I still ‘suffer’ from similar mid-career burnout that culminated 10 years ago. I’ve been successful since, but to I’ve had to move to roles where my work product was much more transactional, visible, and delivered in smaller chunks in order to remain productive.
I’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing this — and I still don’t have great answers — but here’s an internet-friendly numbered list of random strategies and perspectives I’ve had success with:
1/ be open with your boss. They may be able to offer strategies to help.
2/ set short-term goals and force accountability. For me, that was making promises to my manager and asking them to hold me accountable at regular intervals (micro-management as a service).
3/ if it works, it’s fine. I had a lot of my self worth bound up in my ability to deliver clever hacks. I’ve come to the realization that most of my useful output has been simple, obvious, and quite ugly.
4/ the only people who care about your code are you and the peers who have to engage with it. I want to write clever code, but (at work) I want to read really, really dumb code.
5/ I’ve moved from caring about tech to caring about business impact to caring about what that impact has on humans. This helps make decisions about code easy, since in my work humans never care about the framework or elegant code unless that framework or code causes them to have a bad time.
I’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing this — and I still don’t have great answers — but here’s an internet-friendly numbered list of random strategies and perspectives I’ve had success with:
1/ be open with your boss. They may be able to offer strategies to help.
2/ set short-term goals and force accountability. For me, that was making promises to my manager and asking them to hold me accountable at regular intervals (micro-management as a service).
3/ if it works, it’s fine. I had a lot of my self worth bound up in my ability to deliver clever hacks. I’ve come to the realization that most of my useful output has been simple, obvious, and quite ugly.
4/ the only people who care about your code are you and the peers who have to engage with it. I want to write clever code, but (at work) I want to read really, really dumb code.
5/ I’ve moved from caring about tech to caring about business impact to caring about what that impact has on humans. This helps make decisions about code easy, since in my work humans never care about the framework or elegant code unless that framework or code causes them to have a bad time.