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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

>>The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work.

If you are making large amounts of sacrifice towards high risk problems and failing. You are likely doing something wrong and merely backing them up with 'small wins' is not going to help and shouldn't help.

The best thing in that case is to really burnout and quit, to do things that are better rewarding.

There is nothing you are going to gain being stuck in a situation of large sacrifice-zero gain. In many such cases you are likely a victim of office politics, bureaucracy, red tape or just stuck amidst inefficient team mates. Doing small wins and maintaining the status quo will trap you much deeper and cause a far bigger burnout later.

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>>For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc).

Maybe you missed that section of the quote; for me, it rings true. At times I have been in situations where I am sacrificing time for projects that are poorly managed, and it doesn't really matter that I'm doing everything right.

If you AREN'T making large amounts of sacrifice toward high risk problems, I'd say you're doing something wrong.

Startups are a perfect example of this. We see serial entrepreneurs fail spectacularly (see Color), we read about entrepreneurs who kill themselves after a string of failures, and we read all of the time about the new guys and girls who tried their hardest yet never managed to take off. People like to write about "why my startup failed", but they are hurting a lot more than they let on.

Entrepreneurs shouldn't be risk adverse. If you want risk adverse, go work at Google. At the same time, we should understand what it means to live in high risk mode, and learn to recognize warning signs (depression, burn out, loneliness, etc.) in ourselves and others so that a high risk lifestyle can be manageable and even healthy.

You need to strike a balance. I'm not saying you shouldn't make large amounts of sacrifice at something(Not just start ups), but you also need to do move on to something else if despite everything and many attempts things don't work out.

Being stuck in the status quo will eventually make your problem much worse. You will continue much more sacrifices without achieving nothing in the end.

I apologize, I believe I misread your original post as being risk adverse. Absolutely agree with you here though - striving to fail fast is perhaps the one bit of startup advice that is nearly universally applicable.

(Side note: Google's probably the wrong example if you want risk adverse. Projects fail all the time at Google. I would've picked a big company like IBM or Cisco, where I've heard you tend not to try at all.)

The other side of risk adverse isn't apathy. At a big company, if you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, chances are you'll have a long and profitable career. Fresh out of school, a smart and motivated engineer could expect to make say $750,000 - $1,500,000 over five years working there, with almost no personal risk. Over their career, at present value, probably pushing to $10 million.

If you start a company, however, your returns vary extensively. If you're smart and dedicated after five years you might come out broke - or even in debt. Or you'll come out being barely able to make the rent. Or you'll be a millionaire or billionaire. As an entrepreneur, your risk five year returns would be somewhere between -$100,000 to $10,000,000+, with the expectation I would guess quite a bit lower than the Googler's.

That's not to say that either is the right choice - mathematically, the big corporation choice will make you more money in the expectation and probably take less of your time. But you know, life's not about optimizing the integral of income over your career.

I'm saying that "At a big company, if you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, chances are you'll have a long and profitable career" is false, at least at Google. If you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, you'll top out at SWE3 with a salary in the low six-figures. Getting promoted to Senior SWE requires selecting the right projects and some degree of leadership and organizational awareness. Getting promoted to Staff or above also requires sticking your neck out to promote some initiatives that may be controversial, and convincing people to go along with you. This is not all that different from the skillset required to be an entrepreneur.

That's why I suggested picking a big corporation with more of a reputation for "doing what you're told", like IBM, Cisco, or even Apple. Google in a couple years might be there, but right now you cannot get to the higher engineering levels without sticking your neck out on an initiative that may be controversial at first.

(It's also true that the risk/reward curve is flattened a bit at Google than at a startup: at Google, you're still being paid a relatively fat salary if your high-risk project fails, you just don't advance. And if it succeeds, you end up with a raise and a promotion, not F-U money [usually]. But this article is about the emotional aspects of failure, not the financial ones, and those are still just as relevant at fast-growers as at startups.)

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