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Comment by t0mbstone | Hacker News Reader

What about people who build tons of successful things and get win after win after win, but are still feeling burned out?

For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything in software development. You just have an endless backlog of tickets in JIRA. If you get something done faster, you don't get any reward or payoff for doing so.

I once finished my entire week's worth of planned work in two days and instead of being praised for it, I was chided for underestimating my sprint capacity. Did I get to take the rest of the week off? No! Of course not. I was expected to pull more tickets from the top of the backlog and just keep grinding.

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Completely agree with this - I was totally burned out with work because I kept getting and finishing projects and all that would happen is I would get more projects.

I was burned out but then my boss dragged me in a room and told me I was doing a great job, that they appreciated me and that they know I prefer to work in evenings but get there at 9am every day because that’s my contract, so they said I didn’t need to do that in the future and can arrive whenever I want because they know I work hard enough and will work the hours.

That conversation was enough to completely reset the burnout. No doubt it will come back, but a little appreciation goes a long way.

A never ending backlog of work to be done. No rest. No jogging. Not even intervals/ladders (sprint a while, then jog a while and repeat). Just sprint. Sprint. Sprint. Until you burn out and collapse.

Well said. The agile/scrum methodologies in practice pushes people to do this: sprint, sprint, sprint.

Rich Hickey on sprints (30-second clip): https://youtu.be/zPT-DuG0UjU

I think your last paragraph is the key here. You “got the win” without actually getting the win. Instead of praise, reward, recognition — you got more work.

I think the point above is that the win needs to be material beyond your own recognition.

Are there companies that would let you take the rest of the week off in that situation? If so, shouldn’t they also make you work overtime to finish some work that you underestimated?

Isn’t the trick to just work at a sustainable pace, day in and day out, and celebrate the wins along the way?

All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.

Yes, having worked in a FAANG I actually enjoyed the fact that you're measured in a somewhat standardized way. After delivering enough impact I usually took a step back and chilled for a few weeks. Didn't take vacation, just arrived to the office to chat with friends and play ping pong. Sometimes when I felt like it, I continued to grind towards the next expectations level for the cash bonus, but most of the times it wasn't worth it and I just preferred taking a rest.

Vacation is still important even with a sustainable pace. Personally, when i’ve managed teams i’ve always included vacation as part of our 1:1 career talks. Especially with new engineers. If people aren’t taking vacations it’s a dealbreaker to me — taking a real, long, no calls while out vacation is to me as core to professional engineering as fixing bugs and shipping features.

> All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.

Sometimes, even the week off doesn't mean less work, because the few weeks before the vacation you have to work harder to compensate for your coming absence.

This seems horrific to me. Why do people let companies do this to them? Let me guess.... US health insurance? (i:e the need to always be employed to be covered)? A former (US) colleague I had, every year after 9 months he quit the same job to go round S America on his motorcycle. Then after 4 months travel he got hired back. They couldn't manage without him. Eventually they started saying he wouldn't be able to keep doing this and return next time, so he smiled sweetly, said "OK" then 4 months later said "do you need anyone?" and of course they snapped him back up. Part of why he was so good at his job was having a decent break and recharging. In fact arguably he was far more use to his employer by doing this, than what they "wanted" him to do, i:e stay there all the time only 2 weeks annual vacation get burnt out. Sometimes people have to turn to this sort of extreme behaviour to have any sort of life outside work, in the USA at least. I suppose he risked no health insurance for 4 months, or bought some. Maybe now he's older that wouldn't work. Well, please people, look after yourselves.

The grind is eternal, so adjust your pace accordingly, IMO.

I do think that many orgs don't have any sense of pacing when it comes to software dev. So, don't set expectations too high for an org if they don't have PTO in place to compensate for hard work.

Is that really surprising you could not just chill for rest of week?

Yes and no. Am I surprised that a human resource extracting paperclip factory would stive to optimize every last minute of the employee's time? No I am not. Do humans need rest and rewards, to feel special, loved, significant, and appreciated, and do they work better for longer periods of time when they are getting all that, and is it a supprising waste of long term value for short term gain? Yes!

Yes humans need rest. Which has nothing to do with situation in which estimates turn out too low and thus estimated work is done faster.

I don't see how it should imply that employee don't have to do anything rest of the week. Likewise, if estimation is too small at the beginning I don't pull 80 hours long week nor I consider it effective.

Had the complain was about overall lack of rest or overwork, that would be understandable. But it is not about that.

It is about expectation that original estimate is measure of how much you should do and if the task turned out faster, you can watch movies rest of the week.

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