Dealing with burn-out

I've dealt with burnout twice in my life so far, and I'm going to make sure it never happens again. Both were post-crunch meltdowns. The first, when I was just getting in to the industry, and didn't know better. The second, not so long ago, when I should have known better.

The first thing I've learned is that I can't accurately judge my limits. Even if I feel okay and on top of the world... things start to slide. Suddenly I'm writing code so bad, I'm committing code that doesn't even work, but thinking it does, because my brain is in outright rebellion.

Both times, I couldn't code for six months. The first time, I just tried to hide it. I quit my job, and took another. I wrote almost no code in those six months and was paranoid I'd be found out and fired. I wasn't, thankfully.

The second time, I took a few months off work, and requested a change of job for a period of time, so that I didn't have to do any coding. The second time was really bad, I started having panic attacks just looking at code on a screen. I'd start sweating, heart racing. It was horrible.

What I ended up doing for most of those six months at home, was building little plastic robot models. No computer use. Just quiet, methodical, brainless work.

Eventually I recovered, and started coding again. I'm better than ever now, which is good. But I learned an important lesson, which is that working too much is always bad. I know, it seems like a lame ending to this story, but it's true and ultimately important.

I'm experiencing this right now. My productivity at work is dropping to nothing. Looking at the code base is getting harder and harder. Unfortunately, I am under a mountain of debt and am responsible for 3 other humans, so trying something new is not an option. Note to young programmers: please manage your finances wisely and not fall victim to the "they have X, so why can't I" syndrome. There aren't too many fields where you can make the kind of money we do, so don't trap yourself financially--it closes too many doors.

Go to popular bar or night-club and you might be surprised how many burn-outs work there. I know because I was one of them. In addition to your typical starving artists, college student, and part-time model that work in the bar. I worked alongside the worldtraveller who wanted to make some coin before moving onto the next city, burnt-out programmer from Wallstreet. Programmer from SF that was working while his girlfriend was in school, thought it was a good excuse to get out of SF. Post-doc comp. sci who just doesn't want to be around computers for now.

The manager made it point to only higher beautiful people, according to him. But he also enjoyed the company of smart people (less likely to be on drugs) so went out of his way to hire college students and backpackers.

After a few weeks of carrying cases and kegs up and down from the cellar, and partying all night, I was in the best shape of my life.

Alan Watts has a great metaphor for keeping your balance. He says it's like riding a bike. When you start falling on one side, your natural instinct is to turn in the other direction. Of course, if you do that, you fall very fast. The key to staying upright on a bike is to turn in the direction that you're falling into.

The metaphor translates very well to keeping your balance as a human being - go into the direction that you're falling into. In other words, if you find that your body and mind and subconscious is telling you, "I don't want to do X anymore!" don't try to force yourself to do it anymore. And if you find that the message is "I really want to do X" follow it.

Of course, to keep your balance on a bike, you need to pay attention to what your senses are telling you. And to keep your balance in life, you need to pay attention to what your subconscious is telling you.

I agree that it's vitally important to keep burnout in mind when you're the type of person prone to it (I suspect a great many HNers are), however I wonder whether being over-cautious is potentially as, if not more, damaging in some circumstances.

Let's say, theoretically (cough ;-) you're in a job you don't like which is absolutely making you miserable but is actually quite easy in many respects, what if the only way to actually get a job you might like is to work really hard outside of work-work?

The problem is that if you're the kind of person who cares about this stuff, it's worth anything to avoid a life stuck writing CRUD surrounded by people who don't care in a place where even the concept of code review or non-sourcesafe source control is laughed off by seniors (cough again ;-)

It's a fine line to walk in this kind of situation. To me, the key is to have plenty of scheduled breaks, accept + deal with f-ups (i.e. not doing the amount of work you wanted, it happens), have clear goals with smaller goals along the road, etc., and most important of all - do stuff you absolutely love. Nothing is guaranteed to protect you from burnout, however.

A lot of the problem with transitioning from somewhere sucky to somewhere decent is that, in order to actually be up scratch for a job like that, you have to put in a lot of hours in your own time, especially if you don't have a computer science degree and have gaps to fill in.

IMHO, sometimes burnout is just a risk you have to run, though you can certainly work to minimise it.

Um, so, avoid burnout by not doing your job. It's cool that Jacques had that option and all, but how does that really help the vast majority of developers who don't? I'm burned out right now, but quitting my job isn't much of an option either.

Balance. Having any sort of hobby/interest that is physical and away from your desk is more important than you might think. Personally, I keep a garden and do home improvement projects, launching into one of these things tends to break the down cycle. Yours might be entirely different, but it also gives you a fresh viewpoint too. Think of it as a giant university, sometimes the guy down the hall in a completely different domain will have insight into what you're working on. You'll find building physical/meatspace things is not all that different from virtual.

I took up a pottery class this past winter. It was perfect because it surrounded me with people who knew how to take things slow, sit down and focus on the task at hand. It provided the necessary mental shift I needed to not feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day ADHD-like issues of managing a huge project for the first time. I think that if I hadn't taken the class, I would have been more susceptible to burnout.

Labeling this "burn-out" might be a bit harsh. The guy was quite productive ... although he did things in a new field. This kind of change is sometimes very important for a person's mind. I recall reading that Jim Clark (of Netscape) spent an insane amount of time automating his yacht. In Jim's case, some of the non-trivial problems he solved ended up being commercialized. Same thing with this dude ... if he wanted to apply his experience to a renewable energy startup, he can very well make a high-value contribution to society. One final point ... as I was reading the post, I felt that this isn't all too different from doing a PhD :)

Anyone else notice that the symptoms of overwork are rather similar to the symptoms of overindulgence/addiction?

The symptoms (http://jacquesmattheij.com/Are+you+suffering+from+burn-out) are stated to be, sort of, phases.

Anyone speaking from experience: can a burnout be avoided by identifying early symptoms? If so, how?

Energy wise it can also be unhealthy lifestyle: not enough vitamins, Not enough exercise, ... You don't feel it when you are young but getting older you can't get that easily away with abusing your body.

I can definitely relate.

It's been about 15 years since I had mine. I slept a lot, too, and basically stopped all social interactions for roughly two months. Messed me up pretty good.

It's good that it happened early in my professional career and before I had any dependents. I am now able to better self-regulate and have been able to pull back when appropriate without getting in too deep.

But most importantly I learned not to take work so seriously. It's not really all that important in the grand scheme of things.

I'd have to agree with iqster in that it doesn't seem to be burn-out as much as doing something new. He doesn't seem to talk much about the symptoms listed at http://jacquesmattheij.com/Are+you+suffering+from+burn-out although he said he has them (even "if [he] didn't know" it?). Not that I doubt his story or anything, but he seemed motivated enough to build new things and not sulk in depression (symptom #10).

"When you're burned out change, do something that is as far away from what you were doing when you were burned out."

I guess this means he defines being burned out as tired of what you are currently doing, and not burning out on doing something productive altogether. In that case, he's probably right in saying that you should change when you're burned out.

Could it be that the human nervous system just didn't evolve to keep doing the same thing for years on end, and so our industrialized culture isn't good for us?

I've had severe burnouts, and don't want to go through one again. It sucks and it's a waste of time. I've avoided it this far by simply refusing to sacrifice that much. There are some things (e.g. my relationship with my girlfriend) that I will not sacrifice. At 50 hours per week, I expect an explanation. At 60 hours, I want to be paid back in vacation time. If this means I'm fired, I'm fired. Unfortunately, not everyone has this option, but this approach has kept burnout at bay thus far.

It's not that I object to working more than 40 hours per week. Considering the time I spend reading about technology and learning new things, plus side projects-- programming, writing, game design-- I've probably been working 65-75 hours per week on average since high school. But if a boss wants direct control over all of that 65, there better be a damn good reason for this arrangement to exist, especially because I learn a lot more on self-directed work than I do by doing what I'm told to do.

I think this is a great essay. I think motivational crises happen because "work" for most people is psychological monoculture, and we're not built to be that way. I get annoyed when people idealize hunter-gatherer existence, but it was better in one regard: people did a lot of different things (making clothes, building houses, finding food) for work. Specializing for a few years to solve a hard problem is great, but no one's working life should be limited involuntarily to one tiny corner of one discipline, a sub-specialty for which if demand for it collapses, that person is utterly fucked.

If you want to see the desperation of the modern working person, consider what working people do on their vacations: picking their own fruit, hiking, working on open-source projects. They're so deprived of opportunities to actually work by their office jobs that when they have free time, they actually do activities that most humans would consider work. I wrote about this phenomenon here (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/those-who-wor...). It's the fact that their lives are consumed by work-that-isn't-work that makes these motivational crises so common.

Unfortunately, outside of the most innovative few percent of technology startups, burnout is treated as a feature rather than a bug. Look at Wall Street or the mainstream "corporate ladder". It's a war of attrition: wear people down until 95 percent have motivational crises and quit or get fired, then choose the (badly damaged, but still functional) remaining 5 percent to be the next generation's leaders.