I ended up for a while just "caring less" about work while still getting my work done and putting all of my heart and soul into my hobbies (mostly Muay Thai and Running). Ironically, I think the time of putting engineering on the back burner has re-ignited my interest in it again. So it's not like you have to "care less" forever.

I've come to realize that I think life is cyclical like that and we need to be able to drive our energy towards new and interesting things, or even our families and the burn out is a signal you need to turn your energy towards something else. Your craft will always be waiting for you on the other side.

Sometimes separation makes the heart grow fonder, even in tech.

This is the right and timeless advice. Indifference and equanimity towards your craft and output is the way I came out of my burnout. I can't believe that listening to your body has become a hated advice these days. Are we so deep in the pit?

Work is a tool to enable your private life. Not the other way around.

So, totally in agreement. I don’t live to work, I work only to live.

They've failed to do so, now that you're taking care of yourself, consider that you're doing their job.

How the manager responds to you having a burnout, however, is what’s important. A good manager will manage to accelerate your recovery, and come up with some plan to prevent it from happening again in the future.

I also believe that in the end, stress management is something that in the end, it’s best you take your own responsibility for. Learn to say no, learn to communicate about your limits, and learn to walk away / push back in case those limits are crossed.

I went through a few burn outs through various phases of my life, and almost always it was a combination of multiple things at once. While a manager can help, in the end I am responsible for my own mental well being.

I wouldn’t want to be a manager precisely for this type of thing, the ability to absorb stress / pressure from within the organization and relay it in an orderly fashion to your team.

Working now at a startup, there is little to no management and I find myself wishing for good leadership.

6 years ago, a COO once told me, "Employees are donkeys. You use a carrot and stick. If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."

It seemed like such stuck up, pretentious 'advice' at the time that I ran far away from that social group. But parent comment made it click - people act like donkeys for a reason. And your comment made that click too, once the whole group acts like donkeys, they're treated like one.

A COO is an Employee too. Therefore he is a Donkey as well :)

But to go back to the parent post, what the COO said "If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."

Maybe some COOs run small businesses they started where they call the all shots. But most big company COOs have a lot of obligations and have a different carrot and stick for the C-Suite. And a lot of them didn't start the business where they became the COO. So, yes, still Donkeys.

He did call managers "donkeys with sticks", though. Just because they manage, as long as their motivation is solely tied to compensation, they're still no better.

Because it is pretentious and stuck-up.

Any non-trivial endeavor requires humans working together as a group to achieve it. Reducing the humanity of the group you're working with to "donkeys" is horrifying, and the best executives are the ones who understand - and respect - their people.

I don't want to run my own business because I want to be able to drift along and switch off after work. If I did run my own business then it would be better than anybody with this attitude.

Having your own life outside of work and sticking with it can help the burnout and dive into new skills that might lead to a new career.

Never give up your creative hobbies.

Cheers

There is also little need and sense in killing yourself, if you work for yourself.

I'll chime in here with more of this.

1) Make sure all work related correspondence goes via specific email aliases, logins, etc, etc. And turn it off when away from work.

2) Probably, get a personal phone, and just turn off your work phone after hours.

One way to burn out, is to never, ever have work, and work related issues, out of your mind. Unless you are on-call, there is no reason at all someone needs to reach out to you after hours.

And one needs, absolutely needs to not think of work after hours!

Of course people will burn out, if every waking second is filled with work thoughts! Just glancing at status messages -- thinking of work.

Get rid of it. Decouple 100%, completely, totally from work when not there.

I think there's a nuance in this that's easy to be missed. It's possible to care about the quality of your work but not care about the various forms of insanity in your management chain.

I think a lot of people fear that not caring means you turn into a totally useless person - that extremely unproductive person in the company that everybody hates but management and HR refuses to fire.

Not caring doesn't mean you have to become that person.

> I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.

100% this. Care about the quality of your work. If you work for a place where that's never possible due to constant unrealistic expectations, start looking for another place to work.

I've actually found that some managers like employees who don't care so much because they need much less care and feeding. People who care too much also complain too much. And even if you do good work, constant complaining can overshadow that.

Yes, exactly! I've found this to be the main cause of my own burnout, caring too much about the background noise and not focusing enough on the parts of the job that I actually enjoy and do well. When I stopped caring so much about all the chatter in slack and jira, all-hands meetings, etc.. and spent all my time at my desk closing tickets assigned to me, and nothing more, things got better.

> People who care too much also complain too much.

I agree but I've also witnessed other devs burn out who just decided everything was their problem and tried way to hard to please everyone with a problem. Rather than complaining they imploded.

It sounds funny and weird, but benign neglect is sometimes an appropriate response.

I don't think it's "care less" but I think it's "care appropriately for 40 hours a week."

The concept of "quiet quitting" is a shameful, panicky fraud perpetuated by the power holders in the industry that see their power slipping. "Quiet quitting" has been known as "work to rule" or "fulfilling a contract." My paystub says 40 hours. My original contract says nothing about overtime. I'm not quiet quitting, I'm doing my !@#$ing job.

By being STRICTLY limited to 40 hours, I can do my job at full strength, providing consistent results and quality. And then I'm not so burned out that I go home and do whatever I please with my life. Sometimes that's more coding for me!

My job is a side quest, not a main quest.

Even if it were your main quest, I think the strategy you outline is worth following. Going all out is what causes burnout, and that applies to whether you are working for yourself or for someone else, and also whether you are working a job or working on your passion.

A career is like an ultra marathon -- maintain a sustainable pace, and run with people you like to spend time with.

I could retire now, if I had to, but I hope to do this for another three to five years. It is just far too interesting and fun. I had an older coworker that worked full time until he was 74. He also just enjoyed the work and the people he worked with.

It is a marathon, and change is constant, which makes it more interesting than a lot of careers in the long run. Plan for the long run, and make room to live your life all along the way.

Over time, I started putting more time into properly decompressing from work at the end of the day so I didn’t feel stressed about the next day.

I get burned out from time to time still, but it’s much more “in the moment” burn out vs systemic burn out.

Is it?

I always took "Quiet Quitting" to mean, "Lets see how long I can do nothing until I get fired", not "Work to Rule" or "work your pay", or whatever.

I've seen this "Work 5 hours a week sporadically answering slack and see how long till they notice I produce nothing" before, and it's surprising how long I've seen people get away from doing basically 0 work and continue drawing a paycheck.

I think it's largely because most companies don't properly manage a remote teams. It happens when they don't understand how to properly set results-based expectations and deadlines for remote work.

But it's also a huge middle-finger to your teammates who may still care about their work and job, and having dead-weight on the team is demoralizing.

So I imagine the percentage of role-playing in r/overemployeed is less than 50%.

That's a non-trivial number of people, and I'd bet if you work for a large company, there's a non-trivial of people doing this now. (See the thread about Experion firing contractors with multiple jobs[1])

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33198708

If I may: consider it an achievement to work for 60 minutes with heavy focus. Sincerely do so, and even reward yourself with some sort of token for it to represent the effort you did. Use larger tokens for milestones. Over the weeks, these tokens will help motivate you to pull yourself out of your slump and feel good about your work again

I will write an article series on why this works one day, but for now, give it a try? Tiny wins do a lot to help burnout

The absolute simplest version of this is just pomodoro timers with a tally

Finding a good balance and pride in the 1/3rd of the life you spend, without being scornful is worth while. Build a good robust career, become an expert, have passion and perseverence, foster discpline; make a career that rewards you. The world isn't set up against you as people on HN and media would like you to believe; the world is amazing and there are plenty of things to do that can sustain you and your family.

Being apathetic or scornful of "work" is a terrible long term strategy.

Get a copy of Adam Savage's Every Hammer is a Tool: https://www.amazon.com/Every-Tools-Hammer-Life-What/dp/19821...

You'll find better advice than this depressing apathy on HN and places like r/antiwork.

Advice presented by others in this thread would lead to worse spiraling effect where bad work ethics would lead you to be worse at mastering things which would lead to even worse work ethics. Sustaining a career for decades requires careful attention to balance between work and life, ideally if both are coalesced (which many people here would gasp in horror). Even after a burnout.

I'm on year 17 in the industry and year 5 of "care less" which has really turned into "care very little, if at all". I work for a FAANG and while I procrastinate like crazy (btw I have very bad ADHD, so factor that in), I still tend to complete my work on time or ahead of schedule. I do the bare minimum though and I don't give a damn about the job at all beyond that. I haven't put in an honest 40 hours in years. I try to cram all my real work into a 2-3 hour block of time each day. Somehow my managers are still very happy with my output and I still get offered promotions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My sole reason for working is to survive and provide for my family. I put most of my passion and energy into hobbies instead. All of this makes it so I don't dread work every day; it finally feels like I have equilibrium in my work-life balance now even though I still do on-call rotations and work for a massive company.

Funny thing is all of this started from me randomly finding an "e-book" called "The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to The Office" by Venkatesh Rao. It's a somewhat exaggerated take on things, but it got me to re-evaluate my career and life. Free to read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

I tend to do this too. Thing is, without the down time I couldn't do it consistently, so I'm really still putting in a full day of work.

Shit, I can't consistently do more than 3-5 hours of "real work" each day.

My wife just started a WFH office job, after years in a career where she spent a lot of time on her feet, working very socially and responding to things moment-to-moment (though not without planning in the mix). I felt validated in my capacity for staring-at-a-screen work when, after a couple days, she remarked to me that now she understood why I felt brain-dead in the evenings—she finds this way more draining than what she used to do, even though on-paper I think her old career should have been harder in many ways.

The fucking glowing screens are powered mostly by sucking out energy from the user, I swear.

I used to be the sort of person who would stay at work until I got to what felt like a "good" stopping point in what I was doing. If something wasn't working, and seemed like another 30 minutes might fix it, I would often do it. Of course 30 minutes often turned into 3 hours.

Now I'm much more likely to just go home at the end of the day. I don't really care what fires are burning, they will be there tomorrow and nobody will die.

The real question you're answering is:

"What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?"

What did I do?? I did not take vacations or time out. I just changed companies, and made sure the job has variety, and a lot of customers, and asked for a good raise. All the symptoms disappeared after 1 day. Like magic.

I feel I am more respected and more critical in their team. If there are no customers, and they pay you a little, you feel worthless, and treated as a second class dev. Start looking outside, you may find a good opportunity

I know people will dismiss this because of the reputation of the industry but I worked in video games. Teams were small (10-30 people). I was not just a cog but had a roll that let me feel the games I shipped were my project. I'm not saying I led the project but the way I might be proud to show off some art I made, I was proud to be making the game. It was mine, not just some item on a jira ticket. I rarely hated going into work. It was like being paid to work on my own project and with cool people I liked collaborating with.

Then I switched to FANG. Now I get paid TC of 2x-6x, I get 2x/2.5x more vacation. I have zero crunch. Lots of other perks. And..... I hate my work life. I have no interest in the work. It's not mine. I don't feel any attachment to what I do. The team is large so no sense of ownership.

Of course, maybe finding work you enjoy is as rare as being a rockstar. Maybe I just got super lucky. But damit, I miss enjoying work to the level I used to.