Comment by timomeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timomeh | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely not a problem that programming is your passion and also your job. For many people, it's a dream come true.

But don't do work in your free time. Don't fix bugs for your employer, don't learn stuff you need to learn for your employer. Don't give away your time for free. Doing work in your free time will burn you out. Doing the same things you do at work will burn you out – it will take a bit longer, but it will happen. Many employers discourage working in your free time, just because of that (and because in some countries, they're legally obliged to ensure their employees have some free time).

Instead, do your own thing, develop your own project. Probably you'll create 10 side projects and abandon every single one of them after a few days. Something will stick (finding a side project is a whole other topic). Maybe do some open source contributions. Be passionate about your own project(s). And try something new, something you can't do at work. May it be another framework, language, or just some new fancy libraries. It will broaden your horizon and drastically improve your skills as a software engineer.

You will still think of that annoying bug you couldn't fix that day. Those feelings won't go away, but they will be less and less nagging.

Finally, turn off distractions from work in your free time. Mute your work-related notifications, don't check your work mails, they can wait until monday. Oh, and don't forget to meet your friends, go grab your favorite drink with them.

+1000 on this. When I was younger I would work for my employer on the weekends/late nights to try to get ahead. Did that for so many years. I only gave myself a little bit of free time for myself on the weekend.

I _never_ thought I would burnout. “If you enjoy work, work life balance doesn’t matter” I would think to myself. But the point above about “it will take longer, but it will happen” is absolutely correct.

I am now burned out, 13 years later. I’m now going through the process of changing how I think about work-life-balance.

Find a passion outside of work. Think about something that is meaningful to you or some hobby you want to try.

Plan activities with your friends ahead of time - hikes, going to restaurants, just hanging out. It gives you something to look forward to on the weekends.

> But don't do work in your free time. Don't fix bugs for your employer, don't learn stuff you need to learn for your employer.

What hammered this home for me after years of loving my job and thinking about work outside of work, was how little ROI that investment has actually had, compared to how much value it's added for my employers. Now don't get me wrong, I'm pretty happy with my career progress so far, and my love of my job, and learning outside business hours, is a major part of that.

That said, though, I can learn a lot of the same things while trying to invest the time itself in something of my own, where worst case scenario I get the same learning out of it, my employer and my career both still benefit, and I get to choose the direction myself. There's at least a chance, though, that I could produce some extra income, and maybe even build something sustainable on the side where I can personally see a much higher fraction of the ROI, rather than it disappearing somewhere into the enterprise.

And you will be adding interesting projects to your resume, which might create new opportunities.

I agree. It took a while before I was able to leave office behind after a long week. And while I still have.. homework of sorts, I now go out of my way to play with things that are not related to my job at all ( just bought pine time dev kit -- this will be fun ).

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