On the other hand, I always get irritated when I hear "yeah, I know I'm pushing too hard, but if I burn out I'll take a holiday."
Ha ha. You have not known burnout.
It has taken me a drastic break from work, isolation, depression, thousands of pounds in therapy, and 18 months to recover from work-related burn out. I did not write a single line of code for a year.
I am better now, maybe even better than I've ever been in my life, but I am a completely different person. There is a pre-burnout self, and a post-burnout one. (I don't code after work anymore. I do not enjoy cutting edge tech as much as I did just a couple years ago. I have become allergic to corporate life.)
Those that joke about burnout have no idea what they are talking about.
Burnout that occurs outside of work isn't talked about enough, maybe because it's mainly restricted to a certain kind of individual in specific kinds of fields like programming.
Programming itself can lead to burnout because it provides a promise of infinite possibilities, and some of us get fooled into thinking we are equally as capable as the code itself. This leads to time that could otherwise be spent getting in touch with our humanity instead being spent on countless side projects, many of which we secretly hope will lead to wealth and prestige. Virtually all of those projects will fail or reach a dead end; that may not seem like a big deal in your early 20s, but the realization of repeated failure and time spent in relative solitude can take it's toll once you hit your 30s. The burnout feeling occurs, not because you are doing anything functionally different from when you were addicted to code, but because the novelty eventually fades and it becomes clear how short life is. Worse yet, you may have nothing to show for all your effort. One may even have had their social skills atrophy. Burnout can have physiological components, but most of it is mental. The negative effects of having a passion for code may lead to a sense of worthlessness. Feeling like you are as insignificant as a smudge of excrement on a piece of tissue surging out to sea can be pretty demotivating.
>and some of us get fooled into thinking we are equally as capable as the code itself
IMHO burnout as a SW dev isn't because of the coding itself, I find that the easiest part to deal with.
It's the constant pressure to stay up to date an an industry that changes faster and faster and a job market that get more and more competitive. It's the constant sprinting towards more and more ambitious arbitrary deadlines set by sales or management using half-assed Agile and Scrum processes imposed onto you by clueless higher-ups. It's constant interruptions and multitasking in several tools you have to keep up with throughout the day: chats, calls, emails, Jira, etc. while also being expected to focus and code. It's the exhausting and time consuming interview practices. It's the idiotic and overpaid management and execs who treat you like a disposable resource and thinks colorful beanbags, ping-pong and foosball tables would make me want to spend 2h commuting to the office every day to sit in a noisy open office with a view of a concrete parking lot, and that pictures of employees in funny situations with moustaches drawn on them and turned into memes and plastered around the office means a "friendly" atmosphere and it's what I would enjoy instead of WFH in peace and quiet (maybe I'm too old or something but I can't stand my workplace treating me, a professional in my 30's, like I'm a childish toddler looking to join some kindergarten playground).
Coding and debugging alone is very pleasant for me, it's why I became a dev, but it's everything else related to this industry that breaks my will to live.
On my most cynical days all I see agile/scrum used for is a selfish tool to appease stakeholders anxiety that their directives are being worked on by the demanded date and to give the micromanaging admin types something to do. It seems to effectively transfer the stakeholder level anxiety directly onto the people doing the work.
Also you’re not “too old.” It’s called wisdom to see through the emotional manipulation for what it is. That clarity can be punishing when you don’t want to just go along with it and the toxic positivity pushed in the corporate world.
Agree 100%. My old workplace is making everyone commute to office next week so that they can “team bond and destress” by playing with office-provided toys. Really. It’s so patronising and I hate the control bosses think they have over your entire life and personality instead of just your work output.
My current job let me WFH the past couple years but now they're insisting I do the 2H+ commute again four days a week once my current project ends, and I don't think I'm going to be able to manage it long (and the office culture is exactly what you've described).
If they put me on another project I can WFH from after a few weeks, I'll stick around at least a bit longer, but I don't think I'll last if they keep expecting me to go to the office. Tech job recession be damned, I'll eat some of my savings and sit out for a few months until I find something else if I must, as much as I hate that idea.
But even that I expect will still have a lot of that bullshit you're mentioning.
I don't have a problem with coding itself, I'm having fun still working on my game in my spare time, relaxing in a quiet room at a library, but in a corporate environment my brain just feels so fractured and distracted and the projects don't really hold any interest to me.
> Burnout that occurs outside of work isn't talked about enough, maybe because it's mainly restricted to a certain kind of individual in specific kinds of fields like programming.
Wish that was true. There is an outside-work burnout that's arguably quite common in society these days, and mostly not talked about either: having kids. People who are not parents themselves, and not close with some parents of small children, they won't understand. Parents just exchange knowing glances. At least those who aren't conditioned by their society/environment to pretend everything is great and child-rearing is the Greatest Privilege and the Most Rewarding Experience in the Universe.
Going through that right now, I pretty much gave up on coding after work. I tried, telling myself that side projects are keeping me sane. True or not, the tension created by not actually being able to do them, was worse. All the things you write in the second paragraph are true - and they only get worse once you're running on negative me-time budget :).
(EDIT: At least the topic of postpartum depression has been gaining some attention these days. A case of one can easily have negative effect on multiple people across a generation, and there's still very little advance warning or support given for new mothers.)
It has taken six years and counting for me to put the pieces back together after I disintegrated.
I kept going, even when the wings had been shot off, the engine was on fire, and the yoke had been replaced with a bowl of lime chutney. Stiff upper lip, old boy, we’ll be back in Blighty soon. Just a little further and we’ll be safely on the ground. The lies I told myself, myriad.
It all, ultimately, inevitably, met a fiery end - I lost almost every element that comprised myself, and all that remained was a bitter, charred husk, barely capable of functioning homeostasis, never mind running a business, or expressing any emotion other than fury.
Six years, last year. Started, for the first time in all eternity, wanting to do things. Wanting to play a game, to watch a movie, to spend time with friends, to do, to create.
It took me utterly recusing myself from the world, therapy, drugs, more therapy, and it still isn’t quite gone - there remains a dark shadow in my mind.
> (I don't code after work anymore. I do not enjoy cutting edge tech as much as I did just a couple years ago. I have become allergic to corporate life.)
Ouch. I suspect I've been going through a low-key burnout for the last year, but (at least in my mind) I can't really stop where I am now due to having dependents.
Couple years ago, I couldn't imagine myself not coding after work. I would code stuff for myself whenever I had a spare half hour or something. Now, I can hardly get myself to even try. At first, it was about not being able to start or persevere in the act. In the last year or two, I found myself no longer even thinking about potential things to do involving any kind of creative work.
Enjoying cutting-edge tech? Sure, I've gotten cynical over the decade+ spent on HN, but it's different now. I recently realized I'm not just cynical - I plain just don't give a shit anymore. This got me by a complete surprise. I still find the (non-bullshit scammy kind of) tech intellectually interesting - but nowadays in the abstract, not enough to make myself get out of mental bed to play with it.
> It has taken me a drastic break from work, isolation, depression, thousands of pounds in therapy, and 18 months to recover from work-related burn out. I did not write a single line of code for a year.
I'm very happy you endured and recovered. I'm also scared of the possibility of this happening to me, that I may be on that trajectory and already past the point of no return.
My slow descent of 2 years into burnout didn't go that deep but I definitely brushed with your feelings.
I couldn't stop working completely but I was extremely lucky to have a manager who jumped into different orgs of the company and brought me along to a place where she felt I would be able to move away from the toxic aspects leading me into a burnout.
Regardless I still had a whole year of extremely low productivity compared to my baseline throughout my career, bouts of anxiety and depression, aversion to any kind of social aspect of work (meetings, stakeholders' management, anything to do with people), it'd take the energy of a whole day to be able to keep a professional facade up for a 45 minutes meeting, etc.
I'm definitely a very different person, professionally speaking, after that slow descent I don't feel I will ever be again the worker I was before. I'm absolutely jaded by any corporate life, I hate higher management and it's definitely not something I will pursue in life, I don't want "growth" or "career paths", I want to do the job I know how to do well, be paid for it, and completely turn off any code/work related topic outside working hours.
Taking vacation with burnout was worse for me, because I basically wasted perfectly good vacation time and came back to work feeling exactly the same, perhaps a bit worse.
The good thing about it: it's quite unlikely to happen again, as you've also pointed out: one can become quite aware of factors (corporate culture, fear of disappointing others, perfectionism, ...) which might contribute to the death spiral leading to it.
Reading your post it reminded me of a dark year that I had some years ago, where I couldn't do any work at all, and similar to you, there's a before and after for me as well.
I saw in your profile that you're building a website monitoring application. There's a ton of them out there, and I also had one myself although I scraped it some years ago. What does your app do (will do) that the other ones don't?
Basic curiosity from an internet stranger! I too would like to have a small application that could provide me with enough money to live my own life (no big aspirations, no employees, just me, the product, the clients and added value).
I know what you mean by dark year... there is one darkest week a few years ago where I just stopped functioning. My mind turned off, I barely had the energy to sit up from bed, I had gone hollow. Something had broken. It was so terrifying I decided to seek help, and after a long recovery, I made it.
Ha ha. You have not known burnout.
It has taken me a drastic break from work, isolation, depression, thousands of pounds in therapy, and 18 months to recover from work-related burn out. I did not write a single line of code for a year.
I am better now, maybe even better than I've ever been in my life, but I am a completely different person. There is a pre-burnout self, and a post-burnout one. (I don't code after work anymore. I do not enjoy cutting edge tech as much as I did just a couple years ago. I have become allergic to corporate life.)
Those that joke about burnout have no idea what they are talking about.