I quit over something like this. Best decision of my life. I was the lowest paid engineer, I won/led/only person that worked on a major contract (20% of revenue) and they said I was bold for asking for a promotion that would put me equal pay with people that brought in no contracts. Don't work for toxic management. It just isn't worth it. It takes a huge toll on your mental health and honestly no money is worth that. I was burnt out for over a year after that experience. I learned that when applying for positions you should also be interviewing your manager. That's become one of my top criteria.
The burnt out feeling is coming mainly from the feeling of how much prep is required to switch jobs even. I'm just hoping the promotion actually comes through and I don't need to but at the same time I'm preparing now so that 6 months from now I can leave on a dime if I want.
I learned this lesson the hard way and ended having to take a multiple year hiatus from even looking at a text editor. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in a way a form of PTSD; for a long while, even thinking about programming elevated my heart rate. I ended up working as a bike mechanic during that time away, and the combination of a low stakes environment and working with my hands did my mental health a lot of good.
Yeah I mean going off of the great burnout comment before, it's that the negative mental pathways are being carved super deep every day by your continued effort -> failure (or perceived failure by you or manager).
I wonder if mushrooms/acid/mdma can help cure professional burnout faster?
How's being a bike mechanic money-wise? If you have a solid amount of capital built up from grinding as a soft engr, that could be a nice segway for a time.
Basically a combination of both. I was at a medium sized startup fresh out of college, and I was the only one working on a completely new project using a language nobody else at the company used (I was doing NLP stuff in python). There was no code review and next to no mentorship, and every other developer was working in Java/Scala, so they had almost no clue what exactly I was working on. Early on I was actually able to deliver on pretty much everything asked of me, and had one of the models I had trained being used in production within six months. It was this terrible combination of me feeling completely out of my depth, yet everyone else only sees that I'm delivering, so thinks I have everything under control.
I knew very little python or machine learning when I started, but was able to get fairly competent in the problem domain quickly. But as things progressed, my severe lack of experience in developing a large project started to slow progress down and take a toll on me. I felt like I had to keep up the pace I had set expectations with early on, so I just started working longer and longer hours trying to meet deadlines that probably didn't matter anyways. Near the end I was secretly working nights and weekends because I had this mentality that If I didn't someone was eventually going to find out that I had no clue what I was doing. Pretty classic imposter syndrome fueled by perfectionism.
> How's being a bike mechanic money-wise?
Haha, not good. At a shop that pays well, it's around $20/hour after base pay plus commission. It was a nice change of pace though. It made me enough where I didn't have to use too much of my savings. I quit soon after Covid started and have been doing some portfolio projects and brushing up on my interview skills.
Programmers are hard to replace, it hard to find a good one, and it takes time to ramp up a new one with a codebase. You have more negotiating power than you think.
Your comment struck me because I have been in that position before, and I know it really really hurts. But you gotta look out for yourself. Please take a week or two off
That assumes that their manager (1) is aware of how hard it is to find a good programmer, and (2) is rational.
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618