Ask HN: Do you get lazy during burnout? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you get lazy during burnout?

19 pointsbosch_mind19 comments

I'm just now starting to realize I'm very burnt out. However, I'm still very interested in tech, but I think I'm completely burnt out on my team and morale is very low causing me to feel very demotivated to work.

I'm an experienced dev. What have you done in positions like this? What has helped you get out of the rut? I have hobbies and friends outside work, but the lacking motivation at work (which consumes 8+ hours of my day-to-day life) is making me feel depressed and worthless. Has swapping teams within your company been a good move? Have you moved externally to resolve the issue?

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IMO burnout has complicated emotional sources. You can experiment with working less transferring teams or what have you but those are really bandaid solutions. What you really ought to do is get into therapy with someone good and try to understand the emotional causes of your burnout. Once you understand them, it may become much more clear what you could do to improve.

What you're describing is not laziness.

Burnout reduces your maximum productivity.

Working to the full extent of this reduced capacity, even if it is a reduced output compared to your ideal capacity, is not laziness.

You are in fact working at 100% capacity ... which is hardly lazy.

Calling this laziness is just playing into the bullshit corporate power games that drive people to health failure.

Burnout is, truth be told, a dead-end... You studied, dreamed of working on projects, wanted to gain experience, create something of your own, become independent, and earn income from your brainchild - be it a game, utility, program, or something else. However, in the end, you realized that years were passing by, and the project to become your own boss didn't materialize. The fear of losing your job instills panic, as your brain at a cognitive level calculates that you've literally spent too much of your own time on learning and working for someone else. You've sold a considerable amount of your time to others for a coin, and now you find yourself at an impasse. Yes, this is life at 40+. Even if you become an encyclopedia, your time becomes cheap because the time of young, ambitious people is considered precious. It's like being charged printer cartridges while you're already an old printer barely printing. So burnout is the result of selling so much time that doing something for yourself to take a break and generate income, becoming your own boss, has slipped away. You didn't become a genius because you exchanged everything possible for money, and there needed to be a balance. Thirty percent of the income from your sold time should have been saved for your own time to work on your projects instead of squandering it!

I haven't really found swapping teams or companies to be particularly effective. Within a company, often every team has the same basic tools, workflows, and problems that come from the top.

I guess you need to really analyze what isn't working for you, and then try to fix that. In my case, I still like the programming/problem solving aspect, but I have no interest in scrum calls, sprint planning, elaborate frameworks and build pipelines, and all the other pervasive meta-work.

I think my burnout will persist until I can get away from that, possibly my changing career tracks altogether.

Laziness Implies not having a 'valid' reason to do some work. I think of being burned out as being 'drained' by cognitive / emotional load to the extend that your (hormonal, emotional, cognitive etc) system is continously out of whack; which in turn affects your ability to work.

Discomfort, disinterest, boredom etc play into this of course.

That said, why not change things up if you feel so bad? make sure to include other measures to help your mindstate (exercise, vit d, therapy, social life etc). Don't see it as a single problem and one-time fix though. Wether you are burnt out or not, it's worth doing what you can in selfcare.

No. If I’m burned out I go until I’m turned into ash.

I spent the last 30 hours getting something to work. I took a couple of walks, cooked some food, but kept going back to the problem.

Now that I fixed the issue I’m feeling down because tomorrow I’m going to jump back into the fire to take on the next problems.

I have no other choice. I love it. But this is how it is.

Sounds like you are burning yourself out rather than you already being burned out.

Swapping teams or changing job is always better idea than trying to push through the burnout if you don't see it change anytime soon. Also, anything above 8h on a regular basis is a bit too much and it works until it doesn't.

You can suffer from depression and procrastinate. Procrastination is an emotional response.

Was solved for me by getting fired, but I lucked out and my career improved significantly because of that event. Hope you find a path forward, you will survive.

I think that achieving small victories is the best way to overcome this burnout period. Until you get that "Yeah, I did it" moment. It'll just keep dragging.

Cut off from your work, don't even think about it, and start again.

You have internalized the disrespect of management in that "laziness" is bad.

When you get injured, you have to rest to recover. Burnout is kinda like that but there's no blood, scabs or physical pain you can identify.

Either find a way to re-adjust your workload, or find a new team that treats you with dignity and respect. As someone who is 4+ years into a burnout / recovery journey I can assure you that you will NEVER feel better in an environment that is hostile.

People are not honest about their negative behavior and if you try to confront abusers they will gaslight you into thinking you are the problem. If you are beaten down enough you will not be able to fight back against this even if you are smart enough to outwit them.

Watch peoples actions, try not to let their words distract you.

You are not lazy your heart and soul have been injured. Be compassionate to yourself or you will never heal.

Have you tried working no more than 8 hours a day?

Swapping teams can sometimes help for a little bit. But within a couple months it's back to the same burnout for me.

This is the same for me. My case was internal transferring from a engineering division with solid background to a newly created division of a different domain. Things turned out to be very different from what I had previous imagined.

At least now I know that, at the end of the day, burnout can only be fixed by other means.

I don't know. I'm convinced burnout can't be fixed at this point. Or maybe that's because this is regular burnout mixed with autistic burnout.

I've read that it takes _at least_ 3 months of complete withdrawal from what was causing the burnout to fully recover from it. I imagine if you throw autism into the mix, it's probably longer than that haha.

Sometimes it feels like the only real solution is to go back to school and get a degree in something that's not related to tech at all. Or go live in the woods.

How do you define laziness?

Yes that’s a key sign of burn out.

To be fair, laziness isn’t but being unmotivated is. But there’s more to it than that and everyone seems to just make up their own definition of burnout when they aren’t happy at their job.

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and

reduced professional efficacy.

https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...

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