Yeah of course - that would have not been ideal. I know myself though (and know field of the niche products I work on) and I was just going to keep pushing myself as hard as possible until something like that happened.
I'm glad everything worked out and wish it happened a different way but if I didn't hit that burn out then I'm sure it would have ended up much worse down the line.
At the very least now I have a better idea how/when to tell future bosses to go fuck themselves :)
$3 million, no. Ridiculous in my mind at the time, yes.
Also - first real development project from start to finish. Not sure you can put a monetary value on seeing your work actually being used in real life.
Definitely regret letting myself get so burned out / used by the company but don't regret putting everything I had into that implementation. Still miss that job - though I think (hope?) that was professional rock bottom so it's a good force to stop working at a certain point.
Agreed that this questions is asked in a stupid way but I'll throw mine out there.
Last July I ran a migration (SaaS CRM company) that should have taken 3-4 weeks with 1 week of downtime, but the client insisted on 1 week with 4 days of downtime. It was the first major migration moving this platform out of beta and I loved that product (and that client) more than anything, so I said fine.
I made it super clear to my boss that this was going to fucked up and this was a bad idea, but I was down to try. Long story short I work 20+ hours a day for 7 days (heavily helped by, in retrospect, pretty dangerous amounts of adderall/provigil/Ritalin/caffeine/ambien for when I actually did need to sleep) and we got it down.
During the last day of QA I clasped in my office from exhaustion and went temporarily blind, ended up in the ER. That didn't matter though because the migration was a resounding success - client was happy, executives were happy, product was stable.
My boss was incredible (truly the best boss I'll ever have) and was ready to give me anything I wanted... except a budget for more staff, which was really the issue here. This product was my baby and I was going to ensure its success no matter what happened.
Put in my notice three weeks later. They told me to name my price and title bump to stay, but weren't willing to let me hire the two or three staff I knew I needed. I offered to stay as long as they needed to help with the transition but turned down all their bonuses because I didn't want to be beholden to them.
I finally left 6 months later to make slightly less money with a slightly higher title at a company that gave me the team I knew I needed. I still miss that company more than anything, getting to see a mission criticalcproduct go from idea to being used by massive multinational companies was incredible and an experience I doubt I'll ever have again.
FWIW I'm still in touch with people from my old team and the company has since hired three more staff (plus the two existing staff the team already had) and a VP to manage the team. By not giving me to staff support I asked for and letting me burn out the company has "lost" somewhere around $800k in new staff costs alone.