For me, it took couple of years and few failed jobs until I got on track. Today, I'm more than happy to be my own boss as freelancer.

For me talking about stuff helped me realize i was angry and depressed. It's hard to see how your mind comes up with ideas, an outside observer can point out motivations for behavior that aren't obvious from inside my own head.

Exercise kind of quiets my mind down. While burning out, work kind of hurts. It's not exactly but something like painful to execute. With excercise, I kind of rescale that feeling. Executing on X isn't as bad as running for a half an hour.

Having a couple of friends you can talk to about whatever is nice. Family is great too, but they don't always have the perspective to give helpful insight. Parents, spouses, might not tell you the whole truth, or their perspective is colored by the past. A friend will tell you you're being an idiot, or not.

Also, fellow commenters gave pretty good advice too.

How do you land those roles reliably? I have no idea. Some combination of luck and networking, I'd say, as my best positions were always inbound requests. (Generally: Hey Courtland, we saw that you built cool thing X. Could you build the same for us?) It really helps to be in the financial position to say no to anything that doesn't meet your standards.

Don't be afraid to say "no" to the client, especially if you have given them an honest estimate and they are pushing you to revise the estimate downward.

  [1]: https://remotetogether.slack.com

This led to an accumulation of adverse events I was too stressed to effectively manage. Including especially physical injuries that had lasting negative effects.

I "hung in there" until my early 40's, when a career blow knocked the last pin out from under me.

I knew what I needed and wanted to do next. But I was frozen.

Physical health issues have continued to accumulate and to paint me into a corner.

Guard your physical health! Without it, life is much harder, and one problem tends to become two, become three...

Your physical health is the basis of your mental health and well-being. When you are physically unhealthy, it is much harder to be positive and productive. Especially when symptoms weigh on you persistently and take away your ability to focus and think effectively and to be comfortably social.

There is precious little in life that is worth the sacrifice of your physical health. And beware of scenarios that suggest or demand a trade-off against some future promise.

Those reassurances most often simply serve the person or system demanding the sacrifice. And it is a sacrifice -- don't expect to "get it back."

Baking for friends is a fun way to pass the time. Baking for money is a quick road to a second burn out; it was literally years before I was able to stomach the thought of baking cookies or bread for my wife after I left the bakery I worked at.

Maybe it's because I grew up in a working class mexican neighborhood where trades and unskilled work are the majority of occupations, but sitting in an office chair for 7hrs a day is paradise compared to baking, mechanics, or any type of manual labor.

This is the real problem with manual labor, low-skilled labor, and jobs like baking.

The real stress isn't the day to day work, it's knowing that you are slowly wearing down your body but not earning enough to "get out of the game".

It's lack of financial security.

If as a baker you could buy a nice home and pay it off in 7-10 years it wouldn't be such a tough gig.

8+ hours a day, 5-7 days a week, nearly every week for years on end is liable to turn any hobby in to a slog eventually. Except for some people and some hobbies it doesn't. Somehow some people make it work, and enjoy it in the long run, without burning out.

Don't ask me how. I haven't found that magic job myself, and always tend to burn out on anything eventually. I need variety. I can't do any one thing for the long run without getting sick of it. Unfortunately, making career changes is difficult and stressful. So I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe someone who's made it work for themselves can chime in.

There's something about serving food to people that seems to be the emotional counterpoint of mad tech.

In this case, the primacy of establishing a separate fund as your bank roll, and protecting it by not letting too much of it ride on any single bet (no matter how great the bet seems), is very appropriate to self-funding your own businesses. If you lose your bank roll, then you have to stop gambling, which is bad if you are convinced you have an edge.

*I'm not a gambler of any type, unless you count investing 401k/IRA savings in index oriented ETFs and mutual funds gambling (not an unfair position).

My advice would be to not even consider it without having enough money to sustain yourself for a minimum of 2 times the period you predict will take you to become profitable in your desired venture.

So if you spend 3000 a month, want to become a freelancer and expect it to take you 6 months until you build up steady business you should have a minimum of 36,000 saved up.

I learned this the hard way, hope someone out there heeds this advice.

yes, most restaurants fail, but most businesses fail, because people think of it as some kind of paid vacation rather than an actual job.

getting up at 5am and making croissants is a very different thing than getting up at 5am and dealing with people screaming at you because an api endpoint isn't functioning.

At the end of a hard day in the kitchen I'm ready to go hang out with friends and enjoy my free time.

At the end of a hard day as a software dev I can hardly string a sentence together and want to go be by myself.

Likewise in the kitchen I didn't get given completely unrealistic timeframes. As long as I focused and worked hard it was all good.

As a software dev I constantly have pressure to perform miracles and hit unrealistic deadlines from all sides. And the pressure is cumulative. If I have a bad day today I'm going to have to work extra hard and under more pressure the rest of the week to catch up.

If the food services industry paid as well as software dev I'd go back in a heartbeat.

this applies to any business.

> Every task that happens in back and front of house has a very specific start time and a very specific duration allowance - there is no flexibility and no opportunity for pacing or giving yourself some slack.

you've clearly never worked in ops or SRE. or working in a mine, on an oil rig, or on an airplane, or a squad car.

not everyone lives the life of a spoiled computer programmer which seems to be your baseline for evaluation.

  * Can't or won't keep the accounting books in order.
  * Micro-management of staff that want to do the job.
  * Under-management of staff that aren't doing the job.
  
  * I /suspect/ not paying the staff enough (in money/respect/etc) to keep good staff and keep the motivated.

Another way to look at it is, nobody can tell you what to do unless you're willing to hear it from them -- so always be mindful and reasonably opinionated about who you have at your "ear".

I operate a restaurant and I know about 50 people who do. Believe me - there is no shortage of stress and your just as likely, if not more so, to get burned out.

Tell your friend to seriously think twice...

One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.

You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen).

If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order?

If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space?

If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule?

Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.

Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce.

Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this).

There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment.

I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%.

I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.

I think it's really easy to look at something from the outside and think "how hard could that really be?" I bet if you asked someone who wasn't in CS how hard an identity management system is, they wouldn't think it is all that hard. Only once you get into the details do the challenges become apparent, and I suspect that's very true for bakeries as well.

Has anybody here claimed the opposite?

Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.

[1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.

I worked there for almost but not quite two years, and by the end I was managing the bread dough for all the mixes (moving things in and out of the proofer and fridge as necessary to make sure they were ready to bake at the right time), mixing all the specialty breads (multi-grain loaf, rye breads, holiday breads, basically everything but the sandwich bread, french bread, hot dog buns, and pizza dough), handling 95 percent of the actual baking, plus I was the person who kept track of the pastry stock, produced and baked pastries, and did the final prep work (frosting the brownies and cakes, etc).

If you're curious, please don't hesitate to ask me how often things went smoothly.

ps: I am not saying thta being the customer interface is easy. Just not in bakeries and some other kinds. My mother was a post office clerk, it was famous for the angered waiting line venting violently on the powerless employees, sometimes physically. I never had to deal with this in the food serving business.