What grows from the ashes of your old life?

ICT Group

Tessa van der Heijden

Elixir

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The post discusses the severe and often permanent impact of burnout, sharing Hea's experience of being unable to resume her career after being burnt out. It highlights how prolonged overwork and stress can lead to a complete breakdown in mental and physical health. The narrative also emphasizes that burnout is not just a temporary condition but can have lasting effects on one's life and capacity for work, challenging the societal expectations of constant productivity.

You Might Not Recover from Burnout. Ever.

Young, fellow IT guys - mark my words: Be careful when your bosses demand more and more from you - while you think you can keep adding up, getting more done, become even faster, grow in skills every month, every year. After 10-15 years of hamster wheel you might have plenty money, but just out of the blue there could be a point of no return: Total exhaustion and you simply just can’t move on. No energy, no motivation. Totally depleted.
Pace your energy over the years. Watch your quality of life when you are not at work. For example don’t work 16+ hours (e.g. 9 hours day job as software engineer + working 6-8 hours on your own projects every evening). Everything has a toll.

From own experience: burnout doesn’t appear gradually, giving you obvious signs that it’s time to slow down. You keep up with the pace of your work just fine for months or years, and then it hits you over the head like a falling brick.
I did overtime work for various companies, sometimes doing 16-18 hr shifts in a month-long streak, including weekends. I liked my work a lot, and sometimes I was the only person willing to step up when things got dire.
And then, after successfully delivering a large project that was the do-or-die for the company, I felt absolutely no satisfaction or relief, just a gaping, numb void. For the next months I could not force myself to be productive for more than an hour a day; my mind would rebel as soon as I sat down at my computer, preventing any focus on the task at hand. I am still struggling with this, years later. I lost a lot of my professional curiosity, my desire to create, and my drive to be the best programmer I can be.
I’m finding this mental injury to be very slow and very reluctant to heal, despite me paying much greater attention to my well being, working less, and having varied, non-digital hobbies.

At some points, deep expertise in one area of tech will no longer be able to maintain the high quality of work satisfaction, as well as its influences on other aspects of life. Software development or similar fields always ties to business development, and success. At higher level, you need to have a wider view perspective into what matter out there (what the market needs, what the users need). So “going hard” isn’t quite the way. It’s just not sustainable. Maintaining quality of life, and in turn, your mental health, is important so that you can have more cross-domain knowledge, more flexible and transferable skills, or in other words, simply knowing “what needs to be done”, not for “how to fix a problem” but to “identify what problems exist”.

I have a friend who worked on a very demanding and stressful company/project. During his vacation, he decided to see a doctor because of concerns about his mental health and was diagnosed with burnout. He decided to sue the company and won. This happened a few years ago.
Recently, he decided to return to programming and started studying to address some gaps in his knowledge. However, after just a few weeks, he began experiencing burnout symptoms again and had to take a break from studying.
Burnout is real.