As someone with 20+ experience I can tell you burnout is real. It doesn't make you not cut out for the field. That burnout travels with you.

Burnout doesn't happen everywhere. It tends to happen when bad or inexperience people run projects.

If someone feels like there company is burning them out they probably are. Move on before it eats at you. You cannot change bad management.

> Burnout doesn't happen everywhere. It tends to happen when bad or inexperience people run projects.

Definitely.

I would also add that burnout at least for me is a function of ROI. In my experience, teams are willing to put in crazy hours if doing so regularly results in success and favorable outcomes for them. If you force teams to put in crazy hours and the effort results in failure more than a few times, it decimates morale and very quickly leads to burnout. If you're asking teams to give their all you had better be able to deliver.

IMO burnout comes from failing to ship something worthwhile; the feeling that “despite how hard you worked, it didn’t matter in the end” is at the core of my experience with it.

You find yourself thinking “I was sure that would be good and worked hard, and it turned out not to be. Now I am sure my new project will be good, but how can I know it’s going to go differently”.

I've been here myself, and I've seen it in others.

Having too much responsibility to early in one's career I think is a significant risk factor, especially combined with certain personality types. Moreso if you lack a strong professional network and/or mentorship. This situation is often correlated with clueless and/or ineffective and/or hostile management, which is it self an exacerbating factor.

I don't think it's the only cause, but it's probably a common one.

I think you get to burnout pretty quivk with overwork and no worthwhile ouput, but you can also get there with overwork and good output over a long enough period, too.

It’s not enough for the output to be good; you have to feel like it was worthwhile.

Building and shipping great software that goes on to have few or no users? Burnout.

Building widely used software but you come to believe it does more harm than good? Also burnout.

Avoiding it requires believing in the value of the things you have done; imo overwork can only speed up the process, but will not cause it if you believe in the rightness of what you are doing.

This is almost exactly me right now. I have laughable employment gaps for this reason, and am literally going to limp into my next whenever that is. I let myself be fired when I burnt out at my last one. It's hard to tell what I'm well-suited for though. Only working 6 months every 1.5 years for the same pay as many other things working the whole time isn't too bad though. I'd love to find something I can keep, but I have no idea what an actual lucky break would look like. I look at other potential career choices and they don't really seem that different.

I tend to burnout when there's a conflict between expectations and requirements from management, and lack of agency to actually be as productive as I can be. Also when the work becomes very mundane, or I'm required to respond to customers quickly while trying to meet code related deadlines.

This last time it was most of that, but also I couldn't go to the gym, couldn't engage in my other leisure stuff, couldn't hang out with friends or at a coffee shop, or really do anything but wake up and write fucking react code, and a close friend died. So I just stopped being able to do that and gave up. Best pay I've ever had, don't know what I'm doing next, but I'm bored and almost broke.

You're probably a "No problem!" guy. I actually look for people like you in my own organization because you're trouble, but I'll write this from your perspective.

With your employment history, you'll be very eager to please. You will say "Yes" and "No problem" to anything, which is not a problem, if it's actually not a problem. But this:

> when there's a conflict between expectations and requirements from management, and lack of agency to actually be as productive as I can be.

tells me it is a problem. Your quote is always true in any company. This will always happen. You will always burn out.

Here is what you do. You don't answer "No problem". You answer "Write down exactly what you want and a timeframe when you need it and I'll see if I can deliver". This will do two things:

-50% of your work will disappear. There are many middle managers who just go around delegating, thinking that is their job. In reality this is procrastination and they are useless. They will not even be able to write a spec sheet (look into how a good one looks and demand exactly that). These are the most idiotic projects in the company and now you will not be involved

-the projects that come with a spec sheet have self documenting ~code~ expectations. If you force people to write something down in a specific manner, most will realise their lunacy

Then you communicate. Don't hide anything. Tell everyone involved exactly the ups and downs (this is where lack of agency comes in and where it disappears with competent management. If it's incompetent you'll at least not feel responsible or shame) of the project. This isn't poker.

There. This might be too personal. This might be completely wrong. But please realise that it's you doing this to yourself.

Actually no, this could almost not be further from accurate. I say almost because there was one case where I definitely committed to way too much at once, but I can't think of a way it's generally true. Based on your answer and re-reading my comment, it seems like I could have phrased one bit differently. I meant expectations in terms of software delivery, but requirements more broadly. As in, being expected to complete X, but also being required to do it a noisy office or handle customer support troubleshooting. I think what you're saying is important though, I just happened to read similar advice when I identified that I was doing that to myself years ago. It was no doubt a problem I found myself in, and probably did contribute to burnout the first time, but the bigger issue then was that I was already just staring at my screen hopelessly wondering why I couldn't motivate myself to write html. Happened about 6 months in and that's my going residency so far. Its usually a few months previous to that where a manager makes a huge and arbitrary change even though I've figured out how to be productive by then. Like shuffling all the teams in one case, and putting me (adhd) on customer support.

Apologies, if I had pegged you all wrong.

> manager makes a huge and arbitrary change

This is a violation of agreed upon terms, though. Same as feature creep. Again, most managers are just looking for work theatre, rightfully afraid they'll be found out for the imposters they are.

This behavior is extremely demotivating. "why I couldn't motivate myself to write html." - maybe you are right and you can't write html under these circumstances?

Leave out the adhd, maybe customer support is just something you absolutely do not want to do, so where is the motivation supposed to come from?

Thank you, this post gave me something to chew on.

> simply need a year off away from the world

It's actually really hard (mentally) to do this if you don't already have a shitton of savings in the bank that you're not worried about paying rent, and aren't worried about getting a new job. For a lot of people it's harder than it sounds. But yes, gap years would be amazing.

Another thing I wish was more encouraged is part-time work. Working for a year at maybe 20 hours a week would probably pay all living expenses while you have plenty of space and time to recover and time to spend in the wilderness or beach or whatever strikes your fancy. Everyone seems to want to shovel you in as a full-time employee, and part-time seems to be looked down upon more than it should as a transition and recovery tool.

Part-time employment should also be a key to any discussion on preventing mass unemployment due to automation. Rather than have high-paid salary jobs for the few and UBI for everyone else, normalize part-time work and keep keep more people actively engaged in the economy.

I'm not sure, I think this is ungenerous and cynical. I think if you were to seriously evaluate people on a large scale for burn out, you would find that it is more common, across more professions, than is commonly accepted.

There is probably a bottom tier of practitioners who are marginal, and their successes will be more randomly distributed due to fortunate or unfortunate circumstances. The unfortunate people in this group will be difficult to distinguish from the incapable-but-hanging-on-anyway.

That said, I suspect that there is also not that much difference between the symptoms of being burned out and of never having been capable in the first place. I also am not convinced that all burn-out is reversible. Even if you recover your full mental and emotional strength, the experience of deep burn-out can really change a person. You can never get back time that you lose.