I can't upvote this enough. Burnout is real and it is horrible to experience, and could possibly derail your career for years. I was fortunate when I experienced burnout in my mid 20's that it didn't derail my career trajectory, but I have seen cases where it has.

This is definitely the #1 thing to focus on as a junior dev. Start to understand your limits. Listen to your body, become conscientious of your emotional state. One of the best junior developers I had the opportunity to mentor was a 35-40 hour per week developer who consistently day in and day out delivered code. He was dependably consistent and eagerly took advice without ego.

Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though? When you don't go to nightclubs, don't have friends to call at 1am and can't play guitar in your 400sqft apartment with neighbors on all sides of the world's thinnest walls, is it a terrible thing if coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week is your primary source of excitement? Does it not beat alcohol and Counter-Strike in the realms of bad things for your health that generate dopamine?

(Totally agree with the advice who have money and relationships though. But none of us start there.)

You should try to do whatever makes you happy. If it makes you happy to give your labor away for free to some large profitable company, then by all means do so. I would personally try to use my time for myself (either to make more money or to do things I enjoy), but it's a personal choice after all. Only you can make that choice.

That said, having balance is usually a good idea. If you have interests indepedent of your work, you will be able to lean on those interests when work isn't going well. This may not seem important now, but some day you may find yourself tired and lonely working late at night without seeing the fruits of those labors and suddenly your stuck with nothing else going on in your life.

I know that (I learned it at 25 though) but I don't regret being 19 and unbalanced. I had fun in the end. Suffering is a universal human experience and not something to be avoided at all costs or anything.

I mean, sometimes we give young people advice and they are super eager to do everything right and use all the lessons the older people learned. I figure, there may be value in learning that particular lesson on one's own and on one's own time.

The recent Tesla news are a good warning bell against never learning it, though. As was in a different way the recession.

> I figure, there may be value in learning that particular lesson on one's own and on one's own time.

I smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. I mean sure I also went through similar unbalanced years as you and I learned from them, but if I could go back and change something I would instill some more wisdom in myself earlier. I don't live regretting that time of my life, but if I had the chance I'd certainly do it differently.

I believe that most of us that 'made it' (past the kickstart/young-ish phase) have experienced burnout at some point, and we know how much it can delay us from making progress...

That's why I think we should at least try to warn our younger friends that all that eagerness to 'make it there' might actually hurt them in the process. Consistency is key and will take you far, because you'll keep on delivering.

Your boss most surely won't remember of your "weekend hero/superstar" phase when you're having a one or two month downtime period because your head isn't right, and your body isn't working okay from all those jolts you've given yourself from your caffeine micro-poisonings. He'll ask "are you gonna keep me those deadlines?" :-)

So yeah, we should leave the young people be young but the more information, the better.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Why is the alternative nightclubs and counter-strike though? Why not, getting a good nights sleep, reading books and lifting weights?

Because you can do the latter relatively easily at any point in your life (pre-senility) unlike the former.

Do what makes you happy, but don’t neglect your health (mental as well as physical) and take breaks/holidays. I spent too much of this year hating computers due to burnout and it’s extremely draining and depressing to have your primary passion leaving you feeling annoyed, frustrated and empty. It’s taken me pretty much all year (most of which I spent out of work) to get to the point where I can work without feeling too bad, but I still struggle to get any code written for passion projects despite having tons of ideas that excite me (until I sit down to work on them). It’s nuch easier to prevent the problems than to fix them after the fact.

In my personal experience, the way to prevent burnout for me is to have other hobbies, to stay physically healthy (especially to get enough sleep, but exercise and diet are super important too), to take plenty of holiday time, and to work on passion projects that are meaningful to you. Working on stuff to make someone else rich isn’t meaningful to me (especially when you see people getting burned by employers again and again — it’s rare that companies will return the favour)

Also, go easy on the coffee. Caffeine is a bad substitute for sleep.

When I was in my early twenties, hungry and looking to prove myself, it was fun for me to stay up all night programming, put in wild hours to get stuff done, lose myself in overly ambitious projects etc. At some point I realized I kept hitting a wall (which was just actually me burning out, but I didn't recognize it at the time) and finding it basically impossible to care or get even the simplest things done for weeks at a time.

My overall productivity was extremely bursty then–herculean efforts followed by barely anything at all. Now, years later, I'm much more defensive of my time, it's far easier to maintain a consistent flow of good work, and I no longer wake up in the middle of the night having had a bad dream about my code crashing.

This resonates for me, particularly the description of falling into bursty-then-herculean-then-barely anything. So what did you do when you were hitting that wall? Myself I've started putting more time the last few years into non-computing hobbies when outside of work. It's a hard decision because that feels like an abandonment of things I used to like to do or of creative things I had high hopes for producing. But it's probably necessary.

I know that taking a vacation is important too, but it's hard to take enough time off when you only get 10 days' a year. And I have a crap immune system so I end up using half of that to cover for when I run out of sick days every winter. (At my last job they started "hemorrhaging" developers because a local startup put out a standing offer to higher people for 20% less pay, but 20 days starting vacation. So many people took them up on it that our branch office dwindled from 12 to 2-3 people and retention of new hires went to the basement as well. The impression we got from management was they'd let the company burn to the ground before making "more vacation" a negotiable, probably because they had a vesting scheme and existing senior employees had worked there 10+ years to earn comparable amounts.) At my now-job I have the option to work 9 hour days and get a day off every other week, which helps make my "real" vacation hours stretch longer but the downside is that 9 hour days are not easy, either.

> Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though?

Working all-nighters to the point your health starts to suffer is not being young. It's exploitation the likes of which the chapters on the industrial revolution warn us about.

More importantly, we as a society should actively discourage this sort of abuse. It makes no sense to let our health waste away just because a manager wants to boast about a target or a deadline.

If I'm pulling an all-nighter coding, it's sure as hell going to be on my own project. I think that's the context of the convo

The OP wrote:

> "coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week"

which makes no sense. Of course if one ever codes outside of the day job one should code for their own project, but that's not what the OP was suggesting.

Oh, I must have missed that. My apologies :)

This doesn't make much sense. You can very well code at night but at least that shouldn't be related to your day job. I'm not sure what you get out of "coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week". If you code something for yourself that's the best.

Also, not sure if Counter Strike should be regarded as bad as alcohol, though indeed both might become addictive if careful.

I've found this oft-cited advice of avoiding over work and late nights misplaced if the argument is that you get no net benefit from it, esp if you are young and have the energy. The best work I've done has largely been the product of intense personal focus, and late nights of long deep work sessions. I don't buy the notion that there is no "free lunch" and that pushing yourself always results in "performance debt" -- though it may come at the cost of other things like relationships or personal health. I think being conscious of this, as you said, is the key -- but I don't think you are just given a flat balance of performance and ultimately "pay it back" if you throw yourself into your work in your 20s.

It's certainly possible to go too far but certainly the path to mastery is paved with many hours of practice, often to the sacrifice of other things. It may not make one feel great to consider you can't become Mozart without deep sacrifices and it doesn't make for advice one feels like giving others. I think the best version of this is probably "work really hard but be aware you have limits, and that sometimes it's important to sacrifice performance and skills development in the name of a balanced life and good health." I don't like framings that could be interpreted to mean if you hustle or don't hustle you'll get the same result, since "there is only so much you can do in a day." Knowing there is a real tradeoff and "know thyself" is a better pov imho.

People vastly underestimate how easy it is to burn yourself out and how long or difficult it can be to recognize you've done it. Solid advice. I'd tack on finding a mentor who pushes back on you and has reasonable work/life balance expectations.

I sometimes find people that have mentors that have crappy work/life balance and they look up to them like they're some kind of superhumans.

It's just like in japan when someone falls over a heap of work on premises at late hours, instead of lazy they think the guy is a 'trooper' for staying in for such a long time ("must be a strong person").

This has to stop.

My boss at my first gig was like that. Would always praise anyone who worked late or rushed in there to put out fires outside of work hours, he wasn't very interested in preventing fires but always first in line to play the hero role.

And on top of that he was severely dyslectic. I don't know, I feel like he would have made a better fire fighter.

Long story short, it took me two years to run into the wall like a freight train. This was 20 years ago, to this day I have serious issues with phone signals and stress in general. First sign of trouble and I simply shut down, can't do it any more.

Second that!

Also maybe you are not young. Maybe this isn't the first sort of work you've done. If not you, then maybe someone else reading and wondering the same thing.

Try to be consistent and avoid plateauing for long stretches. Consistency will take you far. Maybe you make some sacrifices of other hobbies and uses of time to get some early traction with your skills, but be intentional about doing this and don't put the other things that nourish you on hold forever.

Embrace the beginner's mind that comes easy to you now, remember it so you can cultivate it again more easily when things inevitably feel a little dull or tedious down the road.

This, plus do only 9-5 jobs. Do not work longer than 40hrs / week.

I think it can be okay to occasionally crunch for a few days at the end of a project. But yeah, you need to establish your boundaries now, to yourself at least. Do your homework, ask about expected overtime in the interview, and don't accept any offers that will expect 50+ hours/week on a regular basis.

It’s inportant to recognise that all overtime has a cost (both to you and the business). If I crunch this week, I typically lose more than I gained next week. I believe that Peopleware has a section on this.

Basically this means that crunch is fine to get out of a pinch, as long as it’s very infrequent and the cost is allowed for. Eg if there is an important deadline due this week, by all means, crunch to meet it, but next week is going to be unproductive and these tight deadlines cannot he a regular thing.

Sometimes I worry that I've never once felt a desire to do this.

Then you are very lucky to not have had it foisted onto you. I've been on way too many death march projects. You can see the train wreck coming, you can make all the warnings and signals, but you can still end up in the middle of them, working stupid hours doing things that don't make sense and lead to burnout.

This. But as further justification, some of the worst and dumbest bugs I've introduced in my career were late at night when I was exhausted and trying to push through.

Couldn't disagree more. Burnout sucks... and the crash was terrible, but the things I accomplished leading up to my burnouts were the best work I've done in my life. Here's what I would say: DO IT FOR YOU, not for someone else, not for a company... do it for yourself and what you want to accomplish in your life

I don't think anyone that's been truly burnt out would say something so stupid. It feels like a constant handicap on my skills and abilities. I don't think I'll ever perform to the standard that I did before, and this feels like a great shame given I have my career ahead of me, rather than behind me.

First, pretty sure the concept of "burnout" is a subjective attribution to a very physical, prolonged, exposure to overworking... so its really tough to say who has or hasn't been burned out.

Second, while I appreciate that you are going through hardship, I don't think thats fair to discount a 16 month stint working an average of 74 hours a week. Including a 45 day in a row, and 31 day in a row period. I burned myself to a crisp for a very real goal, and am happy I hit that goal. Of course, The months following were a disaster, and I don't think I actually snapped out of it till 1-2 years later. But I did snap out of it. (Note: I wasn't working in software either...)

Third, you can get through it. Burnout is physical AND mental... the problem is that people think that its primarily mental. If you are able to get past this incident, you will be stronger because you will know what your limits are. I'm not saying its easy... but if you ended up in this situation by working on something that you are truly proud of, or that you accomplished something that you wanted your entire life- then for me, its worth it.

Lastly, if you need help, or are having a tough time hit me up. I don't know what help I can be, but I can try to help you get through it :)

Or, you know, accomplish what you want without burnout. Almost always possible, for a programmer at least.