I've had pretty bad burnout earlier in my career and this is what I am doing now
* Better frameworks. If a framework adds complexity, it needs to enhance the feature set and developer experience by 2x. Otherwise, I just stick with the basics. Example: I was working on a react codebase with insane level of hooks, contexts, 7 layers of abstraction. Solution: Axios/Fetch right next to the form, entire backend functions in the controller: no f's given.
* Business requirements first: I hack off 90% of Agile methodology and just do what makes sense. Which is a balance of acceptance criteria and user stories, or contract driven development to pull the features into production and deliver.
* Thursday and Fridays I don't work, and if it do, it's on something completely new or exciting. Last week I played with DallE as an API. Unfortunately this means less pay.
* In the winter if its sunny out, I leave around 2pm. And come back and work 7pm-10pm.
* One meeting a day, or every other day. And Monday's meeting I come in fresh and excited, cite what I am grateful for, and talk about how incredible everyone's effort is. It can sound cheesey but it works for me.
Last burn out was right before the pandemic. I took a position at a startup that told me they were light on meetings, but I ended up spending all of my time in meetings and getting absolutely nothing done. So I left, and took a big break. I forgot a lot of things but realized what I forgot were skills didn't matter. Attitude matters over skill. I am not interested at all in React 18 and instead focusing on Vanilla JS, HTML5, just regular CSS, and just SQL. Day in day out skills. Stuff that won't change in 10 years. If I forget something like a new feature in React 18, then my mind is telling me it is useless in the long term.
* Better frameworks. If a framework adds complexity, it needs to enhance the feature set and developer experience by 2x. Otherwise, I just stick with the basics. Example: I was working on a react codebase with insane level of hooks, contexts, 7 layers of abstraction. Solution: Axios/Fetch right next to the form, entire backend functions in the controller: no f's given.
* Business requirements first: I hack off 90% of Agile methodology and just do what makes sense. Which is a balance of acceptance criteria and user stories, or contract driven development to pull the features into production and deliver.
* Thursday and Fridays I don't work, and if it do, it's on something completely new or exciting. Last week I played with DallE as an API. Unfortunately this means less pay.
* In the winter if its sunny out, I leave around 2pm. And come back and work 7pm-10pm.
* One meeting a day, or every other day. And Monday's meeting I come in fresh and excited, cite what I am grateful for, and talk about how incredible everyone's effort is. It can sound cheesey but it works for me.
Last burn out was right before the pandemic. I took a position at a startup that told me they were light on meetings, but I ended up spending all of my time in meetings and getting absolutely nothing done. So I left, and took a big break. I forgot a lot of things but realized what I forgot were skills didn't matter. Attitude matters over skill. I am not interested at all in React 18 and instead focusing on Vanilla JS, HTML5, just regular CSS, and just SQL. Day in day out skills. Stuff that won't change in 10 years. If I forget something like a new feature in React 18, then my mind is telling me it is useless in the long term.