from Hacker News

The Reality of Developer Burnout

by kenneth_reitz on 1/5/17, 7:00 PM with 176 comments

• by zoeysaurusrex on 1/5/17, 7:50 PM

  > Not only that, but I found myself censoring my own private thought processes, in the silent comfort of my own home, because of the public opinion of people I follow on Twitter.

  I deleted my Twitter account because of this. I realized it was an empty echo chamber of inaction. If anything you say can be interpreted in a way that the hivemind can destroy you over, they will do it, even with incomplete information and little to no proof.

  I've determined that the key for me is to limit the inputs. My inputs now are a few cultivated social sites (this one, one or two tech sites), books, and podcasts.

  In my opinion, feeding my mind properly has lessened my feelings of burnout. If you have the choice to feed your brain digital junk food, don't be too alarmed when it starts taking of too much space, like fat.

• by paulcole on 1/5/17, 8:02 PM

  > It happens to everyone that writes code all day long

  More like "It happens to everyone."

  I know this is a developer-focused site, but this isn't a problem unique to people in software.

  An old joke, "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar."

• by alexmingoia on 1/5/17, 8:15 PM

  I speculate that burnout is more psychological than physical. Ultimately, I think it stems from the shame arising out of the realization that giving 110% instead of 70% at your job accomplishes little but making things harder for yourself. A software engineer doesn't get more money giving 110%, and if they work to finish something quicker they're just rewarded with more work.

  Often engineers (being human) will want to do a good job, give 110% on an important project, and when its over and their pay and work hours are exactly the same, they get angry with themselves for giving 110% instead of the bare minimum. They have this "I just wasted a month of my life because I'm a fool" feeling that completely zaps their motivation to do anything.

• by matmo on 1/5/17, 7:55 PM

  The worst part for me was going from being a "rockstar developer" on the team to having to explain why I suddenly can't meet the overly ambitious deadlines handed down from above due to anxiety, depression, panic attacks and extreme insomnia.

• by Humdeee on 1/5/17, 7:44 PM

  I've been burned out twice. The first and deeper of the two was right after I graduated years ago. It made the whole process of going straight into the workforce bittersweet, as I was mentally not ready to muster the energy to endure the rigors of professional development on-boarding for a new grad. I managed, but no where near at a potential I could of been. A brutal semester of final projects and endless nights had left me somewhat poisoned, so to speak. It caused the recuperation of my mental and physical state to be much longer (over a year) than if I took a 2-3 week vacation like I should have done, I imagine. I've always taken this as a likely scenario for a new grad when being brought on within a company.

  The second, like the author, was when I was gung-ho into a new technology and went at personal projects endlessly for a solid 12 months before I came up for air and took a breather, with similar but more superficial effects than the first burnout.

  I regret these mistakes, and I've learned the hard way to do work in moderation. However, I am not an entrepreneur for these very reasons, and I simply don't want that lifestyle for the long-term. I'm hoping my health will thank me 30 years from now.

• by coldcode on 1/5/17, 7:35 PM

  If you are developing software as a life, you don't have one; if on the other hand you are developing software for fun, you are having it; if you are just developing software for money; leave it at work. It's hard to be buried 100% in software and realize the rest of life is more important.

• by relics443 on 1/6/17, 1:05 AM

  TL;DR I experienced massive burnout after ridiculous working hours and a broken contract

  I experienced terrible burnout around a year ago that I'm still working to get over.

  I had taken a pay cut to join a startup with the promise (contractually) that I receive a raise to market value + bonus after 12 months. The latter 6 of those months were spent working 16 hour days ramping up to a massive launch. There were multiple times were I was in the office for 40 hours straight. Throughout this entire period I was locked in and producing top quality code.

  A few months after launch I approached my boss about the contractual raise + bonus. After blowing me off for a few weeks I had a meeting with the president and CEO where I was told that I would not be receiving either because I was not coming into the office by 10 AM. Not only that, but they told me they didn't appreciate the amount of work I put in, nor the fact that I had barely seen my family and friends in that the period because "no one asked you to do that." Mind you, our CTO had quit with 4 months to go until launch so I had taken some of his responsibilities, and I was the sole developer on Android, and one of two for the backend. All the while the feature requests kept pouring in.

  Within a week I was bedridden, and I stayed that way for the next 3 months. I've been slowly recovering since then, but I'm not sure I'll ever be the same again.

  I know I could've sued for the money, but it was the lack of even a basic appreciation that did me in.

  Some people have told me that I have no one to blame but myself. I sort of agree with them, however, I know that if I would've gotten my raise and bonus I would've been fine.

• by madmax108 on 1/5/17, 8:27 PM

  A lot of my friends working in the industry have limited interest in coding (or computer science), but look at it solely as a job... something that guarantees decent financial freedom to pursue other goals.

  For me, it's the opposite. Since I first played Super Mario on the NES and wrote my first line of C a decade ago, I've wanted to have a career with computers. But that means I never get to switch off. If I'm not working on something cool at work (and no, I'm not in a dead end job... In fact love my job and team), then I'm at home trying to code something awesome (Was just setting up a DCGAN when I saw this post).

  I have no financial worries and should technically be living the good life, but I always feel that if one day all computers in the world shut down abruptly, I have absolutely nothing to do... for work OR for fun. And when I got close to burning out a year ago, the hardest thing was to find something to do.

  The route back involved calling people I hadn't spoken to in years, Reading (and smelling) a dozen books, Quizzing and quite a bit of travel. It was hard at first, but since getting back, has provided a much clearer view of life!

  So please, plug off for a bit. Don't wait till you start hating yourself/your life. Life is about so much more. :)

• by walrus1066 on 1/5/17, 8:15 PM

  I think the key is to not put pressure on yourself, and don't allow other people to do so. One person can only do so much, you can't make a baby in 5 months. Work a stable amount each day, on tasks in descending order of priority. I never work past 6 pm, and never work on weekends. If a deadline isn't met, it's the fault of the people that set the deadline.

• by gardarh on 1/5/17, 9:38 PM

  A few years back I had a short interaction with Kenneth Reitz. I sent an email about some issue in requests and got a reply within a minute telling me that the issue had been fixed in a release published a few hours prior.

  Considering how hugely popular requests is I imagine my message was just one of so many he answered on day to day basis and he did all this without really needing to do any of it.

  I guess I understand how he and other people in similar situations get tired of it all after a while. For whatever its worth requests is an amazing project and has made my life easier in my personal and professional hacking.

• by cossatot on 1/5/17, 9:17 PM

  One of the amazing things about software that we all write is how well it integrates with many other aspects of life, particularly (though without a doubt not exclusively) intellectual pursuits.

  This is, of course, why it pays what it does: Software for software's sake pays about like math for math's sake, with the same people paying.

  But unfortunately it seems that despite the deep integration with other facets of work and life, most professional developers seem to basically write code 80-100% of their time (including associated activities like meetings etc.). Far fewer developers are also domain experts (or at least domain enthusiasts) and spend, say, 30-50% of their time coding and the remainder working within the domain or on integration.

  I wonder if this separation between the coders and the domains contributes to burnout. Maybe it's more economically efficient (specialization and all that) and we all like our abstractions. But having a lack of meaningful contexts to switch to, i.e. eating ice cream for every meal for lack of broccoli, can't be great. Directly gaining the benefit of the software should also help with perspective, motivation and an appreciation of the work invested.

  But maybe it's too hard to find people who can fill what are effectively 2(+) roles in given field? In what areas other than science/engineering do people actually do this?

• by bioapparatus on 1/5/17, 7:39 PM

  Not sure how I should feel about this, reading a post about no longer reading posts, while I should be writing code.

• by Animats on 1/5/17, 8:07 PM

  This is not developer burnout. This is Twitter burnout. "So, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter" he writes, which apparently fixed his problem. That has nothing to do with development.

• by kaffee on 1/5/17, 10:22 PM

  > So, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. Every single person. I stopped paying attention to tech trends and reading hacker news. I went into publish-only mode.

  The "publish-only mode" is a great, pragmatic solution to this problem. We need some sort of revision to the Tao of the IETF: "Be conservative in what you send. If you have time and energy, be liberal in what you accept."

• by SadWebDeveloper on 1/5/17, 9:31 PM

  I solve developer burnout by playing videos games and paying for hookers. Alcohol only causes more depression.

• by Perceptes on 1/5/17, 11:28 PM

  I work in software and also run some pretty active open source projects, so I worry about this happening to me. I've felt somewhat burned out, or felt close to a more serious burn out, on a few occasions. What has helped me is to remind myself that ultimately I don't owe the open source community anything. I do it because I enjoy it, and want to create things for people to use. But if it's creating stress, I take some time off, spend a few weeks playing video games or spending more time with my partner, and that in turn reminds me that the world does not end when I stop programming for a few days. In other words, I haven't stopped, I've just slowed down, and participated in free time open source development with better moderation.

• by altitudinous on 1/5/17, 11:37 PM

  This describes me well, today, right now. I have dev'd software my whole life, chucked it in to dev apps, have been successful, I _love_ developing apps but for the last 4 or 5 months I can't do it, sit and write code - I don't want to do anything to do with writing code. I can't stand that I have to sit in front of a keyboard to do anything these days - even research a non computer related activity! So this is a real thing and I'm happy that others experience it too. I interviewed for a casual customer service related role yesterday simply because there are no keyboards involved and I have the time!

• by JTenerife on 1/6/17, 2:45 AM

  I've had several periods in my career where I "felt" like I just couldn't get things done. Some weeks ago, I faced panic attacks and anxiety for the first time of my life due to unmanageable workload combine with nastiest politics going on a my workplace.

  This actually changed it for me. I still feel fear that I'm broken permanently.

  So, yes, another anecdote. Everyone just needs to really take care by managing themselfes. Working fixed hours only instead of trying to get features by the end of the day / week has done did it for me.

• by foota on 1/5/17, 9:42 PM

  Last spring we had a few developers leave from my student development team at my university and I had to do 30 hour weeks on top of school in order to finish our projects.

  My summer internship was a much needed break but even now it's hard to go back to work.

• by freework on 1/6/17, 12:14 AM

  Its much easier to avoid burnout when your projects are popular. Whats really hard is to avoid burnout when you put hundreds of hours of effort into a project that only you yourself uses.

• by zachrose on 1/6/17, 6:42 AM

  Does the Gary Bernhardt quote about ice cream come from one of his talks or something? (I thought I'd seen them all.)

• by teabee89 on 1/5/17, 8:08 PM

  It was an interesting read but the solution reminds me of pyramidal "scams" (of course the scam part is where the analogy breaks): the way you avoid burn out, is by delegating it to others and once they too get burned out they have to delegate too. Or they quit and you have to find someone else or let the project die. I'm not disagreeing nor judging, just sharing the thought.

• by LyalinDotCom on 1/6/17, 12:39 AM

  am I the only one who read this and didn't really take anything new away? yeah social media, like anything else is not always a good thing. okay, sure... but i'm sorry developer burnout happens for a lot more reasons then stated in the write-up.

• by Terr_ on 1/6/17, 6:21 AM

  Huh? This sound more like social media burnout than developer burnout.

  I expected something more like maintaining a big ball of mud or dealing with unrealistic expectations or struggling against the inertia of a large company.

• by profalseidol on 1/5/17, 10:18 PM

  If we all just listen to Epicurus. And of course, Marx too.

• by q-base on 1/6/17, 9:33 AM

  In my experience a huge part of burnout also comes from deriving all your sense of identity from one source. If you only identity yourself as a developer then you will probably sooner or later start questioning whether what you do is all that meaningful. You will also be seriously exposed to criticism as questioning your abilities becomes questioning of your worth as a human being.

  You are also someones child, maybe a father or mother and only one step away from being a pianist, boardgamer, hiker, traveller or whatever.

  Identity diversification.

• by cjbenedikt on 1/5/17, 10:01 PM

  Interesting subject. When WWII was over women in the UK and Europe who had lost their husbands often had to rebuild their homes, look after their children and had to put food on the table each day. All that after having lived/suffered through 6 years of war. However, none ever mentioned burnout except perhaps when referring to their homes...just saying

• by rdavl on 1/5/17, 9:05 PM

  > Burnout is, unfortunately, a very real phenomena in software development

  These people sound like they are bomb technicians not software developers...

  > "I'd rather do anything else than this right now" — even though writing software is one of your favorite activities in the world.

  So? Does this mean you have burnt out? How does this compare to jobs like algorithmic trading or mission critical software?

  Burning out over stress of writing a web site? I call BS on all these burn out blog posts.

  You have other problems in your life that make you depress, coding might be little part of it but I don't see what levels of stress can you be under while doing mostly non interesting jobs.