I read some comments from another developer online about their recovering from burn out made me reflect on my history of the subject.

I’ve had coworkers tell me they were burn out, I’ve had people I know tell me, and seen people within the industry speak about it often.

This post is not a denial of their experiences. It is merely a reflection of mine over the course of the years. And I can honestly say that I’ve never been burnt out. Perhaps I write about this to give another point of view, where you don’t often see people talking about not experiencing it.

I’m not sure if I’m the exception or I’m the norm. The number of people who have told me about their burnout is high, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more people who haven’t; they would have no reason to talk about it.

I’ve certainly had days where I didn’t have it. And there have been occasions where I didn’t love what I was working on. There have been times where stress within my personal life made it difficult to bring the energy to programming.

But I’ve never experiences what people with burnout describe. A feeling of hollowness, of numbness. Lack of ability to bring any energy, and the feeling that it would never recover.

I would describe my low times as more of distractions.

Keeping burnout at bay

I have been thinking about why I’ve avoided burnout. This is not to say that you cannot still get burnout this way. Nor does it say that people with burnout don’t still have many of these. It’s just a reflexion of what I think about.

  • First, I’ve been lucky to work on interesting things for most of my career. Much of it working on open source. This is by nature an interesting topic for an engineer.
  • I don’t feel the weight of responsibility in the same way that I think some do. What I mean by that is the feeling that your work must be perfect or you are letting someone down. Of course I care how customers perceive my work, but I also know that I only control so much of it. I reserve the weight for those parts that are completely within my control.
  • Similar to the above, I don’t take criticism harshly. I spent years working on projects that were barely known about. Having someone angry about my work does not make me feel low, it makes me feel like I have achieved something, that some one cares. My self-worth is not tied to my work, so criticism is, if anything, something that my ego wants to overcome.
  • I have a healthy detachment from work, mentally. I am able to work quite a lot, even on many evenings and weekends, but in the moments that I’m not, it’s not following my mind.
  • I take joy in parts of programming that some developers dislike. Bugs, these are items I get to check off my checklist, nothing brings more satisfaction.

Not yet

I’ve been lucky to avoid it so far, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming down the row. I wish I could say that I have a gameplan for when that occurs, but it feels like something you need to feel first, to understand how to deal with it.