Burn Out

Rev to 4500 or 5000, sidestep clutch. All four wheels burn out. Start shift 500 RPM before redline. Repeat until fifth. Say goodbye to everything but Ferraris. But TractionControl? will spoil your fun. [And the manual on the '04 Bimmer 3 says to "break in" the engine by staying below 4500 RPM and 105mph for the first 1250 miles...]

[Notes: All four wheels burn out only on four wheel drive cars - RWD cars burn the rear tires, FWD cars burn the front ones. Also note that the RPM values stated are very specific to the car involved - just trying to keep some 15 year old from causing expensive damage to their cars by following this to the letter. Oh yeah, and regardless of how well you burn out and launch the car, your honda civic will still be beat by many non-ferrari cars. And Ferraris really have a piss-poor ratio of acceleration to cost - a Z06 vette will take them off the line handily for less than half the price.]

Also used to refer to someone who's been in the same job too long, working too hard. They may be suffering ExtremeFrustration.

Or ProgrammersBurnout?

Symptoms

[I'm trying to pull some threads together. Perhaps you can change the question marks into more details? Maybe some of these symptoms are something else altogether.]

Causes [see also: below]

Solutions

Which are "prevention", and which are "cure"?

Formal Studies

It's a bit problem. Why can't I find much about it when I RTFW?

I was going to add this to ProgrammersBurnout, but it's a more general phenomenon than that.

[... continued from GetaLife:] I see the term BurnOut used in this context quite a bit and, over the years, I've talked with a number of programmers and related engineering types who have said variations on, "yeah, I used to do that, but then I got burned out on it ..."

This led me to consider, "what is BurnOut?" After all, if you love what you do, how can you ever get burned out doing it? ...

I worked on this one (sort of a mental background task) for many clock cycles. When I finally "got it" and the light bulb thing happened, I was in a completely different setting.

The discovery was this: Burnout is the realization that no matter how smart you are, how good you are, how hard you work, how loyal or committed you are, or how much you do, you will never be allowed to win. This is usually followed by an intense emotional response - wavelength depending on your personality (some get angry, some get apathetic, some get energized).

The proper solution is always find a WayToWin. In some cases, you can ChangeYourOrganization. You can JustLeave, but remember running away does not change root causes.

Ever since I grasped this, I have always found a WayToWin. Sometimes, I can outlearn or outwork the problem. Sometimes, I can simply go to the management entity and point out the no-win nature of the current configuration. Sometimes, I have to realign.

Realignment. This is a matter of LifeVectors.

The fact that you can't win in the current configuration does not mean the goal is wrong, nor does it mean that the work you've chosen is wrong, only that the current configuration is wrong. In order to find a WayToWin you need to step back far enough to understand the results of your possible choices (look as many moves ahead as you can).

In the context of the original definition ("... you will never be allowed to win"), you can see that this applies only if you forfeit your power to choose.

Be brave enough to choose a long-term life vector, retain your power to choose, and you will never have to endure burnout. -- GarryHamilton

This sounds much more constructive than JustStopCaring.

Does that help? Or does it just let things slide? My next approach will be to push random buttons in the OfficePolitics?, just to see what happens. Same as you do when playing an arcade machine that you don't understand.

All of this is well and good, but the discussion is limited by the presumption of an honest, straightforward PlayingByTheirRules?. You can stay in a situation that is useful for some set of reasons, but for which you are simply not willing to become a FullConvert?. Instead, you can play the PracticedMediocrity? game to a certain extent. Just enough to enable you to conserve your energy and your time, and be able to follow your dream all the whilst squeezing as much enjoyment as possible out of the ugly necessity that is WorkingLife?.

On the other hand, if you can find a place of employment where you actually enjoy the work, and can rise to the challenges presented, with vigor and enthusiasm, and actually enjoy striving to do your best in that environment,then the above gameplaying is not the least bit necessary. Note that you can also get burned out on your own agenda.

BurnOut is a costly route to go down. It can take ten years or more to recover from BurnOut. There are easier ways to learn things. Some people do not recover. It is worth taking the early signs of BurnOut seriously.

Agree. I think I've mostly recovered from my own burnout/breakdown/whatever, but my memory and my ability to concentrate seem to have been permanently degraded. -- KrisJohnson

BurnOut is not always lack of a WayToWin (although I agree it often is). Other factors that lead to BurnOut are

Agreed. The second point is addressed in LifeVectors. The first point would seem to be a side-effect of a LoseOnlyEnvironment?, although I have sometimes seen it as a temporary condition. That said, too many consecutive days at red-line will break down even the best lubricated system. -- GarryHamilton

That F-word appearing again. ExtremeFrustration for the XPers, but I expect it comes in other forms for other persuasions.

Here's an alternative look at a form of burnout: when you first get into professional programming, and get into a real groove, you get that Superman "S" on your chest and want to prove your invincibility. You take on all comers and solve all problems, until you realize you are so busy solving everybody else's little crises that you really don't do any of the good, dedicated creative work that made you feel invincible in the first place. When presented with "new" opportunities, your experience kicks in and "new" feels "old". It's like expecting that finding your house on the drive home every day has the same kind of thrill as the first time you found a secluded swimming hole, and thought that nobody else in the world knew it existed. It doesn't happen: it's just the same old house, and you're driving the same old car. You can replace the house, the car, (some even try to replace the wife and the kids <frown>), but the real discovery of the first few years of programming is hard to replicate. Employers are looking for programmers with specific experience, which as time goes on tends to increasingly fix a developer into repeating the same old crud day after day and year after year.

BurnOut implies a brilliant supernova. Most programmers just fizzle like a brown dwarf - or old soda.

-- Chris

After a solid year of working full time and finishing off university full time and living by the motto of SleepIsOverrated, I burnt myself out. The first solution I tried was a whirlwind tour of 4 cities in 9 days. It didn't work and my employer saw it. A month after getting laid off, I was still a walking BurntOut and found a solution. I went away for 5 days and lived in my car and spent my days at the beach in a variation of temporary JustStopCaring. The important points were

I'm not saying that will work for anyone, but I now know that I can recover from being BurntOut with no more than two-three days vacation around a weekend. -- ScottCowan

Woah, I'm surprised no one has just pointed out that yes, you can have too much of a good thing. Seriously, your favourite food might be Macaroni Cheese, but if that's all you get to eat over a long period, not only will you get bored with it, eventually you might start to hate it. From what I've seen, burnout isn't so much because of bad things or working situations, but because the pleasure of the work has decreased. If someone's still getting about the same amount of pleasure but the bad shit has increased, they usually just bitch about their jobs or the state of the economy, not that they're burned out.

Variety is the spice of life, and I know quite a few people who chose not to get into programming professionally because they didn't want to risk getting bored with it by being forced to do it too much. If you're feeling great about it, cool, pull all nighters, whatever, but at the first sign you're getting bored with it, take a holiday, or at least take up some other interests so that Computers & Programming is not the only thing you're doing. Y'know, distance makes the heart grow fonder and all that, but only if you haven't pushed yourself too far and lost all love for the subject at hand. -- pearl

See RealStoryAboutDeveloperTurnedManager then RecoveringProgrammer; LetterToSoftwareDevelopers, ProgrammingProfession

CategoryEmployment

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