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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

HN is a software-heavy site, so you read a lot about software burnout here. If it were a medical-heavy site, I suspect you'd read a lot about doctor burnout (I still see that here sometimes, even though it's not really a medical site).

But doctors are the one counterexample that came to mind. Do architects burn out? Do civil engineers? Electrical engineers?

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EE here. You could replace every instance of software engineer in the article with electrical engineer and it would absolutely ring true.

I think the most important point was that engineering is an essentially creative profession but many of us are not valued for our creativity.

I have friends who work in medium sized architecture firms. They all say the office culture is for very long hours, led by the architects.

You don't get to iterate much on a building design once construction has begun.

My understanding, although maybe this is just rumor, was that architecture had one of the highest suicide rates of any profession. My theory was that it was because it is a demanding job (comparable to engineering or medicine) but most buildings aren't really architectured. I mean how many sky-scrapers, museums, and city halls are there in the world compared to the number of mcmansions and nondescript office buildings.

> Do architects burn out? Do civil engineers? Electrical engineers?

In all of those fields projects eventually get finished and involve a lot of bureaucracy and waiting. There is much more breathing room, than in software and more time to recover.

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