Burnout is awful, but this post seems preachy and out of touch.
>It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact. Your profession involves hard mental work. You work at the limit of your creative, analytical and problem-solving abilities. You think and read outside of sessions to improve your craft. You bring your entire self to the task of healing someone’s trauma, figuring out what’s holding them back, or whatever. Now imagine it was all completely pointless.
What part of this doesn't apply to every other discipline? Plenty of people feel that everything they do is pointless. Plenty of people spend their entire mental effort at work.
The Hacker News crowd has a higher than average fraction of people who think they have to never turn off and always be doing computer science work even when not at work. That correlates strongly with burnout, but that's not a programming thing, that's a personality type. Go outside and get some fresh air. Every day. Stop staring at screens 24/7. That can't entirely prevent burnout but it helps a lot.
I think IT being exempt from overtime is part of the problem. Nurses for example see a direct increase in wage when they work extra, and many lawyers bill by the minute.
But I think the biggest thing is that programming is a craft, and many programmers think of themselves as artists. As an artist it is heartbreaking to see your creations tainted and then discarded by corporate politics.
In my experience, devs who take more pride in closing tickets than coming up with elegant solutions are less susceptible to burn out. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but they do tend to have many hobbies. They don’t lose sleep over shipping some spaghetti code they copied from stack overflow without understanding.
They just treat it as something to get out of their way so they can get to the things they actually enjoy.
At first glance this seems like a healthy attitude (and probably is)
On the other hand this spaghetti stuff usually comes back to them in form of new (bug) tickets or even worse on-call alerts. Then they (or some other poor soul) has to deal with it again.
It's a false dichotomy. Software engineering skills and workaholism are independent axes. There are people who work 80 hours a week and write poor code. There are amazing coders who go home by 5:00 on the dot and spend their evenings with their family.
If a product is successful, eventually the tech debt price will have to be paid, but that tech debt is just as often (more often, in my experience) generated by "rockstars" burning the midnight oil to ship a prototype than "bad coders".
I think it applies to an extreme degree in programming - but probably in eng. & STEM fields generally as well. Something about having to care a lot about very small details, and especially when the big picture is not something you particularly care about. But yeah, I don't have any experience in other fields so maybe it's not that unique - I guess it was driven mostly by the experiences I've had with people not getting it, and being frustrated with me that I wouldn't "just work a well-paid coding job for 5 years".
>It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact. Your profession involves hard mental work. You work at the limit of your creative, analytical and problem-solving abilities. You think and read outside of sessions to improve your craft. You bring your entire self to the task of healing someone’s trauma, figuring out what’s holding them back, or whatever. Now imagine it was all completely pointless.
What part of this doesn't apply to every other discipline? Plenty of people feel that everything they do is pointless. Plenty of people spend their entire mental effort at work.
The Hacker News crowd has a higher than average fraction of people who think they have to never turn off and always be doing computer science work even when not at work. That correlates strongly with burnout, but that's not a programming thing, that's a personality type. Go outside and get some fresh air. Every day. Stop staring at screens 24/7. That can't entirely prevent burnout but it helps a lot.