> most burnout is mostly caused by managers and culture that just doesn't care about people. A good manager will get an employee who is approaching burnout to take a break/vacation or even change up what they are working on
Agreed and a great manager won't cause burnout because they fundamentally understand what the expectations of their employees are!
> Companies that require 50-80 hour weeks, bosses who yell and scream regularly, psychologically manipulative situations, and environments where people are prevented from having control over their own outcomes are going to take a toll on anyone
If you got paid $250k/yr to work fulltime at Bain and all that work was to shred a single piece of paper, any paper, a day and that is it, no crunch time, no yelling bosses, nothing - would you eventually burn out?
> I was fortunate enough to get promoted into a senior management position, where I am mostly focused on tech strategy and not true "developer work" anymore.
1. Did your find doing the "developer work" itself fulfilling in the first place?
2. If given a choice between your management position and the "developer work", which one would you pick?
3. If you could go back in time and redo everything, would you have started off in management to begin with?
4. What would you have done differently?
I ask these questions because I have a hypothesis that you currently work for bad management and that made the developer work really unfulfilling in part because it gave you no to little agency over your impact. By moving into part of the management layer you got some agency over your impact and managed to disassociate yourself from the unfulfilling developer work, but I would like to learn more from you directly
> a high-performing individual contributor who “lacks” an eye for the bigger picture, because I show little interest in the business side of things
If focusing on engineering, technical, programming, and math problems is really what excites you and you truly have no interest in the business side of things, you should start looking for companies that will only want you to focus on engineering, technical, programming, and math problems and there are a lot of them out there.
If your current place of work complains you “lack” an eye for the bigger picture, and that might be true, that means they dont have good management at all, because a good manager would immediately understand what you value and align you with that or ask you to leave explictly if that's not what they wanted.
Bad management takes no initiative and lack critical decision making skills, stay away.
> I would never have reached the point of ability that I did reach
I think you're conflating skill and ability with impact and expectations.
Early on in your life, your expectations could have been to gain tremendous skill and grow your abilities. You probably didn't care that much if your work went into the trash because in the process, you learned some extremely important and valuable skills. That journey itself made it all worth it and met your expectations.
Over time, as you become more skillful and able, your expectations could change to seeing your work having real impact on the world instead.
This is perhaps, to you, now there's marginal return on being even more skillful and able. You ask "what's the end goal and did I reach it?"
> risk being disappointed once more. Maybe this time, you will be able to recognize it before it's "too late". I don't know
I mentioned in my own comment, the root cause of burnout - be it coding or otherwise, is when expectations don't match reality.
If you're a developer, your impact and outcome is beholden to management, so even through you might not realize it, part of your jobsearch now has to focus on ensuring you detect great management - and you make it a part of your interview to locate them.
The real solution to not being burned out: work with a team that actually knows what they are doing and have strong fundamentals.
> My job has less (no) global impact. What I did previously affected far more people. I told people what project I was on and they thought that was cool. But I don’t hate my life or job and I very much did before.
As I mentioned in my own comment, the root cause of burnout - be it coding or otherwise, is when expectations don't match reality.
For most people, especially the young, they attach their expectations to the job and work they do. There are also a certain number of people who have other expectations though - like how they can contribute to charity or the well-being of their own family from the money they make, from a job they don't necessarily like or even care about. One example is the popular Bain/McKinsey partner who is happy to sell absolute vaporware that will never be delivered ever, because they don't care whether their customers are happy - their own expectations are how bigger of a yatch or mansion they can upgrade to next year.
It all boils down to what the expectations are and whether they match reality.
The root cause of burnout - be it coding or otherwise, is when expectations don't match reality.
In most cases, people want to do meaningful work and see their work having real impact on the world.
If you spent all your waking hours, eating ramen all the while, building something that has outsized impact on the world, you won't be burnt out - quite the opposite!
OTOH, you can even get burnt out doing almost nothing all day, getting paid six figures if your work got thrown away into the trash can regularly (had no impact at all on anyone).
Burnout happens when that expectation doesn't match reality.
> these companies just sound like another high-performance meat grinder
> but are constantly under scrutiny. And smaller companies are all going pseudo-agile to try to squeeze every last ounce from their developers
As bad it sounds, high-performance, being under scrutiny, squeeze every last ounce aren't really the root cause of burnout - these are great symptoms of a broken process that leads to unmet expectations that then causes burnout.
The broken process usually are:
Scenario 1: At big company, BigCo, your work rarely has a direct impact on the customer, or when it does, it could have been years since you actually made the change that makes it way to the customer if it ends up that route at all or you have no way of getting customer feedback.
Result: You question yourself whether working so hard or putting in that overtime was really worth it because you have no idea where that effort ended up
Scenario 2: Someone ambitious, NewGun, at BigCo figured out a shortcut to a promotion - build a new product which is "better, faster" than an existing product CashCow. BigCo is too afraid to make major changes to CashCow (because it is the cash cow) and there's already a layer of management that's known to steward CashCow. NewGun is an outsider so even if NewGun pulled off those major changes to CashCow, they won't get most of the recognition - the CashCow stewards will.
Action: NewGun convinces BigCo to give them a bunch of devs, works them to the bone (because they need results yesterday), skips actual customer research and discovery (because that takes too long and they need results yesterday), makes up usecases and fictitious users
Result: Product flops badly because it doesn't appeal to anyone real. Devs question themselves whether working so hard or putting in that overtime was really worth it
Scenario 3: This is a very close cousin of Scenario 2, except that NewGun is a fresh entrepreneur who convinced some investors to give them money. Result is the same
Micromanagement, scrutiny, squeeze every last ounce are all symptoms of bad management. They by themselves aren't a strong differentiator - great management can do scrutiny, squeezing as well when it's tactically critical, but that's the exception, like pulling the handbrake to avoid an accident, than the norm.
The real solution to not being burned out: work with a team that actually knows what they are doing and have strong fundamentals. How do find those teams is perhaps a separate post as this one's way too long already
Agreed and a great manager won't cause burnout because they fundamentally understand what the expectations of their employees are!
I explained a bit of this in my root comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39809297
Curious to hear what your thoughts are