I had a bit of a burnout around 2006 -- I had worked my ass off on a fantastically complex framework, the pinacle of years of experience, and it was a joy. It was SO cool. There was an application on top, which was also pretty cool.
And the marketing bods/management and so on more or less dragged the project off track, up to the point I didn't want to work on it at all, I quit, I left my 'baby' and had a hard 6 months where I didn't really want to do anything... Good thing is that I became a pretty competent landscape photographer along the way...
Nowadays, I work a LOT more like a mercenary. I don't mind working on projects that leads straight to the wall -- NOBODY will listen to you, or trust you've seen that 12 times before.
So as far as I'm concerned, I enjoy the work, the architecture, the TECH challenges, and everything which gives me a quick, and I completely ignore the outcome in the end. Sure, if it's a success, whoohoo whoohoo but I no longer put the same amount of 'care' and 'ownership' in what I do. I just let it go, and do something else just as efficiently.
It might sound cruel, but for the like of us who REALLY get a kick from designing/building/implementing stuff, it's actually quite liberating.
I just smile benignly on at the idiots in the room sometimes, it's quite relaxing :-)
There's a certain point where you've been abused so much, you've GOT to let go. The reality is, we don't work on these projects in a vacuum. Rarely do we have full control and responsibility for the outcome. If you can't control something, you can't hold yourself accountable for its success or failure. I still do my best work but if I'm put in an impossible situation, my outlook is similar to yours.
Heh, respectfully, I think we're talking about two different kinds of burnout.
The form I am referring to, builds steadily over time. It's not the result of some bad interaction with management, rather, it's the result of doing the "same" thing for 30 years.
I recognize that the problem is in seeing it as the "same" thing. Yet, given our job as programmers is often to see the forest through the trees, to identify patterns, it becomes hard not to see yourself as solving the same set of problems over, and over, and over, and over.
That's the type of burnout I'm referring to. I'm guessing you don't struggle with that at all ;)
Well to be fair I went from doing well over 20 years of Mac programming with a lot of UNIX/Linux alongside to a semi-hardware developer with linux low level stuff, pure embedded and FPGA development...
There's LOADS of fields that you haven't done. I remember my first time trying to get my head around some VHDL code and I felt I was 12 years all over again looking at 6502 assembly code.
It's quite strange and yet makes sense, that embedded salaries are lower than easier higher level development. On the one hand, embedded is NOT the kind of thing some random 14 year old kid can do, whereas iOS/Android/Web is. But unfortunately, there's just not the plethora of jobs demanding embedded folks.
Yeah, as someone who generally winds up rewriting the mess that you wrote for everyone in the room, I really wish you'd pay more attention to the outcome in the end.
And the marketing bods/management and so on more or less dragged the project off track, up to the point I didn't want to work on it at all, I quit, I left my 'baby' and had a hard 6 months where I didn't really want to do anything... Good thing is that I became a pretty competent landscape photographer along the way...
Nowadays, I work a LOT more like a mercenary. I don't mind working on projects that leads straight to the wall -- NOBODY will listen to you, or trust you've seen that 12 times before.
So as far as I'm concerned, I enjoy the work, the architecture, the TECH challenges, and everything which gives me a quick, and I completely ignore the outcome in the end. Sure, if it's a success, whoohoo whoohoo but I no longer put the same amount of 'care' and 'ownership' in what I do. I just let it go, and do something else just as efficiently.
It might sound cruel, but for the like of us who REALLY get a kick from designing/building/implementing stuff, it's actually quite liberating.
I just smile benignly on at the idiots in the room sometimes, it's quite relaxing :-)