I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do.
It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing.
Now that I’m working, with the endless stream of new technologies, the debates of X considered harmful, J is better than K, and a barrage of never ending new things. It started to numb my mind.
Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray.
Reading this story somehow light up that childhood feeling of me learning software engineering. It can still be fun. I can still write things for the sake of me and not for the sake of exit nor a new shiny SaaS.
Thank your for writing this. It gave me a ray of hope that it can still be fun.
Beautifully said. I'm glad to hear that you feel hope for rekindling this feeling. It sounds like you've already figured this out, but I want to highlight that this a symptom of burnout, and that people who resonate with this should take it seriously.
I remember once I was helping someone at work who was learning Python. They were having trouble understanding how binary file types worked. When it clicked for them, they were so delighted.
I realized I hadn't felt that way in years. It wasn't long after that I realized I was too burned out to stay in my position, and needed to take some time to work on my mental health.
Thank you. Now that you mentioned it. Maybe it was a burnout.
If you don't mind sharing, what did you do to improve your mental health?
Let me disclaim that this is a work in progress and that I am not a doctor.
Part of it was that I had a breakdown. That was unpleasant. But ultimately it was part of the process. (Not to say this is necessarily true of everyone!) This forced me to quit my job. I have a one track mind, so I couldn't really do the work on myself I needed while I was working. I hope this isn't necessary for you or anyone else though.
When I was breaking down, I lashed out at the people in my life. I made things very hard for them. But they forgave me and supported me. Sometimes I have a mad instinct to smash everything and start over. But they didn't let me push them away.
Reading the Zhuangzi helped me to conceptualize why I allowed myself to be burned out and didn't do anything about it until I was a wreck. In particular, there's a refrain about people who are useful being ground down by being put to use. I realized that I invested my identity in being useful to others, and my team especially, because I didn't respect myself enough to be useless. I didn't value myself outside of being valuable to others. That attitude will inevitably burn you out.
Studying Zen and Taoism and meditating has helped a lot. Partly it's just a very different perspective from what I'm normally exposed to, so it broadens my horizons and helps me take things less seriously. The Zen notion of "practicing" with a problem is a perspective I find really valuable.
I started therapy and I started taking an antidepressant. This was a mixed bag, my therapist ended up moving away and I think I need to change my medication, but I think it was an important step. Something I struggled with was that I didn't understand the mechanism of action behind therapy and I didn't really see any benefit in any particular session. But I've also had to accept that I just don't understand what I need in my life, I think I do but I'm constantly proven wrong, so not being able to see why something is helping doesn't actually mean it isn't.
Similarly, my medication doesn't seem to do anything. But there have been a few times I've had a really hard day, and then when I'm taking my meds in the evening, I realize I had forgotten yesterday. I also think the lows haven't been as low.
About a year and a half after my breakdown, I had a profound spiritual experience I'm not entirely comfortable discussing, you might call it a breakthrough. None of these things caused it. But I think they were all preconditions. I'm not "fixed," and in the intervening time I've had depressive episodes and panic attacks on occasion. But I was "fixed" for ten glorious days, and it proved to me that, regardless of whether such a thing can be permanent, it is possible.
Thank you for taking your time to write this, it gives me a valuable insight. Wishing all the best for you, me, and others out there who're struggling.
<3
I just wanted to thank you for sharing your experience in such details. Wishing you all the best on your path to recovery and beyond.
Thanks for posting this. It's helpful to read about how others deal with burnout.
Your post reminded me this quote is from a book written in Turkish by a psychologist that had a profound impact on me related to this topic:
"Every rise and ascent to a higher level represents the death of our lower personality at the level we leave behind. Then, we can gently return to that level and whisper to the ear of the actor playing that role with love, understanding, and affection, 'Yes, you are me, but I am not just you!' This way, we can end the dominion of that role in our lives. We both free it from an existence it actually hates and offer ourselves an opportunity for growth! The biggest obstacle in abandoning the role, that is, the lower personality, is not knowing the existence of a higher level - the fear that if the role goes away, we will fall into a void."
I'm not sure it is burn out for me. I think part of it is it feels less special. Maybe that's selfish or delusional on my part. Basically, I used to feel like I was doing something at least somewhat unique. Now, via Youtube and Github, I see that everyone is doing the same thing and repeating the same stuff so I end up with a "why should I do it if it's already been done" feeling.
It's similar to blogs. I ran blog since 26 years ago. Before Facebook, posting and sharing on the net felt special. After Facebook, everyone was posting so blogging was no longer special.
I get that doing it for the fun of the doing itself is a thing. Cooking might be the perfect example. Yet I have a similar problem there. More often than not I learn that a recipe is too much work and it's just better for me to enjoy and appreciate that someone else is willing to make it professionally, and better. One motivation is dishes I can't find at local restaurants. But I still often come to the same conclusion. That it's too much work and I should just wait and really enjoy the dish the next time I'm in a place where it's possible to get it.
Writing code for the joy of it, those were the days
I’m 62, and write code every day. For free, and I still regularly release apps. Most of my work (not all) is open-source.
I love it.
The secret is that I no longer work for people that destroy my work, treat me badly, or force me to do it in a way that destroys creativity, Quality, and velocity.
Being “frozen out” of the tech industry was painful, but it resulted in the first truly happy work I’ve ever done. I’m doing what I dreamed of doing, back then. Out of necessity, I have a much-reduced scope, but I still get a lot done.
However, all those decades of shipping software, on someone else’s dime, made it possible for me to do things the way that I do it now. It gave me the ability to pay the bills, and the Discipline and habit, to write (and ship) good software.
Yeah, the side of programming I love is when I write code for free, or contribute to open source projects.
You are right.
I’m in my 40s and I still do this all of the time. Computers can still be your hobby and not just your job.
This is why I've never taken a coding job despite having played with code since I was a toddler (I'm 36 now). To me, coding is a creative endeavor and I just cannot do creative things for pay/on a deadline. It's the same reason I prefer not to write fiction for money.
This is a lovely phrase. Is it an idiom or your own creation?
Thank you. I wrote it as I was inspired by the Silverwash from Witch Hat Atelier, a disease that causes the eye to see grayscale. Its also because silver is a symbol of money, and as an adult; the responsibility to provide for our family, pay here and there, taxes, tuitions, mortgage, etc - can make life feels bleak.
I interpreted it to mean "many shiny new tools" so that any project just feels like "nothing special" any longer, queueing up with all the other shiny tools.
Ah, nice. I initially interpreted silver as age (grey hair) but that made me intrigued: age can make you jaded but can also give perspective to appreciate the good.
It works on different levels, I guess. =)
“I program like we programmed 15 years ago” told me once my friend and engineer which I consider one of the best graphics programmers around: his projects are fast, beautiful and innovative.
This is, I think, how I felt writing Go. Not necessarily 15 years ago as I was doing Java then, but an "older" but simpler and more straightforward style of programming.
Want to create a database connection? Write "database.connect(host, username, password"). Want to inject a dependency? Just set it in a struct in your main method. Want to create a production build? "go build *.go". Put it in a makefile if you want.
Versus the modern approach, writing YAML to instruct your cloud service to set up a database, docker images that get env vars from somewhere magic, XML or magic auto-injection or however backend works nowadays, typechecking and transpiling, etc.
At the time I was lost joy of coding too but I was able to found it again.
One key point was to ignore learning new tech if it was not absolutely necessary and focus just creating new things. I think it all started from Sebastian Lague's video which reminded how beautiful coding can be.
[https://youtu.be/X-iSQQgOd1A?si=aqriiWmcqqphOiuI]
He is a Savant.
Same! It reminded me of a story about the latest Phrack issue called "Calling All Hackers" [1] and made me hopeful that indeed the hacker spirit is still present in the younger generation and will always be, as long as we older folks encourage it instead of trying to hammer it down. Makes me remember the times I was a teen and I was writing code because I wanted to, not because I needed to. Sometimes I used these skills for good, other times for stupid crap like hacking the "competition" and I'm ashamed of this, but all in all this experience made me who I am today and I'm grateful that I had it. And I'm happy the next generation is still finding joy in coding.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306128
Thank you for this.
That's because we can't grow. You want your easy-to-use distilled library? Too bad, here convoluted hallucinated framework and it's an industry and community standard. Or you can get nothing, ha-ha. Going off the "grid" returns you there in no time.
I've found a personal set of tech that is bearable and static and am building up the swiss army tool kit that is either easy to use, or at least I am familiar with and can steer. It's just for me, no link available. My personal garden of programming. The downside is I can't interact with the "industry" that much, which I considered harmful anyway.
What a beautiful sentence "for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray"..
You comment deserves at least two upvotes.
I feel like we have an entire generation of engineers lost in the SaaSification, over-abstraction, over-branding of everything.
I think we need to give junior engineers permission to not care about "whats becoming an industry standard" and "HN front page frameworks/vendors/tooling/etc". It's okay to stop caring about whether or not what you ship is perfectly engineered; the state of the art isn't close to perfect either when you get into the guts of it.
For ongoing skill development, spend more time reading books, manuals, and research papers. Spend less time following software thought leaders on YouTube and X, less time chasing the shiny new thing on the HN frontpage.
Just build. Roll up your sleeves. Find the flow. And just build.
(Note: this is really bad advice if your goal is to learn how to LARP as a senior engineer, land a comfy job at FAANG, go on the conference circuit, and build an audience on social)
Hear hear!
This cannot be overstated
Every time I want to have that good old feeling, I create three files in a new directory on my home server: index.php, index.css, index.js :)
I would have done everything in Perl for maximum creativeness but didn't have the time to bring myself up to date with the current version.
From time to time I write code just for the heck of it. That endless debate on how you could've done this better with x instead of y don't happen in a personal project. Unless you're a jerk to yourself (like I sometimes am)
(while reading the article..) In the beginning I was like a slow "whoooooaaaah" (mouth 20% open). Then as I scrolled down more and more the 20% became 80%.
A m a z i n g !!!!
So we _can_ have good things! And (most) people _are_ nice and cool and fun!
Sometimes it's good to just step away and do something random. Do Advent of Code but non-competitively, just make it work in a random language without following best practices. Pick up pico-8 and write a crappy game or script with two-lettered variables because you don't have the space or arsedness for longDescriptiveVariableNames. Play games like TIS-100 or Shenzen I/O, making sure to print out the manuals and put them in the oldest folder you can find, and / or spill coffee on it.