Advice from a once burnt-out programmer

http://www.miketec.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/9-Sure,-Change-Jobs!.html

by anuraggoel • 18 years ago

136 52 18 years ago

For me, the key is "turn off the creativity spigot". I always thought that creativity is one of those lovely positive feedback loops: do more, have more ideas, do more. However, this only works for so long.

I thought that trying to code a new site and write an album at the same time would work. It didn't. My ability to write songs just disappeared.

However, I took Christmas off from creativity and now I'm flying.

derefr• 18 years ago

I have a blog; I find that I only end up posting to it when I avoid Reddit and HN for a while. Not because they're distracting, but because I comment so much that I end up with nothing, personally, to say on my blog; I just feel like I would be repeating myself. All my little ideas get bound up in the context of someone else's article rather than bound together in the strange seed of imagination that writing without a set topic requires.

jballanc• 18 years ago

I find that very often the perfect cure for too much "thinking" work is an awful lot of physical work. I started feeling a lot better about working on my Ph.D. when I got a second job stocking shelves on the night shift.

russell• 18 years ago

I found carpentry to be a good revitalizer, building decks, fences and the like. Long hikes work. I cant turn off the thinking, but I can usually point it somewhere else.

aschobel• 18 years ago

Ditto. Bike rides, washing dishes, fixing stuff around the apartment are all nice escapes from the cerebral world.

michaelneale• 18 years ago

Not quite the same as that - but I now live on a property that has a large amount of gardens to take care of (otherwise fire/snakes and general pestilence will ensue). its not every day, but its an epic effort when I do tackle it - but I view it as a) healthy excercise (on top of what I normally do) and b) somehow good for me - I do enjoy doing it and look forward to it.

scott_s• 18 years ago

I'm a Ph.D. student. Including the time spent getting my Master's, I've been in grad school five and a half years.

If it wasn't for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and lifting, I would be lost.

Training BJJ and MMA is physical, skill-based and social. I train with people who don't care if I miss or make the next paper deadline. They only care that I show up, work hard, and be friendly. Lifting by myself has a meditative quality.

Most people go through a week without ever exposing themselves to real physical exertion, and I have no idea how they cope.

lallysingh• 18 years ago

Also a Ph.D. student, Karatedo myself. My sensei's on my committee :-)

timr2• 18 years ago

This is a strange piece of writing. On the one hand, it's telling you that burnout is real, and that you should be careful to avoid it. On the other hand, it sound an awful lot like "there are worse things in the world than sitting at a cushy desk for 10 hours a day, whiner." The latter seems to undermine the former.

One of the best jobs I've ever had was manual labor: I was a bellman for a hotel. My primary job responsibilities included lifting heavy luggage in 100-degree heat, being yelled at by cranky guests, and running around non-stop for 10-hour shifts. What made it great? I was almost completely autonomous, and I got paid a little bit of money every time I did some work. There was almost always a direct consequence when I did good work, and nobody told me how to do my job. (My boss didn't even work on the same shift!)

I've worked a lot of much more "comfortable" jobs since that time, and I've had a lot of time to think about why that luggage-monkey job was so much better than nearly all of the intellectual gigs I've held. So far, I think it boils down to a simple point: there's no worse tyranny than being told how to think. No matter how much luggage I lifted, I was always free with my thoughts. But when you work in an industry where your thoughts are your primary output, it's inevitable that someone (or something) will try to consume all of them. When that happens, you're on a path to burnout.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

The latter seems to undermine the former.

I don't read it that way at all. He's addressing burned-out people. When you're burned out, you find yourself believing with all your heart that your job is the worst job in the world. He's cautioning against that.

He's saying that desk jobs aren't actually all that bad, provided you know the risks. Avoid burnout, and know its warning signs, and you may be able to sustainably appreciate the virtues of your desk job.

homme• 18 years ago

Well said. How offensive is that, that your thinking has been conscripted to someone elses vision?

Another issue may be the social aspect of manual labor. I worked on a plastic assembly factory, with a more natural mix of male and female coworkers than any tech job I've had.

The pay and shifts sucked, but at least it felt...natural. Work your shift, grab a brew, and go out with a few of the mates after the gig. Good times.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

> The pay and shifts sucked, but at least it felt...natural. Work your shift, grab a brew, and go out with a few of the mates after the gig. Good times.

I had a friend who was a almost-stellar IT career, depending on how you define it.. Anyway, he was doing well by most measures. In his late 20's he quit to become a ski instructor and train to compete in cross country.

He had a great time, got to do some physical work -- however, the main thing was that it made no difference to his career.

I think if you said to a lot of people - take 2 years out, climb mountains, be a landscape gardener, whatever - they would think this would be career suicide. The thing is that's rarely the case, and from the evidence I've seen it's actually the opposite (i.e. people who come back are well regarded).

Pretty much anyone I talk to late in their career (60+) usually say they wished they'd taken 1, 2, 3+ years out to do other things.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

What timr wrote above perfectly put something into words, that I've been trying to explain to myself for years.

And just like that, quitting a cubicle job to work manual labor while coding at night is no longer even a tiny bit bit scary.

quantumhobbit2• 18 years ago

Office Space was prophetic.

timr2• 18 years ago

The pay cut should be a little bit scary. ;-)

joubert3• 18 years ago

"All the terrorists went to Iraq so I had to go there in order to shoot them."

You are an idiot.

compay• 18 years ago

I'm guessing (hoping) that that was tongue-in-cheek.

joubert3• 18 years ago

It didn't seem sarcastic to me; he did join a violent organization, after all.

Retric• 18 years ago

We fucked up Iraq. We replaced an Evil despot with a chaos and now there are terrorists and ethnic cleansing and a whole host of nasty shit. So depending on the time line he could be sarcastic and literally accurate at the same time.

Situation Normal All Fucked Up is a classic military saying and places like Iraq are the root cause of a lot of messed up situations.

fauigerzigerk4• 18 years ago

"Idiot" is a harsh word. But I do agree that his reasoning is pretty hard to understand considering the terrorists only went to Iraq after the US invasion.

Maybe he went to Iraq only later when the terrorists were already there, thinking whatever the reason for them being there I want them out (which is a worthy goal in my opinion).

david9273• 18 years ago

What terrorists went there after the invasion? How do you define a terrorist? As someone who shoots at an American?

chops• 18 years ago

That was a fun read.

Doing the same thing over and over again for years at the hours the writer says he was working is sure to induce burnout. But if you change even the industry you're writing for and/or the type of projects you're working on, as well as mixing some fun personal programming stuff in there, that helps to alleviate burnout.

amix• 18 years ago

I would feel rather empty without coding.

That said, I think it's important to have a life outside of one's job. That way, one can escape to fuel up the batteries. Getting a girlfriend, doing some sports and having vacations is a really good way of preventing a burnout.

swilliams• 18 years ago

I wonder if such an outcome is avoidable if you have a better work-life balance. I like coding too, but I definitely have a line between my job and everything else.

Advice from a once burnt-out programmer

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