Was writing a first product for my best friend and my first company/startup. (that one is on hold now by the way).

Spent about a month doing a full-time internship and also programming after that the entire day. Weekends full of programming as well and after a few weeks I noticed that when turning around/walking quickly, I lost my balance.

Went to the doctor who immediately asked if I worked loads and loads to which I answered yes.

He took a look at my daily patterns in general and then told me that I was having a thing which you were only supposed to get at old age and that I was heading towards a burnout because my body was highly not used to/ready for this.

Continued for a little and people started asking why I looked so white (my face lost color) and unhealthy.

Started to take care of myself and voilà, within weeks I was getting better :)

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

Some words of wisdom passed on by our Scrum.

1. I am responsible for setting boundaries. Work time, sleep time, family time, me time. If I don't set them properly, things WILL get unbalanced very quickly. (And I would add, burnout will follow closely).

2. Being productive isn't about doing more and more in less time. It's about doing only the most important things well, and either saying no to the other things, or finding another way to get them done. (Prioritize!)

3. I can't win (let alone run) a marathon by thinking of it as a 26 mile long sprint, or a week as a five day sprint. (Eat a digital elephant a byte at a time).

4. Loved ones are good judges of when things are in and out of balance.

5. Taking time off is essential. Vacations, yes, but also nights and weekends. (Or you WILL burn out and hate what you do).

Comments in () are mine.

*the Company closes a project and splits us in different teams*

Me: *tells the manager for half a year about feeling extremely bad in the new team which is mobbing me, caling the previous project "shit" (it was not, it simply didn't need to be alive anymore cause we found out cheap alternatives) and not letting me do anything*

Company(half a year later): *sends me into a new project* we don't get why you are underperforming lately.

Me: *full burnout after half a year of being treated as living shit* yeah. Wonder why.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

Ok guys time for a big question.

About 1yr ago I had a burnout. Since then I've been avoiding online communities, social medias, the phone itself and if I hadn't to graduate I'd have avoided my pc as well.

So, recently I reopened "the web" and I feel like Fry from futurama.

What the fuck are NFTs? Images for sell? Blockchain related stuff? Why is everyone talking about them? And why is everyone talking about web 3.0? And why none says anything good about it? Is this related with NFTs?

If I google this shit out I get only ELI5s, so I'd appreciate if anyone could Explain Like I'm A Software Engineer.

Thanks for your patience

Fresh out of dropping out of uni with a real heaping of newly diagnosed depression.

Get job in the industry.

Absolute joke of a company, spiral even further.

Thus begins the saga of boom / bust and the universe / myself fucking me over just as things get good that has been the last 8 years of my life.

Maybe one day I’ll write properly about my experience of mental health, in industry, in welfare and in my family too.

Suffice it to say, anything that leads you to take a whole year out, as well as makes you question whether what you thought was your dream job is actually right for you - is, ultimately, the definition of burnout.

tl;dr - the last 8 years have been a fucking burnout episode.

A meeting about defining the
definition of done (…)
I know I mentioned it before, but it’s beyond stupid.

- Lasted 2.5 hours
- Didn’t solve shit
- Could have been solved by adding a freaking column in our Jira, but someone wanted a physical board cause let’s waste paper I guess.

Just imagine 2.5 hours of continuous suggestions and stupid reject reasons.

Fun fact: it was called by a “senior” dev which rejected every single purposal cause they also didn’t want to change the process.

Idfk why I didn’t leave the company sooner, had to get a massive burnout before realising my sanity is worth more than being paid the minimum in the office.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

I worked two months for free, 15h per day, including weekends, due a contract trap. On top of that, client was emotionally blackmailing me and I was feeling threatened and helpless.

I even lost weight, skipping meals to save time and money. One day, my body collapsed. I ended up in bed for 10 days, feeling stiffness, pain, weakness, and shakiness. I even had to ask for help to brush my teeth.

I abandoned the project, and didn't receive any payment. The client went crazy and made me feel the worst person in the world for being sick and unable to work. But didn't put his menaces in execution.

I still remember the joy I felt when I was able to walk again.

That was the worst burnout I had, and also one of the biggest lessons about limits and evil people.

Burnout is the absolute worst. Feeling like you can’t bring yourself to do anything even though you really want to work on the project. You know logically that you want to get it done and you do genuinely care about the project. But you just can’t bring yourself to commit to it anymore because you’ve given it your all for far too long. You keep telling yourself that you will get us back to work tomorrow or the day after. But rest never feels like enough rest it’s exhausting. Baby steps I guess. I feel like at this point I’ve just developed a habit of putting it off. Time to build a more constructive habit.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

One of my parents likely has cancer (waiting for results to confirm), my work is currently cutting benefits, I am reaching a new level of burnout where my voice just cracks during meetings and I have terrible sore throat afterwards and the only project I was looking forward to, is deprioritized due to company doing bs (so much bs that there’s a team that expects progress even though it has been officially deprioritized). And don’t ask me about the junior, I don’t even have energy anymore to rant.

People ask me how am I, and I’m wondering how much more shit needs to happen before it’s acceptable to reply “I’m regretfully sober”

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

I'm taking a vacation in two weeks to hopefully recover from this burnout. I don't know if I can make it that long.

I've been trying to work on a ticket for the past two days. I don't even know what the ticket says. Just something about optimizing the Google pay object api. idk. I just can't. I need to have it done today though. Bleh.

Cannot understand those who are frustrated with it.
Sure, one can feel frustration when some project is not going as they were supposed to go, but that is life for ya, boi.

Without wanting to offend anyone it feels like devs who complain so much either do not actively search for a solution and learn shit properly and cry their soul out afterwards or they do search, but cannot find anything.
Patience is the solution. Do not let yourself fall down and stay strong.
Even if it takes a lot of willpower, retries, inner pain, patience and non-sleepy nights, you will and can do it. I believe in you.

My whole life was basically a psychological disaster.
I have had and still have depression and a lot of short frustrations from time to time, too, but I do not cry it out loud.
My high school is fucked up. In every single aspect. I am doing all-nighters almost every day. With maybe half an hour of sleep to get school projects done on time.
I cannot just say "fuck you. I am not gonna do this shit" to school, because that would affect my grades in a negative way. Same thing applies to you, as an employee, too. But at least you do not need to be afraid of getting bad grades.
Bad grades->not getting the desired degree->bad chance of finding a job
In your case:
Bad communication with boss->bad connection->bad chance of finding a job

But is that really so?
I do not think so. Nonetheless, you still can have a good chance of finding a job, if you have proven yourself to others in a great way. Everyone has bad times. Even with their bosses. That's normal. Being bad with someone does not make yourself bad in general.

The job world will still accept you, but school won't accept you again. Whenever I feel like the burnout is about to catch me, I take an immediate break and go outside. Take a walk in the sunset. Go to the forest. Run with music playing loudly. Swim. And other things like watching the stars in the silence of the night.

To finally come to an end here...
Do not make yourself feel bad that quickly and try to endure the pain. This is going to make you a better and stronger person.
If you cannot do it anymore (hitting the borders of burnout), take your time and do whatever makes you happy and treat yourself.
Life is not all about work. Were you born to be a worker? No. Were you born to be a slave of others? No.
What is holding you then? Let go of all the stress (for a minute). You are free.

You are a great person.
Do not forget that.

Should I be excited or concerned?

Newbie dev(babydev) who just learned string vs int and the word "boolean", is SUPER into data parsing, extrapolation and recursion... without knowing what any of those terms.

2 ½ hrs later. still nothing... assuming he was confused, I set up a 'quick' call...near 3 hrs later I think he got that it was only meant so I could see if/where he didnt understand... not dive into building extensive data arch... hopefully.

So, we need some basic af PHP forms for some public-provided input into a mySQL db. I figured I'd have him look up mySQL variables/fields, teach him a bit about proper db/field setup and give him something to practice on his currently untouched linux container I just set up so he could have a static ipv4 and cli on our new block (yea... he's spoiled, but has no clue).

I asked him to list some traits of X that he thinks could be relevant. Then to essentially briefly explain the logic to deciding/returning the values/how to store in the db... essentially basic conditionals and for loops... which is also quite new to him.

I love databases; I know I'm not in the majority... I assumed he'd get a couple traits in his mind and exhaust himself breaking them down. I was wrong. He was/likely is in his sleep now, over complicating something that was just meant as a basic af.

Fyi, the company is currently weighted towards more autistics (him and myself included) than neurotypicals.

I know I was(still am) extremely abnormal, especially when it comes to things like data.

So, should I be concerned/have him focus elsewhere for a bit?... I dont want to have him burnout before he even gets to installing mySQL

The scary thing about burnout is that you usually don't realize you are burning out before it's too late.

Personally, at least, I've worked on projects that just felt a little intense at the time, but after taking a step back due to holidays or hitting some milestone I realize I never want to have anything to do with it ever again. One project makes my stomach drop even today every time I see the code; Not because the code is bad, but how it takes me back to how miserable I was without admitting it to myself.

The biggest red flag I look for is when I'm tempted to work on stuff in my free time. When this starts seeming like a solution there's a serious problem with the project that needs to be addressed.

2021 was really rough, saw friends going over the deep end with burnout, significant incidents to handle and a shitty manager to deal with.

It wasn't about blood and tears, it was about commuting 4 hours/day mid-pandemic to be present in the office and respond to an incident whilst having to deal with a bunch of heroes thinking they were part of a CSI: Cyber episode.

All of that just to be said that my raise "would be enough to keep me from looking elsewhere" as my manager said they were very happy with my performance.

This week I found out exactly how much this appreciation is worth: 2%. And I should consider myself lucky with this number as my performance wasn't good enough to grant me any raise whatsoever.

feelsreallybad.png

I'm about to get a burnout I suppose.
I just can't handle the amount of things we need to master in very near dead lines anymore. It's too much.
I've spend about 3 years with this year now. I am thinking of dropping it, because my grades only get worse, but on the other hand I had my dream of attending an university plus all the years that I've kind of lost here...
I can feel how the veins around my brain are full with pressure.

BTW. I'm thinking of dropping it and beginning an apprenticeship as a developer. But before that maybe an internship in that company xor taking one year free to fly to China and to the US to get my brain free.

Almost a year and a half. I was so overworked and my failures were so impactful. I would go home and obsess over work all evening and have fever dreams on nights that I could sleep. It was so mentally painful that I was going to jump off a building after a few drinks to make it stop. A military turned civilian doctor told me that I showed symptoms like soldiers in prolonged conflict. He told me “quit or it will kill you” without even knowing about the suicide stuff. So I quit the job and to this day still suffer flashbacks and have crazy mood swings.

Burnout is real. Dangerous stress is real.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

Question about burnout here!

I've been a developer for a year and a half now and I've reached a point of burnout. Experiencing a lot of external stress as well as internal (handled well with a fantastic and supportive team)

I'm taking some time away from work and having a much needed break but I'm worried that for now, I can't code! I've got no drive at all to learn anything new, I'm just sat here waiting for a production push.

I'm by no means thinking of changing careers or leaving my current role and the lack of concentration is likely as a result of stress, I just wanted to hear some of your stories so I feel a little less alienated!

Being new to this is pretty overwhelming at times!

So today, i talked to my manager about my burnout and she offered the extra resources to help my project. And if nothing goes wrong, i’m going to take leave for 2 weeks by next week.

My advice, we are human and developer is special human. So, talked to your manager or boss about your problem, it’s their job to help you on this.

On last thing, i hope you guys pray for me and i hope i can be a better person once i comeback. 👌

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

Hired as a junior full stack when I didn’t know shit about frontend. Ended up taking care of full stack on both mobile and web. Quit 6 months later due to burnout

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

[Fairly existential career question] How fulfilling would you say your career in development has been?

[Long rant] for years I had been planning on becoming a rabbi, majored in religious studies etc, until I realized there would be no way out of my rapidly growing debt if I chose to continue on that path. i had to drop out 3 years into my undergrad due to financial issues, and as it is now working full time im barely holding my head above water. I spent a lot of time being sad about it until i decided to change things and started getting into accounting before I discovered coding. I am SO GLAD I discovered coding cause accounting was so boring...Now I'm excited to be going back to school for software development and I'm in a bit of a pink cloud having discovered something thats both exciting/fun/challenging AND lucrative... But i do worry about 5, 10 years in the future, will i still be as stoked about it? Religious leadership was and is something I know i would feel ~fulfilled~ over a lifetime, and while my newly discovered passion for coding literally keeps me up at night getting fired up on solving problems and writing my little newb programs, i think I'm afraid of burnout?

[Tl;dr] I'm making an education+career switch to software development and i wanna know how folks feel about their career years into it, do you still love it just as much? Feel jaded? Regretful? Happy?

I HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION.

i need advice.

is it better that i study during the day for college until 12pm (midnight) and then work on my own project from 12pm till 4-5am, go to sleep and wake up around 9-10am so thats 4-7h of sleep each day. the only exception would be tuesday bc i gotta wake up for college at 6am.

so i would be working on my project 6 days for about 4-5h per week.

i plan to do this for 2 months.

so: day shift - college study
night shift - my work

please help me organize my time.

now, im thinking about long term effects on this. its going to be pain. but i am in pain each day so i no longer feel pain. i will be exhausted as fuck. i am fully conscious of what is awaiting for me if i decide to do this.

here is my question. am i going to get a burnout from this? am i going to look physically different in 2 months (in a bad way)? am i going to be mentally worse? am i going to get really skinny? this would basically be a work of 19-20h for 6 days per week for 2 months. that is approximately 114-120h work week minus tuesday.

i have to be mentally equipped for this so i plan to do home workouts in night shift session in order to prevent burnouts. I'll do walks/jogs too in day shift for mental cooldowns. the most important thing for me is NOT TO GET A BURNOUT AT ALL COSTS DURING THIS PERIOD OF TIME NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

i need serious advice on how to do this right AND AVOID BURNOUTS AT ALL COST.

i MUST stay operational mentally for the next 2 months.

please list the things i should DO and NOT do so this can be achievable.

Hey. I would like to do a research on developer burnout analyzing post from developer sites like Stackoverflow or devRant. I think it's getting a more and more common problem in the developer community. What do you think about it? Any ideas about how should i identify the symptoms from only programming related posts?

I'm too burnt out at this point to write a post about burnout...

Doing the work of four developers previously, with no relief in sight.

Though they did tease the possibility of a new project...

I'm stressed and my manager values the future of the company before people's health.

I already clocked over 40 hours this week with no foreseeable reward.

I head in mind to leave the company somewhere Q4 2021 but this stuff will make it sooner..

I used to blast throught everything accademic in a really short time span. I used to push hard on the gas pedal since my college years, up to my bacheler degree. I was always on schedule with every exam, even graduated top of my class and first amongst my colleagues. But then, I felt the urge to change university, I moved out of my parent's home, in a far away city, and everything simply collapsed. All of the sudden, not only was I struggling with my exams, but, most importantly, I started struggling with telling the truth about it. I constantly felt in debt of my parent's efforts to put me through university, to have given me a chance. This caused a strange feeling in me, it was similar to a weird form of depression, I was unable to...act. To do stuff. To even wanting to do it. I started procrastinating everything. I lived at my parent's expenses in this far away town but all I could do was playing videogames. I somehow managed to get to the point that I only had three exams left plus my thesis, but I did this by avoiding all the real hard exams, somehow cheating myself. I was already two years behind schedule at this point, and willing to quit. I was desperate, I cried a lot, thought about running away fron everything as I fear the disappointment I would have caused by simply telling the whole story.

Thankfully I met my girlfriend who helped me realize all I needed to do was move back to my former university and take it step by step from there onwards. I almost didn't make it...again. But I was able to pull throught, I worked during the day, wrote my master thesis early in the morning and late in the evenings. I gave it all. And I made it.

I graduated last year and got a job in the industry. I don't feel as useless anymore. I still fear and dread what the burnout made me feel. How it almost destroyed all confidence I had in myself.

Tldr; I burned out right after getting my bachelor degree. And I stayed like that for years, up to the point that I ended up being years behind schedule. I was able to recover thanks to my gf but still fear and dread those feelings I had when I burned out.

What do you do when you're trying to push yourself further by learning new concepts and techniques but start to feel the burnout closing in?

Usually I'm useless for about week if I push myself too hard. Would love to overcome this.

How do you guys handle this?

Hi fellow ranters, I humbly request your opinion on a matter.

I am a CS student in his last year of college, and currently developing a Node.js app as his final year project with a partner. The project has potential, and we've been at it for about three weeks, but the problem is that the more I code, the less I see myself doing Node in the future.

I was a total noob in CSS before starting the project, and I have learnt a ton in just 3 short weeks, but that has taken a toll on me, because I fell pretty far behind our schedule. However, for as much time and effort ad I have put in, my partner has put in a lot more (and he knows way more than me), thus increasing the gap.

My partner and I have (for the moment) different views on the amount of effort that we want to put in the project, since I see it as "slightly more than just another subject" (9-hr a week), and he sees it as a real passion project (endless hours). This could be due to the burnout of the first weeks, but I'm really not that excited about the project anymore, and I find myself thinking that I am wasting both of our time (I don't want to be dead weight), and that if I worked on a project that really made me passionate, such a compiler or a runtime environment, or a new programming language, I wouldn't mind putting in the hours that he does. Just to give more context, this whole project was his idea, and although I find it a great idea, and I know he is capable of building an amazing product, I am not sure whether I would be useful, or even if I want to be useful. Again, this could all be because of burnout.

Anyone has had such an experience?

TL;DR: I am working on a final project with a partner (it was his idea, and I found it interesting), but I think I would be happier switching to a project of my own.

Exciting and challenging projects really helps with burnout. I didn't really believe that the solution is to work more it sounds stupid, but it reminded me why I love my craft, it was worth the sleepless nights(wouldn't do it in the long term). I hope you get the opportunity to work on something that you are passionate about and reignite that fire 🙂