This is a powerful piece that resonates with my own experience. I went through a period of severe burnout that took me a couple years to recover from. One of my later insights was that burnout doesn't merely entail working too much (although that's certainly part of it); burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc.
A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.
> burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
I authored this comment but can't go back to edit. Given that this sentiment appeared to resonate with HN, I just want to add that I write extensively on this theme in my book "Eating Glass." I just put the chapter titled "Burnout" up for free: https://markdjacobsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/eg-samp...
> burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
So much this. If you are putting in too much effort into something at work just because you care about it, this is a recipe for disaster.
If you're putting in extra work to learn valuable transferrable skills, that's fine - if that's the tradeoff you want to make.
But if you're just working your ass off for no reason, you're setting yourself up for a major let down.
This is precisely why I cringe anytime ANY executive/HR person in a company refers to the team as a "family"
No, areyou going to fucking fire Uncle Joe for being too drunk at thanksgiving and cut him off from the family will and make him sign a non-familial-secrets-disclosure promise?
Fuck that. You are not a family. HR is NEVER your friend.
I was once offered ~8K to non-disparage a company upon leaving.
Yeah - no thanks.
I had to sign on a non-disparagement agreement once. HR was like "don't worry! you're not in trouble!! please sign this for our legal dept." I'm there wondering to myself, how can I possibly be in trouble? I had just quit...
I've you had just quit, why did you have to sign a non-disparagrmeny agreement? Did they threaten you with bad referrences or blacklisting or something?
Yeah it's surprising how little control you end up with once you burn out. I got there and thought I could will myself through it. I was not even keeping up with my timesheeting, it took so much will power just to get through a day.
I learnt you have to take holidays, you can't sustain long hours for months at a time and if management is focusing in a different direction than your team it's time to leave.
For me, I realized though that you do have control. The solution is counterintuitive, though. If I am at risk of burnout I slow down a bit, but I don't outright quit. I also queue up labor that will derive small tangible, almost guaranteed wins. Although programmers seem to burn out a lot (probably because there are almost no limits to how much effort you can put in... There's always more code to be pushed, after all), programmers uniquely have the tools to reschedule small tasks (e.g. refactoring, writing those tests you've put off) that can create small emotional "success hits", sometimes even with primary stimuli (green passing tests dots). These can serve to reassociate effort with reward.
Conversely, taking a vacation immediately after burning out is likely the worst thing you can do, because it associates not-effort with reward. Typically I like to drop in a timing-non-negotiable vacation far enough in the future to dissociate from the burnout, e.g. 2mo.
Anyways, it's been many years since I have had a full-on burnout. (I have had project burnouts though, where I refuse to continue working on a given thing and pivot to something else with a more favorable seeming reward schedule).
I think this thread gets to the heart of why engineers seem to have a more difficult relationship with performance management than most disciplines.
When management gives opaque or “unjust” performance reviews, it can almost directly trigger burnout in tech. Similarly if the process is not perceived as transparent engineers can simply feel like they are hitting a brick wall.
Given the high turnover rate in tech I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s even worth having a performance management process. Unless someone has straight up stopped working for a prolonged period, it’s unlikely that they will stay with the company long anyway.
It helps a lot to think your management knows what it's doing. If you're stressing out on the latest likely "swing and a miss" feature that you think they picked using a dart board and ransom-note cutouts from magazines, you can end up burnt out for a good long time.
I’m surprised by how hard it’s become to motivate myself to learn anything new - I used to read about and experiment with new technology pretty much all the time. Now I can barely work up the strength to learn something new even if it’s actually something that I’m working with.
Maybe that's what I need - for now I'm focused on getting my kids into college, but maybe if I can distract myself with something else for a while I'll get back into focus.
Yep. I was recently asked by an interviewer what burnout means to me. I said it's a function of energy and reward. High energy expenditure paired with high reward is just rewarding work. It's when there's high expenditure with low reward that causes burnout.
Ah, this is on point. I've been struggling with this for years after having put so much energy in to try and put good work into a major website, only to be totally fucked over by ignorant managers and subsequently internalize this feeling of "why would I ever fucking put extra energy into any work again"
People who haven't experienced this are just lucky. They've been rewarded well for their energy, or they had an early stake, or they just never put much energy in because they were in a space where they could be productive. They've never been fired on their way up. They've never had to rely on savings for an entire year and have to battle algo challenges just to get a phone call while dealing with zero motivation for even writing code.
The reward, for me, also has to be more than just money. I get paid well, but when the work isn't intrinsically rewarding, I still risk burnout. That's why the highest paid engineers in the world still burn out.
(And then there's the guilt of "wow, what is wrong with me, I'm getting paid a bunch of money to do something I'm good at, why am I losing my mind?", but that thought process doesn't help much.)
I think too many people ( ones who did not have kids) threw themselves into work since Covid started.
Companies squeezed every ounce of productivity possible from employees.
I imagine most people who had never worked remotely pre-covid did not understand that you need to clearly demarcate you work and personal life when WFH.
Everyone was just thrust into this. And companies took advantage of the market uncertainty to basically exploit folks.
Shame on them and now the workers are retaliating by quitting en-masse, demanding they be treated better.
It's a paradigm shift with some of the power back in the hand of employees.
I agree with the end effect, but I question the intent on companies side. It feels like Hanlon's razer should be applied "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
My experience is companies/leaders are just other overworked people who fell into the same trap and allowed their employees to fall into the same trap, and a reckoning (increased attrition) is on the horizon.
"Upādāna is a Sanskrit and Pali word that means "fuel, material cause, substrate that is the source and means for keeping an active process energized".[1][2] It is also an important Buddhist concept referring to "attachment, clinging, grasping".[3] It is considered to be the result of taṇhā (craving), and is part of the dukkha (suffering, pain) doctrine in Buddhism."
This has been my experience. I have simply learned to look for emotional fulfillment and creative output elsewhere in my life and am far happier for it. I find I’m actually a lot better at my job when I have some distance from it. It allows me to connect with people — even at work — on a human level because I don’t particularly care about my actual work and basically forget about it as soon as I stand up from my desk.
Time is difficult, but I'm primarily unable to find the energy outside work for anything emotionally fulfilling or creative. I think this is why people are so motivated to find fulfillment in their work. Any time I have tried, my sleep, my work, and my life in general suffers, and I'm soon frustrated by the limited progress I can make.
A good day's work can be so draining as to leave me literally depressed. A good day, mind you - not hard, not bad, not stressful - just one where I am completely focused on work for 7-8 hours. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the nature of coding for a living.
Well, I can't honestly say this is a panacea (or that it is in any way something that would work for you), since I'm struggling currently myself. But here's something I've been doing and I think has helped some:
I make it a point to go on a backpacking trip once per month (Not saying it has to be camping, although there are special benefits to spending time in the wild).
This is a hard commitment that I've made with myself. I do it whether I feel like it or not. Usually, I don't, but end up happy I did it anyway. I've posed this to my friends and family as my monthly "therapy session", because it is, and because that frames it more correctly than saying "I'm just farting around".
You can carve out a day or two for your therapy every month, even if it doesn't seem that way before you start. It might not be much, but it isn't nothing.
For me, being out in the wild, away from society (especially cell phones, the internet, and the media), is an important component.
I don't think I've ever been able to be completely focussed on work for 7-8 hours. I can plod away on routine work all day long but it seems I only ever have three hours worth of intense thinking in me. Trying to push past that always creates more problems than it solves.
This reminds me of some advice I got from a grad student as an undergrad -- "It's important to not care TOO much when doing research. Most things don't work out the way you expect and you'll always be disappointed or even biased when you are looking at your data."
I’ve seen it in the field as pouring your heart and soul into something and it did love you back but the supreme goal was achieved so it’s difficult to continue. You’re just sort of detached from it all since you got to the top of the mountain and there’s nowhere to go but down. There just isn’t the space to continue doing it like it was and it burns you out. You can only look back on that moment there were love streams.
_ “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”_
I guess you’re right though in that in the end it will never love you back. The wheel must continue to turn.
I have been basically, retired, for the last four years.
I’ve worked harder than I have in many years; all self-directed projects. I’ve been crafting a single iOS app, for the last ten months, and there’s months more to go.
I spent my entire working life, living frugally, and carefully investing. I avoided personal debt, as well as frivolous expenses, drove old cars, lived in small apartments and houses, and practiced good fiscal hygiene. I saved and invested 25% - 40% of my income. Basically, the old-fashioned stuff that everyone laughs at, these days.
I'm not rich, but I'm OK.
I didn’t actually want to retire; I was forced into it, by the ageism in SV. I would not have taken the leap, left to my own devices, so I guess I should be grateful to the bigots.
It was totally worth it. I am done with having my work destroyed by others. I write the code I want to write, in the way that I want, and -quelle surprise- it works!
Huh. Turns out I knew what I was doing, all along. I just had to remove myself from situations where someone else was the gatekeeper on my methodology. My dream has been to be in the position where I can chart my own course[0], and experiment with the methodologies that I have been developing (but never allowed to implement), for years.
Continuing the figure of "unrequited love", idealization plays a role - a simple misperception or distortion of what the state of affairs actually is. It's no coincidence that a "romance" used to refer to fantasy tales of adventure, like Treasure Island.
OTOH some seemingly impossible things couldn't have happened without a "vision". So... tilt away.
This almost exactly sums up the major issue of the times I've been burnt out. Combination of high passion for the project and a toxic, hostile or unsafe/unsupportive environment.
>"I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc."
I thought this was a good insight, that there are more causes of burnout than simply working too many hours. Thanks for sharing.
I think this conception of burnout rings true for me also after living the best part of a decade in a non-immigration accepting society. Sometime ones executive functioning just wont show up, and you lose the send of how to get more of what you want and less of what you don't want.
So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc.
A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.