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Comment by corobo | Hacker News Reader

Hah. 32, aye. Riding that average!

Probably career suicidal (never admit it in your application) but honestly the thing I've found helps is just not caring about work at all. It's like the equivalent to acceptance in grief. Get the day done, look forward to the weekend, when you book time off make sure to book the following Monday.

I'll do the job as best I can for as long as I'm paid but if you think I'm here for any reason other than money to pay the bills you're completely delusional.

Watch the film Office Space, be inspired.

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I think this isn't great advice for everyone.

I'm 31 and actually, I've gone through phases and got bored and miserable about my job (I have ADHD and this happens easily). The thing I've found that helps is to keep things fresh, and find a job where you care about the company and product and have more flexibility in what you do and are still learning and keeping stuff interesting. I'm learning Rust at the moment because I know just doing front-end stuff (I've done all kinds of stuff in the past 12 years, but at the moment front-end is what gets the money). Even doing more jobs using React Native and opening up the world of app development has kept thing interesting.

Also maintaining a work life balance, aggressively enforcing flexibility (I was straight up with my new employer that some days I am useless and just want to go for a walk, but I will work hard enough on the days my brain wants to play ball, that it won't be an issue).

Burnout is a lot easier in corporates because there is less flexibility and you are so removed from the people at the top and are much more of a cog in a machine, there are arbitrary seeming rulebooks because they require consistency, and that is demoralising for individuals. Basically the more corporate a company is run, the less I like it.

Once I lose interest I'll end up doing stuff that will end up in my being let go which has happened a couple times in my career, so maintaining interest and keeping things fresh in whatever way is absolutely imperative. Also the product I'm building is a factor for me - I've worked at companies where despite having a good team, what they're building is so mundane and dull I can't force myself to be excited by it.

Remember what excited you about your field and why you got into it. If that was purely money then yes, previous advice is all you can do really, but if it was a passion for your field, then keep feeding the fire and reigniting that passion by whatever means necessary. Sometimes you need a break, sometimes you need a change, sometimes you need something new.

> find a job where you care about the company and product

I'm an average person. I'm not qualified for those roles. I make websites in WordPress and I now hate the process of writing code of any flavour with such passion I'll take anything else that pays more. I don't have the capacity to learn some new thing on the off chance I go work somewhere that isn't just the same old.

Also I now work for a small indie company for the very reason of having more responsibility and purpose. You know what that led to recently? I moved all our kit to managed hosting in case I went through with offing myself.

It's burnout, not a bad day. I'd love to just take some time off all willy nillily as you say but that would result in a performance improvement plan and an eventual firing, which I can't afford right now.

I'd fucking love to go back to Sysadmin work but I've been out so long everything's gone cloudy - again, not qualified.

All these excuses and more in your nearest person with burnout :)

Man it sounds like you have some deeper issues and I hope you can find more meaning in life in general, but being a WordPress admin would probably drive most of us to the brink. Probably one of the most tedious and banal jobs in tech.

Why not start learning more languages and whatnot? What do you mean you don't have the capacity? I was a PHP dev back in the day and progressed to things like Python/Django, but there's a whole world of resources that are accessible to you as an existing coder if you wanted to skill up and take it to the next level. There were points in the last few years I was bored of coding and rarely did it outside of my work hours. Recently I started looking at Rust and it dazzled me into being excited again.

I dunno if you'll ever see this but if you do thank you. Calling it out has put it in focus, today I'm trying to appreciate all of the stuff I have done

For instance the CI/CD I set up is f-in cool how it just works. I'll start from there.

your hn karma is above average. And the average on hn is way above average for a for a non hn Sysadmin.

I think one can look forward to the weekend (or the end of the shift) but still work for other things in addition to money.

I mean things like enjoying your colleagues, be happy for a well done job, have fun with interesting problems, appreciate that your work is valuable for other people.

Yeah, those are not things you should accept _instead_ of the money, in general, but they count too.

You can, but the cold reality is that most jobs aren't like that. You work alongside the kind of people you don't want to be around, solving problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place, and doing work that isn't valuable to anyone except one of the managers up in the org chart who can use it to justify their bonuses.

Sometimes you get lucky and get one of the good jobs that tick some of these boxes, but most people don't get lucky.

- enjoying your colleagues

- be happy for a well done job

- have fun with interesting problems

It may be a bit cynicsl, but there’s your problem. It’s much easier to find jobs without these things that still pay very well.

Oh aye but we are talking pre and post burnout. Things are closer to depression (if depression isn't just straight up part and parcel) with burnout.

I have friends outside work, the problems are easy but tedious, I have access to the analytics of the sites I build and can see nobody uses them.

Burnout is like arguing with someone on Twitter, you're not convincing it otherwise in the moment

Paradoxically the message in Office Space is also, if you forgo the grind and act as you've describe, you'll actually get promoted and have a better career.

There's a bit of old wisdom in this, I suppose old jobs were mostly "just jobs". You go for the money, not for thrill or creativity. But post 90s college programming cursus felt like a door to neverending thrill.. the gap was a bit surreal.

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