The trick is to un-learn that helplessness by retraining yourself with small steps in the right direction. Jumping straight into hours of Leetcode grinding isn't a good small step. Setting a goal to solve 2 Leetcode problems per week is a good first step. Or even better, maybe skip the Leetcode and start pinging your network for any job openings. Not every job requires Leetcode practice.

> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.

Time to force some control over your workload. Does your manager try to shame you into not taking vacation? Or do they expect you to accomplish the same work whether your on vacation or not? Time to push back.

If you're burned out and thinking of quitting anyway, what's the worst that can happen? As it turns out, you're not actually going to get fired quickly at most any company for simply limiting your workload to something reasonable. There's a hiring crunch right now and they'd have to replace you with someone else. Then you'd just get another job, which is what you wanted anyway. Time to start setting some boundaries, leading with expectations instead of waiting for them to be applied to you, and forcing some vacation time into your schedule. No one is going to make vacation happen for you, so get it done.

Meanwhile, it's time to find another company. I agree that quitting isn't a great idea if it can be avoided. I've seen enough people quit due to burnout and/or depression, only to spiral further into burnout/depression in the ensuing loneliness and financial stresses. Better to switch to a new job where people actually enjoy working together.

In The Netherlands, most jobs don't.

UK, Aus, and NZ definitely don't unless its with some American company.

The former is untrue, in my experience.

The latter is worth it.

> Vacation doesn't help. It just puts me farther behind.

Work somewhere humane and this really, truly isn't an issue. It isn't. There is sustainable work out there, and you do take a haircut to do it, but it's far from unlivable.

Like--oh, woe is me, I only made a few multiples of the median personal income in the USA last year. I could have made several. But--would I be happier? No.

This isn't helpful. I thought HN would understand more than most, but a lot don't seem to.

It's more like--great I make a ton of money. now that you're here, try to keep it going.

Taking a pay cut (which would be significant my comp is ~FAANG level), feels like gambling. Is it worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to gamble that my new lower paying job is less stressful?

There are some success stories, but do we hear of people who left their high paying jobs only to be just as stressed in their new positions?

> It's more like--great I make a ton of money. now that you're here, try to keep it going.

Why? Like-so--in the long run, we're all dead. But, unlike many, many working folks in this country and in the world, we are pretty privileged to be able to enjoy a very comfortable life in this industry without worrying that we defer The Good Stuff so far that if we get hit by a bus tomorrow we'll never have had it.

Like, I've been there, I've asked myself if twice my total compensation in a pressure cooker would make me happier, and I realized it wouldn't. Maybe you're different. But you also sound pretty unhappy about it, and I just came in from playing fetch with my dog and I'm neither worried about retirement nor about what sort of a shitshow tomorrow will be.

YMMV.

> There are some success stories, but do we hear of people who left their high paying jobs only to be just as stressed in their new positions?

I'm sure that happens. But the whole point is preparation, isn't it? I've picked most of my jobs pretty carefully and after pretty long interview processes (my current one was a quick process because I've never vibed with a place like I do here, but that's an outlier). It means you're interviewing companies as much as you're being interviewed, but that's just fine.

I keep a little more in the e-fund than maybe my coworkers do, because there's always the chance that it takes a little longer to find that job. But it's never been a problem for me.

I can retire in 10-15 years, or retire in like 35 years.

I think a lot of people are missing this. 10-15 years of grinding and I'm free.

Do I want to work until I'm 65, when I have the option not to? Hell no.

There's your danger sign, right there. It's not even the realistic plausibility of shifting down a gear (and for what? dooming yourself to never be able to run top speed again, who's to say you won't keep doing that, shifting down over and over to no avail, and then be working some shit job at 80 years old, just as miserable, never able to escape?)

Did I just do your mental voice there?

It's not even the realistic plausibility. It's THAT MENTAL VOICE and the pressure you're putting on, allowing no wavering from the path. I put it to you that it's possible that mental voice is unhealthy and not a reality thing. 'Cos that's the one I had, which is why I can do it on command. But I learned I wasn't being reality-based.

You're talking about "grinding"--you get that that's grinding your psyche and your personality too, right? I'm going to be very blunt with you: do you think, with the attitude you're expressing, do you think you will be a person people want to be around once you're "free"? Because dude. You sound miserable.

The journey can be worth it if you can pace yourself. But you've decided destination uber alles, it sounds like, so I can only wish you good luck.

You can be free in 15 years but you'll never be able to buy back your youth.

One might also die in a couple of years from the big C, heart, covid, even a car accident...

So, those 10-15 years might never even arrive...

What else are you going to do? If every form of “work” you encounter is just a means to an end, then I guess I can understand. But don’t underestimate how much you might change personally in 10-15 years, and how much enjoyment you might find in the future forms of work you engage with.

Like, live?

Or do you believe if you don't passionately "change the world" by working at some BS startup/FAANG you don't really live?

I think it's important to keep in mind "signal bias" -- I'm never on other social media, and I'm only on HN every weekday over my breakfast and morning coffee. I don't spend time building my brand or writing blog posts or shouting from the rooftops about how great my life is because I'm trying hard to stay busy actually enjoying how great my life is. In my experience, there really are a lot of folks who've made similar decisions, it's just that part of managing your life is also giving up on trying to convince strangers that you're awesome.

Amen. I find that it’s easiest to just focus on being awesome and let others figure it out on their own. Some won’t—oh well!

I think that's what the GP is trying to avoid. Not caring whether others figure it out

Worth it in what sense? You sound like you're trying to do a statistical and financially logical risk analysis. If you have burnout, that's just not an option. It sucks, but simply trying to do that math and somehow compare it to non-financial things that are important would probably take the help of a trained therapist.

So the answer is just going to vary.

If you are not on a path to burnout, who cares if the job is objectively stressful? Maybe you enjoy that environment and that's fine, in that context a logical financial analysis makes sense. Plenty of people are extremely happy and extremely successful in stressful high paying jobs, plenty of other people would happily make much less money if it means they get to spend more time with family, mentor, work for a non-profit they care about, do pro-bono work, switch fields, ... the list is long. People's motivations are complicated and I assume yours are too, or if they are not now that they are likely to become different as time goes on.

If you are on a path to burnout, the amount the job pays matters a lot less. Certainly if you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of theoretical future income the answer is comically obvious -- yes, it is worth it to find something more sustainable. I've never made half a FAANG salary when compared to people with similar experience and education at those places, and would still give up half my salary to avoid it. But I also don't think it's obvious whether you are on a path to burnout, you could try engaging a therapist to help make sure that you are tracking your feelings at regular intervals to see the derivative, but often it's even harder to see from the inside than it is from the outside (by which I mean friends/family more than work colleagues).

That said, money in the bank vastly reduces the stress that contributes to burnout, no question. Future earnings, not so much. Those are in the future, and imply that you will even be capable of continuing in the role you're in that long.

A serious analysis of future financial rewards and career options is a thing that is almost beside the point when you're actually dealing with burnout. Uncertainty about careers is more of a professional coach thing, if I had a professional coach suggest to me that I should do a back of the envelope calculation of how much money I stand to gain if I merely push myself to work for another year and then burn out I am walking out the door by the time they finish the sentence. It's just the wrong type of advice for the issue at hand.

Personally those jobs still burn me out / depress me because I hate the industry and the job. But I can't imagine working somewhere that I felt I couldnt take a vacation.

I make 240k total comp and I work about 5 hours a day remotely on average. I'm still thinking about quitting to do contracts and work less than half the year. I figure if I can make atleast 100 an hour I will be fine. I am fine living like a cheap bastard and don't have a family.

Of course work will not be happy with me, but I have to lookout for myself. They have to honor my position upon return, the question being that my future on the team would be compromised.

A more sinister idea is to take FMLA and leetcode full time for three months, then land a new role. Its kind of unethical, but life is so short.

As an example: my SO was dealing with a lot of stress due to health reasons and tried to use FMLA. Her company let her do the paperwork, but ultimately let her take off 3 weeks of paid leave that didn’t count against her PTO. That gave her some room to breathe, but she started crashing again a few months later and tried to hand in her resignation. Welp. Her company is now giving her 6 months of paid leave with no hard obligation to return to work, just a request to be courteous and let them know if she’s not coming back so they can stop paying her.

If the first time that your manager is hearing about your situation is also your request to start taking FMLA immediately or else resign, your manager isn't going to be able to do much for you (and probably won't want to either, given the tough situation you will be putting them in on short notice.)

IMO our industry should really start considering sabbaticals as the next standardized perk. I think they would do a lot to prevent burnout and retain top performers.

Whether the support function is IT support, IT Security, HR they should not be allowed to simply say "No.".

If business wants to do a thing, then they should be saying "Well, this is how we can achieve that, the benefits and costs are these..."

I know they sound awesome. But why do some companies introduce them? What are you suggesting introducing them for? To combat burnout. I.e. hopefully shortly before someone really burns out or most probably after they burned out already and need recovery they can go on a sabbatical.

How about not doing 80 hour weeks in the first place? How about not using arbitrary deadlines and throwing a fit over minor delays or changes to the plan? How about not doing all the crazy preventable things and pawing it off on other people.

I know, might be too much to ask so to speak but I really wish that more people would just not take this abuse instead of asking for a sabbatical to recover from the abuse.

Anyway, my $0.02.

Offering sabbaticals and maintaining good work life balance are not mutually exclusive. We should be able to have both.

I quit my job in February in part because my employer would not offer me a sabbatical. Had they offered me a sabbatical, I would likely be returning to work around now. The business would benefit from my seniority and established relationships within the company. Instead I'm out here finding new ways of making money and supporting myself - which is good for me perhaps, but not good for the business that I left.

Not surprised. I assume that during the sabbatical, without the burden of the constant rat race, employees had time to reflect on what was bothering them about their job and practice interviewing without the daily work stress, allowing them to secure better jobs later.

I know a lot of people who hate their current job but the daily grind is so stressful, they don't have the energy to practice and interview at other places during the work week so they're more or less stuck in a place they hate.

Leetcode often filters out burned out employees

Then do something else! There is a world beyond unicorns and FAANG companies.

(Sorry if you were already aware and are saying more along the lines of "money isn't everything", but I wanted to make the point)

So not a whole lot.

There are better ways to live than sucking down cash to be miserable. You can't take it with you.

Also, interviewing and quitting after leave isn't unethical. Do it, take care of yourself.

I didn't realize this until somewhat recently. The reason I don't take time off isn't because I don't want time off, or because I'm saving it for something better (like many of my colleagues seem to be). I don't take time off because deadlines don't care about time off and all it does is make the time surrounding it worse.

This struck a chord with me. I recently had a “vacation” where I still had to participate in and do work on an RFP and then be in the RFP presentation itself. I ended up working 3-4 hours every day. In addition, when I got back (officially), I was expected to simply “catch up” with the work I couldn’t do during the week I was off. It was actually one of the most stressful vacations I had ever been on because I was torn between trying to relax and spend time with my family and the duty to my job. I justified it by saying to myself that I was at least having some fun, but it actually ended up being worse than if I hadn’t taken vacation at all.

This is not a job for humans.

You got used by your employer.

They owe you comp time equal to the length of your "vacation". You deserve that and should not hesitate to ask for it.

She sounds dedicated but hardly "great". In my mind great employees don't need to spend 100 hours working any week, let alone 7 months in a row. That's a death march. There's only 168 hours in a week.

Once you hit full burnout, you'll realize that you don't really have a choice, unfortunately. You will have to stop. Whether that means quitting depends on your situation but, in any case, you won't be able to continue on your current path.

>And until I have enough to retire, I have to keep grinding.

This is the trap that pushes us into burnout. By definition, it happens when we get to a place where we're making enough that retirement (or other financial goal) becomes an option on some timeline we think we can stomach. Then, we worry that the cost of improving upon our current situation (or even replicating it) is too high. So, we settle into a game of essentially trying to outlast the misery. In reality, our quality of life is so miserable that it's simply not worth it. We recognize the problem, but we convince ourselves that we don't have a choice.

But, the premise itself is an illusion. There are always other options, some of which are far less costly than we imagine (and certainly less costly than destroying ourselves). It sometimes takes walking away from the burnout situation to recognize our full option-set, so we get stuck in a loop, the confinement and stress of which adds to our burnout.

One way out is to simply say to yourself, "I can no longer live this way" and intenralize that it's really not an option to continue. You will then be able to see new opportunities for change, as well as assign the proper cost to making those changes. In other words, you'll start to gain the perspective you need to move forward.

You will BREAK. You will be unable to think. The think no work. You no work. Not be fix thing today. Or tormorwo. blah.

Plenty of people in this HN post who are flirting with this. It's a natural outcome of motivation so strong that you'll push yourself to the limit, without flinching or weakening. I don't know where everyone else gets that. Childhood stuff? Social conditioning? Most people don't have it that bad. Most companies aren't SV unicorns.

Success on the grand scale, rides on the back of people like this. Some of them don't break, and some do. If you do, you will break. Not your will, not your motivation… your MIND breaks and you can't think. And then it's the months or years of down-time. You burned out.

Exactly. This is 100% what I'm referring to. It's not that you'll just be exhausted and perhaps less efficient, but be able to power through it. That's kind of the pre-burnout stage where you can dial it down and still manage. I think people who've never experienced full burnout think this is what it is.

But, burnout is beyond that. Your brain just won't function--won't obey--and there's no willing your way through it. If you can, then by definition it's probably not burnout.

While burnout seems to manifest as what we'd think of as a mental state, there's very much a physiological component to it.

I'll suggest that, historically, this is part of burnout and their brains are already not functioning/obeying, but it's because they're in the process of doubling down on the motivational state that will end up breaking them beyond functioning. Nobody wrecks themselves just because they're such Pepsi achievers, so I'd have to count that 'charge harder at the brick wall when it starts to hurt' as equally part of the burnout syndrome. Otherwise, people would stop :)

I hate this so much. I spent three months leetcoding and doing mock interviews to pass the interview and get hired into a FAANG company. After deciding to leave the company after a few years, I went straight into interviewing instead of doing prep first thinking it would be a breeze. I bombed. I could tell from my interviewer's faces that they were questioning the validity of my resume due to how badly I was doing.

I eventually went on to get hired by another company that asked me to solve a small problem prior to the interview and discuss my approach, which went very well. I couldn't bring myself to go practice whiteboarding binary search again.

If your work is remote, perhaps a change of scenery might suffice? I've been working from Albania, and with timezones, that basically means I get to go to the beach in the morning, then start work at 2PM-10:30PM.

Unfortunately I'm not worth getting paid that much, so my statement isn't a humble brag or anything, it's a realistic observation that my role + work isn't special and I shouldn't be making this amount. With rest/vest I will likely never get this high of a salary + equity package again.

In that sense I feel like I'm currently at my maximum earning potential even though I'm a mid-level engineer. Plus going back to leetcoding? Pfft.

Thankfully, most public companies don't seem to have management that will look at your vesting schedule and try to abuse you maximally. I'm really not sure why, they probably should be doing that.

My actual choices are to labor aggressively in the hopes of some day entering the investor class that doesn't need to labor for survival, or to do less labor and hope socialism builds me a safety net before I run out of funds.

If there's another option, I'd like to hear it, but I'm already pretty far down the capitalist route.

Also, the pandemic has really shattered any illusion that we could all work together to achieve any sort of universal good, which probably makes capitalism a better bet.

Take a regular job. Try the best you can to find a nice position so you don't need to hop too much but basically the point is to find a good company that you can have fun at and still feel valuable. And if they try bullshit you don't care because you have all those dividends and you probably don't even need most of the salary.

To me at that point the salary and steady CV would be reassurance against bad stock performance. The dividends are reassurance that I have to take absolutely zero abuse at work and can even use that to make life better for the rest of the employees by being able to speak the truth from a position of financial security. The position fills the hole in life that would otherwise show up soon (sure, take a year for traveling the world or whatever but chances are you won't make it through a full year at a time anyway. Maybe contracting is best, schedule wise.

That's pretty much the plan, but you lose me after that.

> The position fills the hole in life that would otherwise show up soon

The purpose of every life decision that I've made so far is to avoid ever having to work a job again again. I don't understand how anyone can "have fun" or "feel valuable" due to employment. Nobody would be there unless they were being paid for it, because all those coworkers were not there before they started getting paid (excluding interns, but that's also an oppressive dynamic).

The only data point I have is that school sucked while I was there. People told me I would miss it so much when I got older. They were very wrong. School sucked and was a huge waste of time. College was also a huge waste of time. I don't miss any of it at all.

The only thing that makes my career not a waste of time is that it will provide for a future where I can pursue my own interests without threat of hunger and homelessness.

I recognize that my position is considered extreme, and I'd like to be convinced otherwise. The only argument I ever hear is "oh you'll be so bored, you'll see, you'll come back" and it doesn't make any sense to me.

If I make it through a few more years of this, I'll find the answer and report back :)

I personally do not miss school at all either. I miss some parts of university for sure. And not _just_ the party parts ;)

As for work, I have phases and those seem to corroborate what "people say" about missing work. What I mean is that on a vacation for example, if it's long enough, I sometimes want to "do" stuff again instead of just being on vacation. And I don't mean I want to be back at work work specifically but yes I do get "bored". If you think about it, why do the billionaire sons and daughters throw parties all the time and such? Probably not because they have a fulfilling life otherwise.

Now when I say vacation, I don't have slack on my phone, I do not check work email and everyone knows they can call me if things get dire but nobody has ever done so. I know this is in stark contrast to some other folks on here that worked 4 hours per day on their "vacation".

Personally I want to make a difference in how people work. Both now and also if I had millions of dollars. So both now and in that case I would want to provide a good work environment and get rid of things like BS deadlines, "do this by EOD or else" and such stuff. With millions in the bank I could be much much more frank than I already am. Of course I'd take much longer vacations and work less.

My current workplace is actually pretty good in many aspects as to the fun at work part and it is fulfilling to build stuff that lots of people use. Our stack for the most part is awesome as is the dev experience (best I've had so far but maybe there are better ones I just don't know yet). Of course there are parts I hate and that a few million in the bank would totally turn the tables on vis a vis 'fix this BS or I leave'.

YMMV but yes please do report back :)

There's always another possibility: you might die. And then what would happen to the poor work?

But my family, who needs my financial support, would be in a much much worse position.

I'm completely serious.

My post you're responding to was a little dramatic and really just a response to the idea that I cared about whether the actual work gets done. I just care about my family.

Terrible way to look at it. The saying “recharge your batteries” is pretty appropriate here, you’re making an investment that when you return you’ll be more productive in the long run.

And further behind…further behind what exactly? Some artificial deadline or some arbitrary release date? That’s not your problem, if management doesn’t factor in people’s vacations that’s on them. Push back a little, get a backbone, and say “no”.

Would that really be so bad? If software dev is burning you out then why try a different career and a cheaper lifestyle. Or simply a lower-pressure job and a cheaper lifestyle (there are plenty of companies that don't do leetcode interviews).

I burnt out at my last job in March of 2020, and that savings I was building up to hopefully one day retire is gone, and that's as a person with no true dependants, minimal bills, and a very frugal lifestyle. I haven't found work since. I took 1 step forward, and 1 step back. This was also true of the previous time I burnt out in 2016; I didn't end up finding work again before I lost my apartment and had to live out of my car for a long time.

Know the warning signs. Leave/change jobs before you destroy your career like I apparently have.

You get one chance to live your life, then it's suddenly over. One chance. Do you really want to squander an opportunity like this because you think something worse might happen when you retire decades from now? I don't think someone with the worldview you just described will ever have enough to retire.

I truly hope you do something that makes you happy tonight, even if it's something small.

Then you won't be (thoroughly) burnt-out. One of the hallmark sign of burnout is cynicism and lack of motivation. You won't want to open leetcode, and you won't care if you never, ever wrote another line of code for the rest of your life. You will be done. You get to this stage when you're slightly burnt out and push yourself over the edge, such as by leetcoding. Giving your mind time to recover is the only way to recover from a burnout - if you're still able to put in work or leetcode, you're not burnt out.

It's true that there are always things that need to be done. But vacation does help. A lot. It works on people by the same principle as the burn-out does, as long as we allow ourselves to be drawn in, redirecting and focusing our strong attention onto the vacation context and details.

Does a vacation solve the latent issues in the office? Unlikely. But it can give a stronger chance at finding courage to move on to better pastures with less of a collateral damage or personal injury in the process.

Vacation helps, so does the personal/sick-time. A culture of banking (or shaming for taking) the PTO is outright traumatizing and usually a good indicator of an unhealthy team/organization.