I'm a self taught dev with 2 young kids. I've always had a healthy approach to work, but now I'm feeling quite a lot of pressure to learn new things on my own time, whether to make sure I'm prepared for the interview circuit if I get laid off, or to patch my skills that are needed at work.
I'm starting to feel burnout creep in, getting an hour of study in the morning, taking care of family, and then working 8 hours.
I appreciate your insight.
Your brain only has so many truly 'on' hours in a day, and it's already less than 8. Trying to burn even more in the pursuit of complex knowledge isn't just robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's eating the seed corn and wondering why your harvest failed.
It's a scary thing to realize, and can be hard to stick with. But limits are real, and respecting them gets more work done in the long run than not.
This is so important. I have a 3yo and wife, I currently work for a series-A startup - It's incredibly easy to do things out of hours, answer messages, train, lab things up, etc... But at the end of the day that is a part of my career.
So except for when I'm traveling for work, I don't do a GD thing past 5pm, unless i choose to. When I choose to, it's likely because a lot of my team is in IST time zone rather than EST.
When you're a family person, your job is to be there for yourself first, your family second, your other commitments after that.
I have a weekly 4:30p friday call. Would i rather have that at 1:30p? Yes. But i've chosen to work remotely in Ohio instead of move to Cali like the last four companies have asked. So I take that friday 4:30p call.
But you better believe that i check out until monday after that.
During the week I'll take odd hour calls for my counter-parts in IST, but that's nearly entirely out of courtesy than necessity.
Take care of things in the following order: 1. You, as a human, holistically 2. Your family, spouse first, kids second 3. Your work 4. Everything else
It's reduced a huge portion of stress from my life by doing this.
The hedonic treadmill exists in all countries, stepping off it is a personal priority and discipline regardless of where you live.
There’s a few other expenses and some cons of living here but some research and YouTube videos will help you figure out if it’s right for you. And of course you can ask me :)
My experiences were similar, however I must add when your day job is not related to skill building activities, you may find your "on" time to be greater.
Still, be careful.
In my case, my day job was manufacturing and I was an effective prototype mechanic. Loved the work, hated the pay, so...
I used a percentage of my free time learning more computer related things.
When the time was right, I was ready to take the jump.
Landed nicely, and have no regrets.
Now, later in life I find the dynamics above are in play and we all ignore them at our peril.
Real talk: the gender wage gap exists due to misogyny. That's it.
However, on the point of last names, I feel the urge to point out that I personally know several, very devout and traditional, catholic couples who kept their last names in wedlock.
On a slightly different note: Hammurabi's name means literally "his uncle is a healer" (related to Arabic عم (ʕamm) meaning paternal uncle, and the latter part to rabbi).
I my mind there's a mildly funny* movie where Hammurabi, the person who created/codified the foundations of our law, someone remembered for 1000s of years... was an insecure overachiever. "You conquered the Elamites? And Larsa? Oh, that's cute my boy. Now get a real job like your uncle who is a doctor!"
* (for me, my bar is low)
Cultures share history but the whole point is that they’re not continuous. You specified the pre-Christian era, and there have been many significant changes since then which any common definition of the term would consider discrete boundaries.
> Also, I've never ever heard anyone say that wives need to take names of their husbands, because the Bible says so. Is that an American thing?
It’s not specific to the US but there are certainly American churches which have strong opinions on this point. One thing to remember is that these things aren’t just the literal text of the scriptures in whatever version of the Bible they use but also the collection of interpretation and custom around it, and people have a history of interpreting scriptural text differently based on a position which they want to support.
Now is the fact women take over the majority of the childcare and are more likely to take off to raise their children misogyny? Depends on your definition and perspective.
Yes, given that:
- In conservative circles, there is a strong expectation that a woman's chief job is to be a mom,
- Many businesses are lead by conservatives, and
- Many states (at present) are run by conservatives and enact policy to make this so (anti-abortion laws being the biggest example)
Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Many of us developers justify our sky-high compensation packages in today's remote-first working culture by the "value" that we provide relative to the profit margins produced by our work.
If this is true, then this should apply equally apply to working moms since them being moms doesn't take away from the value they bring to the table. Moms don't stop being great programmers once they bring children into this world!
However, if we're going to use _availability_ as a compensation-affecting performance metric, then dads should also be paid less since, in an ideal world, they are just as involved in parenting as moms are.
Given that being paid less due to being a parent is de facto illegal in the US, then I think that any argument for suppressing women's wages is either uninformed or in bad faith.
(As an aside, we don't and won't have kids, but I am a huge advocate for equal-length parental leave; nobody is at their best when they're working on two hours of sleep because the baby's always crying through the night.)
> Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Whether a women wants to enter motherhood is irrelevant to her compensation. But how much time, effort, and experience she brings to the job is relevant to her compensation. And despite there being plenty of mothers who bring more of those things to their job than their childless counter parts, most people cannot bring as much time and energy to bare on work as they could if they were childless given how we currently divide up childcare. If you're on partner track at a lawyer, you're expected to bill 2000 hrs a year which means working 3000. It's very hard to continue to work 3000 hrs a year while raising a kid and the lack of billable hours will effect bonuses and promotions. How could it not?
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
Then the social security cut gets distributed regardless of preference to who raised the kids who now pay the taxes.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons, offload almost all the cost on moms then socialize the taxed gains.
I have never had a leetcode-style interview in 40 years. (I may have had one such question, maybe - hard to remember for sure.) So, no, it is not required at all stages.
Disclaimer: I'm in embedded systems, which is very different from FAANG.
But some of the internal postions do it differently. My favorite was a mock code review on a PR that had intentional flaws. Then you'd call put what was wrong and how to fix it - not just pure code but also requirements, tests, commit messages, etc.
LeetCode is different though. The rating and stuff. Even the interface... I still don't know what it's doing behind the scenes to run the code and feed inputs and what those inputs are. Believe it or not, this LeetCode interview wasn't my worst internal code screen. I once had one that HR said to bring my laptop and use any language I wanted. When I got there, the manager handed me a Mac (which I've never used), told me to use Angular to create a page with a table (hadn't used Angular at that point), and told me to do it in Webstorm (most teams were still using Eclipse at that time, so no experience here either). I managed to Google my way to a working table, but cut the interview short when he wanted me to style it. It's and internal posting. I clearly know the basics and got something working, even in the worst possible interview scenario where I didn't know the tools at all. Surely I can learn the rest (this was a midlevel posting, not even senior).
On the opposite side, I usually skip teams for their repo so I can review them. Are there test cases built out? Do they have east to follow code design, or descriptive comments? Do they have a normal level of abstraction, or are there multiple layers of interfaces for not real reason? I recently declined a position because the team was building a UI, didn't have a CMS, didn't have any real rests, and the code looked like a bit of a mess. It didn't help that the languages (Go, React) were completely new to me, so I wouldn't be able to make an impact on improving these issues.
Some of the folks here don't see alternative options when FAANG compensation is some integer multiple of what the rest of the industry has been supporting for the last 40+ years, and I don't entirely blame them for that. I'm not surprised when some later find themselves miserable and feel like they're trapped by golden handcuffs and insufferable bureaucracy, but I understand how they got there.
It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? It's basically the top 1% speaking. And you can't tell me that the other 99% have miserable lives.
> unless your partner is also in tech and is ok with not being a stay at home parent.
Stay at home parent is a choice, and a pretty expensive one. One does not have to choose that and can still live a comfortable life. Many women (and let's face it, we're unlikely discussing the man staying at home for the next 7-15 years, eh?) even prefer not to interrupt and/or basically end their careers because of parenthood.
Americans often look to Europe, claiming that these things are so much easier there, which might be true, but at least as much is it a matter of personal choice as well.
Yes, to some extent the asinine expenses of people like me are a result of various choices we made, but that's assuming those choices had any really realistic alternative at the time. And now I'm stuck.
To my pleasant surprise, the HFT is more rewarding (not just in comp) than the FAANG was. At least for now, or that's what I keep telling myself.
Caveat: I don't live in the Bay Area, though the Boston area isn't exactly cheap.
The interview is about finding the obvious resume frauds and seeing if they can communicate their problem solving process, not finding a genius that’ll invent new algorithms
I also have a hunch I've gotten easier coding questions when an existing team member referred me to hiring for their own team.
My family wouldn't understand that, so I play hookie.
Twice a year, I schedule a vacation day that I don't tell my family about. I act as if I'm going to work like normal, but I spend the day at the art museum or sitting in the park reading, or something else that doesn't involve anyone else.
My big thing is being able to protect my sense of autonomy, even when I'm responsible for things or obligated toward others. If I literally can't take a day away from my phone or without telling people where I am, I've found myself in a risky space emotionally. So I'll occasionally leave the phone at home, or go hiking from sun up to after nightfall alone with the phone off, only maybe telling someone (including my spouse). People need their own space.
In addition to my previous comment, burnout seems to happen when you're working a lot on something you don't really control the outcome or reward of, along with the presence of some force that gradually erodes your sense of autonomy. If you feel like someone else is the arbiter of not just most of your energy, but all of it, over a long enough period of time, you'll grow to resent yourself, those people, and the work.
It’s a frustrating position to be in, and you can feel quite helpless.
In my experience, it’s less about “do only what’s asked”, and rather “say no”.
I.e. explain “I can do X, but if I do that then Y will suffer, and Y is a priority”. (Y being another company priority, or even your own mental health). Stated in these terms, it’s easier to negotiate your time with your coworkers.
I did this but I was surrounded by coworkers who were stupidly running straight into burnout themselves and said yes to anything.
Well, upper management felt I wasn’t doing enough in comparison and pressured/harassed me. Ultimately, I were the first to burn out.
Of course, in hindsight, I should have left way before it happened, but when you are in, you have no hindsight. Sometimes you can’t grab the surrounding toxicity before being hurt.
I transitioned to software development in the age of ~30 and am based in Austria, Europe. The way I did is was to work on a project in my free time, and use that to a) LEARN, b) demonstrate that I can aquire skills myself and c) can stay motivated and push through. I wanted to show that I'm worth being given a chance. It worked flawlessly, I got hired on the first try.
Just try it, what's the worst that can happen? :)
I've got the feeling good software engineers are a bit more rare here, though, and Whiteboard interviews are not a common thing either.
And your sanity is only yours to keep, protect it at all cost.
But, I did all that and more in my 20s as IC and 30s as a leader. I helped 3 startups go up and now 2 of them are unicorns (That was pure luck but doesn't change my view).
My point is, there is a time for everything. I've hired a couple of JRs at my startup nowadays, and I tell them: what you lack of experience, I want you to cover by will.
Guys at 20s want to eat the world. The energy and motivation is amazing. Those are the years to run and hustle like a demon. However, I would never do that in a big Corp environment (like Goog, IBM, MS, etc) because you will only be abused by middle manager.
But as 1st, 2nd or 3rd engineer in a startup. I'll do it all again.
It was a revelation for me when I realized I could tell people “no, I’m swamped right now” and they’d be “ok, no problem”
That sounds like a good philosophy for work-life balance. I sometimes work evenings or weekends, but it might be a bit different since I don’t work at a company but at a university, so my work hours are a bit flexible. I have had burnout before, especially during Covid home office.
A big improvement for me was:
- Regardless what’s going on, have at least one day per week when I don’t work at all (usually Saturday) and never pull all-nighters (no work after midnight);
- Stop syncing work email to any mobile devices, and close the mail app on my laptop outside standard working hours. (This does wonders for destressing.)
- Track the amount of time you “try to work” (e.g. how long you have your work laptop open). Note that this is not the same as tracking e.g. “focus hours”. Keep an eye on it and don’t let it accumulate too much per week.
Why are you working during the weekend and after work hours?
This is my reason for burnout, opposite of your example. There's a thin balance doing more work because you enjoy, and doing it because managers are pushing you to do it. And now that I JUST do my job and what I'm asked to do, I have lost a lot of the drive that I loved about being a developer and engineer, making life kind of dull. Weird thing is that it is the job description that put me into this place, with no room for growth, and the search for new jobs has been dry, year after year of searching.
I traded my sanity for a big chunk of my life's enjoyment. That ain't great either.
If your "do the minimum" is having complete control over a module and implementing features as slow as you can without pissing anyone off too much, you're going to have a great time.
If your "do the minimum" is picking up the bare minimum number of Jira cards in a sunshine and roses "teamwork makes the dream work" team where everyone is responsible for every line of code but nobody knows more than 5% of the codebase, your mental health is going to go straight down the toilet, because nothing is more stressful than working with over-complicated code you didn't write, and the less cards you pick up, the less code you're going to understand.
Personally, I think autonomy has little to do with it and lacking autonomy is dangerous to pin burnout on because it puts the responsibility on the person, when burnout is often the result of a system (broken or exploitative).
Sure having autonomy can help cope or delay burnout, but I don't think lacking autonomy is causing burnout singlehandedly.
So I have always had such a nice (some would say epic) work-life balance as far as "hours" and "availability" go. After a (forced) break from work, and exploring health related help professionally, I came to know I was clearly burnt out. I was told high number of "hours" working or "visible or quantifiable work load" don't necessarily have to be present for a burn out. There are other factors at work which cause stress/etc and they are often more insidious than the typical "load" (not to reduce the ill effect of the typical load^). And were those signs abundant in my life and work!
It was quite shocking. I always used to think that with my kind of work-life balance at least burn out was never going to be a problem.
^ It was added by them - those typical load/etc almost always cause mental health damage so I should not consider them okay all.
"Will the fight for our sanity, be the fight of our lives?" - flaming lips
I don’t know why this is a revelation to so many people.
Who cares about you more than you do? Nobody — especially not anybody at work.
Maybe it is a revelation for those who haven't been taught to say no outside work?
I was told to be quiet and obey growing up, why would anyone expect me to be equipped to stand up for myself as an adult after that?
Because you are equipped to do it. It’ll be a new experience for you but it shouldn’t take you long to figure out that it’s in your best interests.
A PM at my company told me a few weeks ago "if you finish your work early, we can always find other things for you to work on" and I told him "you understand that my incentive is not to do that, right? If working faster only gives me more work to do, then why would I work faster?" He told me that fast workers are repaid with bonuses, promotions, etc., but I don't think most people believe in that kind of upward mobility anymore. I certainly don't
I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work. I stopped taking on more work once I got my stuff done. I would do exactly what a Sprint called for. Nothing more, nothing less. If I finished early with my tasks, I would stretch out the time and just tell the scrum master I was close, but not done yet, but always finished on time. I basically just did what was required of me. I wasn't out to impress anybody, I just became "Mr. Dependable" on any of the teams I worked on.
This was the approach that changed everything.
Now, some ten years later? I'm never too high or too low. I still do the same thing, I still just do what is asked of me and that's it. 5pm every night? Laptop gets turned off. Friday at 6pm? Laptop is off for the entire weekend. I turn it back on right before my meetings on Monday. Separating my personal life from my work life with a hard delimiter was paramount.
I found out that if you don't protect your sanity and your own well being, people will take advantage of you and your time and it will never end. Once you break the cycle and get that time back for yourself? You'll make sure you never willingly give it to someone else ever again.
Protect yourself. Protect your sanity. Once you lose it, like OP said, it's very, very hard to get back.
I hope this helps someone else struggling to break this cycle.