This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people but.. care less.
You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today, so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work
as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company.
Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. If you don’t have particularly healthy hobbies, maybe start some. Getting away from your work more and more will make it all the more bearable.
These days work is close to the bottom of my list of concerns, which sounds really bad - BUT - I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.
If you’re burned out this badly I’d suggest it’s your soul’s way of telling yourself “hey this isn’t working for me”. As someone who has been to some pretty messed up depths with the anxiety monster, I’d heed that voice. Life isn’t long enough to stay stuck in a rut like this for any amount of time at all.
I don't think it's "care less" but I think it's "care appropriately for 40 hours a week."
The concept of "quiet quitting" is a shameful, panicky fraud perpetuated by the power holders in the industry that see their power slipping. "Quiet quitting" has been known as "work to rule" or "fulfilling a contract." My paystub says 40 hours. My original contract says nothing about overtime. I'm not quiet quitting, I'm doing my !@#$ing job.
By being STRICTLY limited to 40 hours, I can do my job at full strength, providing consistent results and quality. And then I'm not so burned out that I go home and do whatever I please with my life. Sometimes that's more coding for me!
Even if it were your main quest, I think the strategy you outline is worth following. Going all out is what causes burnout, and that applies to whether you are working for yourself or for someone else, and also whether you are working a job or working on your passion.
A career is like an ultra marathon -- maintain a sustainable pace, and run with people you like to spend time with.
This ^^^^. I am in my thirty ninth year in embedded development, started the year I turned 27. (yeah, do the math) I have strictly limited myself to 40 hour weeks following a severe burnout in the late 1990s.
I could retire now, if I had to, but I hope to do this for another three to five years. It is just far too interesting and fun. I had an older coworker that worked full time until he was 74. He also just enjoyed the work and the people he worked with.
It is a marathon, and change is constant, which makes it more interesting than a lot of careers in the long run. Plan for the long run, and make room to live your life all along the way.
Right on! Do you have any resources to share that you've found excellent such as books or articles? Any projects you've enjoyed? Do you hack with any of the new languages? Do you have a blog? I'm always curious and work in the web space and think this sounds interesting. Thank you!
And definitely do not put any kind of work contact on your phone. If people are texting your private number, ignore it until you are back on the clock, or even consider blocking them. If you're not on the clock, you're not reachable. If they want you reachable, that's called "being on call" and is a separate negotiation involving higher wages and agreed-upon hours.
It’s interesting to see the shift on HN from hustle/burnout culture to wiser takes on work life balance. The startup culture in the Bay burned a hole in my soul at one point with its 80+ hour a week puritan laden virtue signaling.
This 100%. I got burned out by the classic case of working at a startup from pre-seed round. After two or three years or so of working virtually every single day, including between leisure activities on “days off” and almost always “on call” replying to emails and DMs, I just stopped. I didn’t reply at absurd hours, even if I knew the answer or had something to say. I didn’t spend hours outside of work thinking about work anymore.
Over time, I started putting more time into properly decompressing from work at the end of the day so I didn’t feel stressed about the next day.
I get burned out from time to time still, but it’s much more “in the moment” burn out vs systemic burn out.
> The concept of "quiet quitting" is a shameful, panicky fraud perpetuated by the power holders in the industry that see their power slipping
Is it?
I always took "Quiet Quitting" to mean, "Lets see how long I can do nothing until I get fired", not "Work to Rule" or "work your pay", or whatever.
I've seen this "Work 5 hours a week sporadically answering slack and see how long till they notice I produce nothing" before, and it's surprising how long I've seen people get away from doing basically 0 work and continue drawing a paycheck.
I think it's largely because most companies don't properly manage a remote teams. It happens when they don't understand how to properly set results-based expectations and deadlines for remote work.
But it's also a huge middle-finger to your teammates who may still care about their work and job, and having dead-weight on the team is demoralizing.
Can you give some details on where you saw this "work 5 hours a week" thing? I have never seen anything like that in my career. I have seen incompetent colleagues who worked hard but produced less than 5 hours of useful work per week though.
I found out through a friend they had started a new job, and instead of turning in notice, they just rode it out for a few months taking multiple paychecks. Look around on r/overemployed on reddit for a lot more examples of the mindset that does this type of thing.
I'd take what you read on subreddits like this with a pinch of salt. A lot of people like to embellish or flat-out lie to either fit in, sound cool or to provoke a reaction (see "am I the asshole").
:shrug: there's definitely role-playing in there, but anecdotally, I know 2 close friends who did this during Covid and had 2-3 full-time jobs in non-software roles.
So I imagine the percentage of role-playing in r/overemployeed is less than 50%.
That's a non-trivial number of people, and I'd bet if you work for a large company, there's a non-trivial of people doing this now. (See the thread about Experion firing contractors with multiple jobs[1])
That would basically just be “fraud” IMO. Maybe others can chime in but I’ve only seen quiet quitting described as “not going above and beyond anymore. Just doing the minimal job.”
When it comes to health and well being f*ck what's appropriate do whatever you can get away with ... just do not put life or well being of other people in harm ways
>This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people but.. care less.
I think there's a nuance in this that's easy to be missed. It's possible to care about the quality of your work but not care about the various forms of insanity in your management chain.
I think a lot of people fear that not caring means you turn into a totally useless person - that extremely unproductive person in the company that everybody hates but management and HR refuses to fire.
Not caring doesn't mean you have to become that person.
> I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.
100% this. Care about the quality of your work. If you work for a place where that's never possible due to constant unrealistic expectations, start looking for another place to work.
I've actually found that some managers like employees who don't care so much because they need much less care and feeding. People who care too much also complain too much. And even if you do good work, constant complaining can overshadow that.
I think a better way of putting it is: "don't get too emotionally invested". Writing code I often times get emotionally invested in it's success, but with a job you have to create that clear line of "I care, but I'm not emotionally invested". I really want to fix that bug in the system but if 5PM hits, I don't have the emotional investment to keep going into the night like with a side project, I can get to it in the morning.
> I think there's a nuance in this that's easy to be missed. It's possible to care about the quality of your work but not care about the various forms of insanity in your management chain.
Yes, exactly! I've found this to be the main cause of my own burnout, caring too much about the background noise and not focusing enough on the parts of the job that I actually enjoy and do well. When I stopped caring so much about all the chatter in slack and jira, all-hands meetings, etc.. and spent all my time at my desk closing tickets assigned to me, and nothing more, things got better.
> People who care too much also complain too much.
I agree but I've also witnessed other devs burn out who just decided everything was their problem and tried way to hard to please everyone with a problem. Rather than complaining they imploded.
I'm on year 17 in the industry and year 5 of "care less" which has really turned into "care very little, if at all". I work for a FAANG and while I procrastinate like crazy (btw I have very bad ADHD, so factor that in), I still tend to complete my work on time or ahead of schedule. I do the bare minimum though and I don't give a damn about the job at all beyond that. I haven't put in an honest 40 hours in years. I try to cram all my real work into a 2-3 hour block of time each day. Somehow my managers are still very happy with my output and I still get offered promotions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My sole reason for working is to survive and provide for my family. I put most of my passion and energy into hobbies instead. All of this makes it so I don't dread work every day; it finally feels like I have equilibrium in my work-life balance now even though I still do on-call rotations and work for a massive company.
Funny thing is all of this started from me randomly finding an "e-book" called "The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to The Office" by Venkatesh Rao. It's a somewhat exaggerated take on things, but it got me to re-evaluate my career and life. Free to read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
> I do the bare minimum though and I don't give a damn about the job at all beyond that. I haven't put in an honest 40 hours in years. I try to cram all my real work into a 2-3 hour block of time each day. Somehow my managers are still very happy with my output and I still get offered promotions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Shit, I can't consistently do more than 3-5 hours of "real work" each day.
My wife just started a WFH office job, after years in a career where she spent a lot of time on her feet, working very socially and responding to things moment-to-moment (though not without planning in the mix). I felt validated in my capacity for staring-at-a-screen work when, after a couple days, she remarked to me that now she understood why I felt brain-dead in the evenings—she finds this way more draining than what she used to do, even though on-paper I think her old career should have been harder in many ways.
The fucking glowing screens are powered mostly by sucking out energy from the user, I swear.
100% agree. My life used to be all about tech / software engineering, especially when I got started in the industry and was learning a lot. One day I became burnt out and realized my life was so one dimensional, all I could talk about was different tech products and software engineering. I decided to put my work on the back burner and focus on instead trying various hobbies.
I ended up for a while just "caring less" about work while still getting my work done and putting all of my heart and soul into my hobbies (mostly Muay Thai and Running). Ironically, I think the time of putting engineering on the back burner has re-ignited my interest in it again. So it's not like you have to "care less" forever.
I've come to realize that I think life is cyclical like that and we need to be able to drive our energy towards new and interesting things, or even our families and the burn out is a signal you need to turn your energy towards something else. Your craft will always be waiting for you on the other side.
Coincidentally this is how I know what I am made to do. I've stopped programming on personal stuff for months at a time to solve burnout. Yet, I always manage to get the spark reignited, drop every other hobby, and focus on what I love doing. I've lost a lot of friends this way (sorry can't do X, I'm working on a project) but generally people don't understand anyway.
Sometimes separation makes the heart grow fonder, even in tech.
This is the right and timeless advice. Indifference and equanimity towards your craft and output is the way I came out of my burnout. I can't believe that listening to your body has become a hated advice these days. Are we so deep in the pit?
It seems to flow both ways. Management gets burned out dealing with people who just don't care, and they end up not caring about the people they manage.
6 years ago, a COO once told me, "Employees are donkeys. You use a carrot and stick. If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."
It seemed like such stuck up, pretentious 'advice' at the time that I ran far away from that social group. But parent comment made it click - people act like donkeys for a reason. And your comment made that click too, once the whole group acts like donkeys, they're treated like one.
> It seemed like such stuck up, pretentious 'advice' at the time
Because it is pretentious and stuck-up.
Any non-trivial endeavor requires humans working together as a group to achieve it. Reducing the humanity of the group you're working with to "donkeys" is horrifying, and the best executives are the ones who understand - and respect - their people.
For context, it was a talk on HR policies. He retired at 40 after investing in real estate, then went back to work running companies, but was no longer solely motivated by compensation or the threat of being fired.
He did call managers "donkeys with sticks", though. Just because they manage, as long as their motivation is solely tied to compensation, they're still no better.
But to go back to the parent post, what the COO said "If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."
Maybe some COOs run small businesses they started where they call the all shots. But most big company COOs have a lot of obligations and have a different carrot and stick for the C-Suite. And a lot of them didn't start the business where they became the COO. So, yes, still Donkeys.
> 6 years ago, a COO once told me, "Employees are donkeys. You use a carrot and stick. If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."
I don't want to run my own business because I want to be able to drift along and switch off after work. If I did run my own business then it would be better than anybody with this attitude.
I don’t think it’s that black-and-white. Sometimes mistakes just happen anywhere, be it with management of developers or whatever. It’s also highly personal the types and amount of stress each individual can cope with. Burnout also happens across many professions, including the managers themselves.
How the manager responds to you having a burnout, however, is what’s important. A good manager will manage to accelerate your recovery, and come up with some plan to prevent it from happening again in the future.
I also believe that in the end, stress management is something that in the end, it’s best you take your own responsibility for. Learn to say no, learn to communicate about your limits, and learn to walk away / push back in case those limits are crossed.
I went through a few burn outs through various phases of my life, and almost always it was a combination of multiple things at once. While a manager can help, in the end I am responsible for my own mental well being.
Well sorry it feels like that my message is blaming management for that. It kinda does (that it's one of their objective and failed to do so). But it's more to show that you're not care less about the work by taking care of yourself, because it's also in the interest of higher ups that you keep up being productive.
Managers have managers, though. But perhaps they’re expected to be more self-sufficient in this regard.
I wouldn’t want to be a manager precisely for this type of thing, the ability to absorb stress / pressure from within the organization and relay it in an orderly fashion to your team.
Having a good life outside of work is a great goal but I've been lucky enough that the first 25 years of my career I actually fully enjoyed going to work.
I know people will dismiss this because of the reputation of the industry but I worked in video games. Teams were small (10-30 people). I was not just a cog but had a roll that let me feel the games I shipped were my project. I'm not saying I led the project but the way I might be proud to show off some art I made, I was proud to be making the game. It was mine, not just some item on a jira ticket. I rarely hated going into work. It was like being paid to work on my own project and with cool people I liked collaborating with.
Then I switched to FANG. Now I get paid TC of 2x-6x, I get 2x/2.5x more vacation. I have zero crunch. Lots of other perks. And..... I hate my work life. I have no interest in the work. It's not mine. I don't feel any attachment to what I do. The team is large so no sense of ownership.
Of course, maybe finding work you enjoy is as rare as being a rockstar. Maybe I just got super lucky. But damit, I miss enjoying work to the level I used to.
This advice is going to be hated by a lot of people
I'll chime in here with more of this.
1) Make sure all work related correspondence goes via specific email aliases, logins, etc, etc. And turn it off when away from work.
2) Probably, get a personal phone, and just turn off your work phone after hours.
One way to burn out, is to never, ever have work, and work related issues, out of your mind. Unless you are on-call, there is no reason at all someone needs to reach out to you after hours.
And one needs, absolutely needs to not think of work after hours!
Of course people will burn out, if every waking second is filled with work thoughts! Just glancing at status messages -- thinking of work.
Get rid of it. Decouple 100%, completely, totally from work when not there.
I respectfully disagree. Ignoring a major part of your life, that sustains you and your family, might be a luxury for people that get burned out with $450k salaries and have $2M in savings.
Finding a good balance and pride in the 1/3rd of the life you spend, without being scornful is worth while. Build a good robust career, become an expert, have passion and perseverence, foster discpline; make a career that rewards you. The world isn't set up against you as people on HN and media would like you to believe; the world is amazing and there are plenty of things to do that can sustain you and your family.
Being apathetic or scornful of "work" is a terrible long term strategy.
Burnout can mean a lot of things, without precise and quantifiable definition, you cannot broad-brush this. Burnout can mean from "slight discomfort to challenges" to "suicidal" state of person. So I am giving general advice to build a sustainable career and if you're burned out and on the verge of suicide, you're going to have to find solace in some other type of work that gives you purpose and that you can master it.
Advice presented by others in this thread would lead to worse spiraling effect where bad work ethics would lead you to be worse at mastering things which would lead to even worse work ethics. Sustaining a career for decades requires careful attention to balance between work and life, ideally if both are coalesced (which many people here would gasp in horror). Even after a burnout.
I can relate to all of this. One consequence for me has been lower visibility from my managers. I'm more productive by focusing on the work of my team and helping others, but by not participating in the politics I am perceived as a lower contributor than someone who does the opposite. It's still worth it for me, I've just given up on the goal of being perceived as the top contributor.
I was having burnout, the team I was in was not as challenging. Simple features took me weeks to finish. It got so difficult for me to turn on the laptop in the morning. Internally I asked to be moved to another team, but it did not improve.
What did I do??
I did not take vacations or time out. I just changed companies, and made sure the job has variety, and a lot of customers, and asked for a good raise. All the symptoms disappeared after 1 day. Like magic.
I feel I am more respected and more critical in their team. If there are no customers, and they pay you a little, you feel worthless, and treated as a second class dev. Start looking outside, you may find a good opportunity
I used to be the sort of person who would stay at work until I got to what felt like a "good" stopping point in what I was doing. If something wasn't working, and seemed like another 30 minutes might fix it, I would often do it. Of course 30 minutes often turned into 3 hours.
Now I'm much more likely to just go home at the end of the day. I don't really care what fires are burning, they will be there tomorrow and nobody will die.
If I may: consider it an achievement to work for 60 minutes with heavy focus. Sincerely do so, and even reward yourself with some sort of token for it to represent the effort you did. Use larger tokens for milestones. Over the weeks, these tokens will help motivate you to pull yourself out of your slump and feel good about your work again
I will write an article series on why this works one day, but for now, give it a try? Tiny wins do a lot to help burnout
The absolute simplest version of this is just pomodoro timers with a tally
I think your are agreeing? Choosing to care less takes the pressure off. People take their jobs too seriously (except maybe doctors) and work too hard. Chill out, no one is going to die and that deadline was made up by an incompetent project manager or exec anyway. If you don't enjoy your job change your company, or change your company.
This is actually very reasonable, but I think it's sad that we have to do such gymnastics to justify a healthy work-life balance. It's even sad that we had to coin the term "work-life balance."
This is excellent advice. Treat work as part of your life, not your whole life. Try and build your social circle of people who aren't in the industry, let alone your colleagues.
You’re in an industry that values your skills and seems to always have demand. Whether or not that’s true in the future, it certainly is today, so the best thing you can do is put yourself first and worry less about work as a whole. Especially if it’s not your own company.
Spend more time on you, on activities with friends and family, on hobbies. If you don’t have particularly healthy hobbies, maybe start some. Getting away from your work more and more will make it all the more bearable.
These days work is close to the bottom of my list of concerns, which sounds really bad - BUT - I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.
If you’re burned out this badly I’d suggest it’s your soul’s way of telling yourself “hey this isn’t working for me”. As someone who has been to some pretty messed up depths with the anxiety monster, I’d heed that voice. Life isn’t long enough to stay stuck in a rut like this for any amount of time at all.