The Anonymous Moose

On Burnout

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Moose

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Search Twitter for burnout and you’ll find threads like this:

Search HN for burnout and you’ll see over a thousand results and stories like this one.

Google it and you’ll find articles like this one that talk about causes and how to avoid them.

It’s probably a problem in every industry, but I can only write about what I know, and that’s that it’s a huge problem in the tech industry. Everyone I work or know in the industry talks about being burned out.

Some leaders encourage PTO to help avoid burnout:

https://twitter.com/toddmckinnon/status/1405732561104433155

I’ve been in the industry since the mid-2000s. I take a normal amount of PTO every year (for an American), but I fight burnout on a daily basis. I think a burned out day looks different for everyone, but this what it looks like for me sometimes:

  • Focusing on tasks is hard. I write a decent amount of code and I usually enjoy it, but some days I can’t keep my IDE in focus. Every idea that pops in my head gets Googled, or I spend too much time trying to find music (or a movie) to fill in the background noise. Sometimes I’ll even start one noise-making thing on my laptop just to start another on my phone. Ever listened to YouTube and TikTok at the same time?
  • Getting to the office is hard. Some mornings I’ll linger before coming down to my office. I’ve worked home full time since H2 of 2019 and removing the commute aspect helped with burnout immensely, but sometimes I’ll still avoid coming down to the office
  • House chores become more enticing. Doing dishes, vacuuming, taking the trash out – things I wouldn’t usually look forward to doing suddenly get done.
  • Lunches are long.

I’ve noticed a week of PTO is helpful, but the burn out feeling usually comes back as soon as I get back into the routine of standup meetings, looking at tickets in JIRA, and the endless amount of time we waste on Zoom. Sometimes that’s a day, sometimes it’s a few days. Rarely though is it more than a week.

For me, the best thing is to embrace those burn out days. Reducing my output for a day isn’t the end of anyone’s world. I think it’s fair to say that when you’re feeling tired, rest.

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