycle.

We also pay 1.5X per hour for more than 40 hours per week if we asked you to work extra.

The primary advantage is that it aligns everyone incentives. In management I know that there is a very real cost to us if we ask people to work more hours.

It's important that we feel the sting, because it means that we are less likely ask people to work overtime, and only when it's really important.

It also lets people work more or less as they choose. Some people might choose to work 30 hour weeks for a while, and it doesn't cause resentment in other team members. People know they are getting paid less for doing it.

For many the commute more than hits your daily stress quota, even before work contributes. So you can end up starting your day stressed, be that public transport sardines and delays or playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt.

This to reach an office at some arbitrary time everybody seems to follow of the 8/9am start. Hence you have this sudden rush into cities around that time and again with the bulk leaving home in the early evening.

Travel outside those hours or against the commuter grain are such a joy, that the contrast is huge.

Whilst many companies offer flexible hours, they are still the exception and until more flexibility becomes more widespread along with home working or local hub/satellite office working. Such stress will play more and more a factor.

I'd dare say that having a stressful commute alone can on many levels kill of your entire morning productivity. Then you have the costs, adding more stress. Again costs that would be much cheaper (public transport trains here in the UK) if you travel outside peak hours. But then, roads much more pleasant off peak.

But a 4 day week can sure make a difference over a 5 day one. Working longer hours for 4 days, avoiding some of that peak commute stress and focusing on work, for those days and giving yourself 3 days of freedom. It is a fine balance over having 5 days of self imposed stress if your late home and the impact upon a social life. Which means you end up with a less quality social life and/or work life and by this approach you get quality time with both. Though not always suitable for all, it's more palatable for companies who are less flexible. At least what I've found. Though again, depends upon your job.

No problem. It can be a hard and long problem to solve, but it gets better with time and space.

Everyone's experience is different, but one thing I can say is this: the size of a problem is not necessarily proportional to the effect it will have on you in this state.

For instance, I had a reduced ability to multitask. Multitasking is one of those things where holding even three simple things in your head can be hard.

So, don't beat yourself up if an apparently simple situation is causing you stress. What seems simple may not be, given how humans are wired. And you have a reduced capacity while burnt out.

What you can do is look for things that trigger situations. Then see if you can reconfigure things so that the trigger is eliminated.

It's also helpful to look for physical signs. For example, in my case, I would get a tension in my neck, when inhaling. This happened after a stressor. Paying attention to this let me identify stressors and deal with them.

I also was able to work on it from the other end. Basically, my system was identifying minor threats as larger threats. So, I did something called square breathing. Basically: Stressor --> awareness --> hold breathe, count to 4 --> exhale, then inhale --> hold breathe while inhaled, count to four. Repeat if necessary.

It was like a pattern interrupt. The body wanted to go "minor stressor --> red alert!!!!!!". The breathing interrupted this and demonstrated to the body "see, no threat. Cancel the alarms".

After doing that for a few weeks I basically no longer have to do it, except in rare cases. Though that was some time in to the burnout, so some other stuff may have fixed itself in the meantime. YMMV, including with the specific way in which you do breathing.

Another thing: sleep as if your life depends on it. Good sleep helps every other thing and especially burnout.

I recognize that saying this can make the problem worse. So: if you are awake at night, and can't sleep: don't sweat it. Don't sweat the one offs. Instead, look for causes and solutions.

I improved my sleep by working on light exposure. I wrote more on that here a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507938

Working on the general environment helped fixed my sleep. I still have occasional off nights, but the rhythm is better.

Sleep may not be your issue. The point is, to the extent you're able, get outside of a situation, analyze it, look for stressors, and consider the full rational situation. Basically your job is to teach your body to align its (presently damaged) threat response systems to the actual situation, which is presumably not an acute threat.

Some or much of this may not apply to you, so take the bits that do apply. And good luck!

Reduce exercise; that alone could deplete your "stress-alleviating well". Obviously, you (unconsciously) see your work as pointless and it probably is; many jobs these days are just useless busywork, even at top companies, even with dubious moral background. Market might also force you to unlearn better ways to program, e.g. if you are forced to switch to JavaScript from a better language, so motivation can get a hit from that as well. You might also notice that most of jobs you can apply to or are contacted by recruiters for are jobs nobody wants to do and for meaningful jobs it's all about networking, reducing motivation to bother to minimum.

The only way I see is to study new things on your own and do your own stuff if you find something you like; to survive try to get some part-time/remote work until you can reap fruits of your labor later. By all means avoid people that are putting you down; they do it so that they could dominate you and feel better about themselves. Start practicing some forgotten virtues, that would make you unique and stand out.

What exhausts me is the people, the politics, the engineering egos, and the endless tolerance of companies to spend months of time working through previously obviously poor decisions and no tolerance for fixing the attitudes that created them. You’re called perfectionist engineer, regardless of how little effort or time it takes to correct the long term trajectory for your project. There’s little connection to clear organized thinking and the enjoyment of the work, it’s like everyone has gone mad and can’t see the obvious right in front of their face at times.