Welcome to Bytes in Balance, the podcast where we navigate the wild world of software engineering together. I'm Dan and this is Damian. We have been juggling code, teams and sanity for over 35 years combined. From junior devs to principal engineers, we have worn every hat in the industry. In this podcast, we're sharing our journey, lessons learned and mentoring tricks to help you find your own balance.
It's not just about the tech. We dive into people, psychology, communication, and all the messy bits in between. Think of it as group therapy for the digital age. We bend to swap word stories and share what we think is solid advice. Sometimes we even bring guests to shake things up. This podcast is our way of tackling the stress, burnout, and growth pains that come with the job. It's as much a balancing act for us as it is for you. Grab a seat and let's navigate this madness together.
You'll find some interesting links in the episode description if you want to learn more about us or the topics we discuss. All right, let's get started. Hey folks, thank you for coming back and listening. Hey Dan, good to see you again. Yeah, likewise. I've been enjoying our conversations, so this is going to be another interesting one. Today we want to talk a little bit about burnout.
I think it's a topic that lots of engineers have gone through or are going through. We went through our own phases of burnout. I've been burnout twice in my life, at least. And I think there is value in having conversations about this burnout, mental health in the job, and to understand this topic better and share experiences. So what do you think, Dan? Where do we start?
Yeah, that sounds great. And as far as where we start, I was thinking that at a high level, both of us have experienced this. Both of us have gone through this. And it's funny when I say phrases like gone through this, it implies that it was some binary event I went through and now I'm on the other side now. it's all perfectly better, right? This is a super complex thing. I've felt the symptoms of burnout rise and fall at various points in my career. Sometimes they reached ahead and I...
quit my job and I'll tell about that, but you know, it's a complex topic. Basically, I was thinking we would each kind of talk about our personal experiences with it, what our take is on it, what causes it. And then I'm hoping both of us can share strategies that we've learned or we've heard from others on what to do, both how to identify it and then what to do about it.
I don't think either of us have a silver bullet panacea kind of solution here, but I think diving into those will lead to interesting conversations. Yeah, and I agree. Something we wanted to say on this topic is that please remember we are not therapists. We are not professionals in this area. We're just engineers going through this and that have gone through this. So anyhow, take whatever it says here with a pinch of salt in that sense. Absolutely. This is more about sharing our experiences.
then a good recommendation that we may talk later is just, if you're going through something like this, just go find a therapist. A good therapist could be actually helpful. I think it's important to say that. I also think it's really important to talk about burnout because it's definitely a problem, an epidemic in the industry, and it's not of one company in particular. It's widespread across companies and different roles, and there are some statistics about that.
of what you believe and what source you pick, where 60% of engineers in companies are burned out, right? That's alarming. And something that happened to me when I started to go through this, I started to talk to people. I started to find a bunch of other people that I would never imagine that were going through this. And they were actually going through this. Definitely. I'll just mention finding other people that are going through it or have gone through it is one of the best ways to...
recover and to help identify it in yourself. Those conversations were and are still incredibly cathartic. Just yesterday I had lunch with an old friend and sharing our experiences working for the same company. and sharing our desire to currently not be working in a full-time job was great. Being able to connect with someone else who has gone through that is helpful. I think doing those things gave me this sense of, okay, I'm not crazy.
Yeah, ultimately that's a validation. Yeah, it's a validation of it. Well, are you itching to dive into yours or how do we want to do this? I can talk about mine. As I mentioned before, I believe I have been born out twice in my life. The first one was long ago, I had my own companies and We had an incredibly crazy and bad year at the same time in 2008. We were trying to close customers and we were having a hard time closing customers for the company, generating revenue.
the buffer of money that we have to pay salaries etc was going down at the same time I was a little bit obsessed on certain technological projects that I thought were going to make life easier to develop software for certain customers and I was putting a lot of effort on those things. So it was this crazy 11 hours a day, probably Saturdays or whatever and working very intensively in these technological projects or aspects and in trying to find
customers to actually generate the revenue that we needed to keep the company going. Observing something about this. This was a startup or something that you had founded, right? You were an owner in some sense. Sometimes people find themselves in situations where there's a lot of pressure to do exactly this work long hours and crunch time and stuff like this from their boss.
In this case, this pressure was essentially self-imposed, right? Not to diminish it at all, but like it definitely, sometimes that even makes it worse, doesn't it? Well, I always joke that the worst boss that I have is myself. Yeah, exactly. And it comes to another piece of the discussion of burnout that people tend to associate burnout to long hours.
And I don't think that's necessarily true. No, I mean, yeah, same thing. That's a different aspect. They can be correlated. They can be correlated. Clearly they were for you, right? Yeah. But it's not simple cause and effect.
Yeah, and back then it's a lot of pressure because I had somewhere around for employees so it's not a huge company but you have the pressure of you have to pay those salaries every month and those employees may have families and and so on and that's that is a lot of pressure
And if you have to let them go for some reason that could actually hurt the company and even your own personal finances Incredibly if lost don't help you in that sense So anyhow, this was a very intensive year of coding, of dealing with people, of trying to close contracts and stuff like that. and not having the results that we were having the previous year. Being able to keep the company healthy.
And I remember I ended that year, 2008, in a very, very, very bad shape. And I got to a point in which I was not able to code. I was not able to put one line of code after the other. I've been coding all my life. Back then, at that point, I had been coding probably for like 10 years or something like that. So it's hard when you sit down and try to do what you think that you're gonna do for a living the rest of your life, right? And you suddenly just can't.
They're fully blocked. It is really hard. I was lucky enough that back then I transitioned as a university professor. So I had this buffer or this relief in that sense that I could do something. for a living that still was related with computer science and software engineering and I like it a lot. But I didn't have to code professionally or focus on getting customers or doing that type of stuff. So I had this relatively safe paycheck at the end of the month and it took me a year basically.
to get to a point in which I could sit down in front of a computer and actually code. again and enjoy it and take a project and say okay i'm gonna do this and let's put this idea together this prototype together and and so on and so forth i'm curious in that timeline like when did you identify that you were burned out did you sort of have that term
back then? Did you recognize it or did you just know like, oh, I got to get away from this and do something different? I don't think we managed that terminology back then. And I'm trying to think of words in Spanish.
because it was in Spanish. Yeah, no, it doesn't matter the literal words, but just how did you identify when you sat down to write code, were you just like, I can't code anymore? Or did you identify that there was some kind of a blockage? Yeah, it was a concern. It was definitely a concern. It was a mentally concern.
aren't as strong as it could be physical it's like if you have tendonitis or something like that and you cannot tie because your hands hurt and then you cannot cope yeah this is such a serious problem as that yeah i remember getting very picky and perfectionist on what i was doing I've always been a perfectionist, but it flared incredibly back then to the point of running the code formatter like 10 times before closing the file. It's stupid things like that. And it was like, okay, there is...
definitely something wrong here. And I think the way Life is going the last year and everything is kind of crashing. Was detonator of all this thing and has to be related. That was my thought process. Has to be related to this. And I need a change. And I was lucky enough. Getting in the university as a professor back then was... It's not a trivial thing.
I had been daydreaming with that for a couple of years, but it was hard. And I was looking off that the universe left a line to actually do that and end in that situation. And that allowed me to come back into programming in a healthy way. Yeah, and even when I move out of Venezuela and went to Chile to live for a year I went there with the mindset of
I don't know if I want to do something in software in the industry. And I ended with a role as a business analyst, which was very interesting. And I ended coding for other reasons. And then that's when Amazon came into the picture and I was like... Okay, I think I'm okay to go back and it was actually a great experience to some extent.
So that was the first time. And I identify something really interesting that correlates with the second time I have been born out. And I don't think it's fully related to the long hours. I think it's related to the lack of control of a situation. Yeah, I think that's part of it. And I think that had something to do with my second time that I was born. My second time was at Amazon.
And I was working hard, but I was definitely not working 11 hours a day, Saturdays or something like that. I had already went through that stage at Amazon. And I remember one day, like three years into Amazon, and one day it was like... Never again, right? I'm not doing this ever again. It was like a project that I was working for six months. I was like
11 hours a day, Saturdays, Sundays. And I remember at the end of a very stressful meeting, a go or no go meeting, I remember not feeling great and it was like, okay, I have to stop this, it's gonna kill me. And that changed a little bit the mindset. So again, work hard, normally, right? But I started not feeling great. I started questioning what is... the purpose of all what we are doing really and i as a principal engineer on that organization i was putting a lot of energy into the leadership
of the organization and you do many things as principal engineer but one of the things that you could get to do sometimes is to be an example for your team and sometimes to be the cheerleader of your team, the person that knows in what direction we are going and keeps people motivated. motivated going into that direction. And that happens to be an enormous drain of energy and you need to be very careful with those aspects and with those things.
So anyhow, it was like a feeling of a lack of purpose. Amazon went through a lot of changes, was going through a lot of changes back then too. A lot of products had interesting potential, but were not necessarily being properly funded. And that was especially bad in the corner that we were in. We had a bunch of unrelated projects that we were trying to shove all into one sort of productivity sweet and it was tricky.
Yeah, and now you see a lot of things looking at this from outside of the company at this point. One year after leaving Amazon, you see that some of these products are in path of deprecation. They are acknowledging the fact that it's not sustainable, probably. Who knows the concrete? exact reasons, but they are deprecating a bunch of products to focus on probably what is important. It's my guess. And that as well.
So I don't know, in your case, I think, but in my case, we had a couple of interesting products that seemed to have a lot of potential, but it was really hard to make progress because of the funding that to some extent we had. And then you start questioning a bit of the purpose. And that brings what I think is the second aspect of burnout. There could be a factor of a lack of... control it's like you know the potential of this you know all the things that could happen here and what can be done
but you really don't have control. You cannot change either culture or you cannot change the direction in which the ship is going. Yeah, there's too much momentum going in the wrong direction, and it's a huge effort, as you mentioned, to ride it. And it happens, right? It's like, I feel that I had big wins in Amazon along with my career, and this particular one, it could not change that momentum. It ended being a company-wide direction and momentum. So that's one thing.
lack of control and the other is purpose. You start questioning, what am I doing with my life to some extent at this point? And I want to do something else, something different, something that you don't know what it is. And then if you keep pouring energy in something where there is this lack of purpose, you don't get energy back.
When you don't get energy back, you deplete it. I really like this definition. I know this isn't the complete definition of burnout that you're trying to construct here, but I like lack of control and lack of purpose because I have my own kind of take on what is burnout. And it fits really nicely into this, but I kind of approach it from a different way. At a very high level, I basically think burnout is a kind of long-term disconnect between
your actions, the energy you put in and the results that you achieve from that in the future. You go through this cycle on a very short, small scale all the time, especially as when you're, when you're first start coding, you write some code, it works.
You publish it, boom, you get a little boost of dopamine or whatever, and you're happy. But this happens in a long-term scale too. You work as a principal engineer, you work over a long time to change the culture. And this involves many documents and many stupid arguments.
and many people that you have to have the same argument with over and over and over, and you have to do it all very politely and with a good face on and all that. And that, as you identified, that takes up a huge amount of emotional energy.
If you do this and ultimately the culture changes and you look backwards on it and you think, wow, that was cool. I had a part in that. Then you go on and you feel great about yourself. But a lot of times it doesn't happen that way. And a lot of times the momentum is too big.
You can't change the culture. You can't launch the product. You can't convince the PM to drop this stupid feature. And then you're left with this long-term problem of you put a whole bunch of energy into something and you never got anything out of it. And of course, this happens. Everybody deals with it as adults, where you put energy into something and you don't get it out. And so that's why burnout is not this thing that occurs overnight.
It's also not directly caused by working long hours. It's funny. You and I both worked at Amazon. And of course, Amazon has this reputation for burning people out essentially. But the times at Amazon where I was working the most hours.
i was happy there's a reason why i was working those hours that was before i had kids of course and i was super engaged in the code of what we were launching and those are the times when i was the most excited the times when i was the most burned out i was actually working the least amount of hours and in a lot of ways that made it harder right to be a principal engineer
And, at the time we were pretty much working from home, there was no return to office mandate. So I was rolling in my sweatpants and showing up to some meetings and I was trying to change the culture of this team. And I was trying to push them to focus on. something that we could launch and build and not just play to the whims of upper management. And I wasn't really successful and over time, and this occurred over like more than a year, several years, actually.
And I was in different orgs at different times. But this was when I was the most burned out. Most recently, this was what ultimately caused me to leave the company. I was also, I experienced a sort of mini burnout a few years into Amazon. And again, it was kind of the same thing where I was trying to change the culture of the team. It felt like we needed a big new piece of software to replace all of this old legacy stuff.
Culture at large, the organization at large was perfectly happy continuing to limp along with 10,000 lines of spaghetti pearl. and just kind of making stuff work. And it was hard. Internally, we had this small team mandate to go replace it and build this new shiny hotness. And we sort of felt like we could do that. And we put a lot of time and energy into that. And ultimately we weren't successful. And I solved that by leaving that team and going somewhere else within Amazon.
But looking back on it, it was interesting to see how I felt. I got some feedback later from a peer that said that I was being more and more cynical and more and more pessimistic. And that's always something that comes up in me. But I notice it more when I'm more burned out. That's like the first signal to me. You know, you always complain about everything. And I think the same things that make me a pessimist also make me a good engineer.
But when I start harping on those excessively and start being like, oh, this is screwed up. We'll never fix this. If it's kind of trending into cynicism and hopelessness, that's one of the first signals to me that I'm getting burned out. So...
I think going back to that original definition of what I think burnout is, I think that's why it's so prevalent in the software industry. In theory, this could happen anywhere. And I think it does. You talk about like physicians and lawyers and other professions. There is an element of burnout. But I think it's especially...
bad in the software industry, because there's always a long period of time between your actions today and achieving your results, even in the best of cases, as a principal engineer, there might be months or years in between those things. And that's just a fact of life.
And then there's a lot more cases, I think, of projects that either completely fail or are completely canceled and binned and the things that you build today. And then there's a whole aspect of our industry, especially in the startup world, that kind of runs on hopes and dreams and hype and BS.
And I think getting caught up in that, when that ultimately doesn't lead anywhere, can also contribute to the same kind of thing. So that's my take on it. I'm curious, maybe the next thing we should both dive into, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. How do you get... unburnt out when you do recognize it creeping in what do you do what's been helpful if you don't mind i think you have touched on some incredible points i think it's important to to elaborate
So you talk about feeling cynical and pessimistic. I went through the same loop to some extent. And it's interesting because when you are in a position of leadership, you shouldn't. It's very poisonous. And that starts even poisoning yourself because what I do is that I, in my case, I get angry. I'm normally not an angry person, but I start getting angry to small things and small details and people that normally shouldn't. So that was my first indication that, hey, there's something going on.
I found myself apologizing with somebody after a meeting, not because I'd say something ridiculously angry or something like that, but because in my mind it was getting there and it was like, hey, I'm really sorry if what I say sounded XYZ.
bad way. That's not what I meant or I'm really sorry if that was the case. And again, it was nothing egregious, but it was there. I found myself being cynical and pessimistic, but like keeping it to myself and not projecting it because you are in a leadership position. You can't be like that. And the other thing that you mentioned is that I think it's very important to have this awareness across all the process and be aware of your own emotions. We tend to play a lot with this game.
which is true to some extent of we are professionals we don't do xyz we don't get angry We don't feel this way. We are optimistic all the way. You know what I mean? We put this face, we could get there and get the job done, right? And I think that's okay up to certain point, but beyond certain point. there is a problem and we need to be able to look through that.
a mask of we are professionals and see the human behind that mask and understand that ultimately we have feelings too yeah i think this is a really good thing and i've done this both for myself and for others for yourself well maybe i'll But for others, there are times where I know exactly the same mask. I'm thinking of a design review that I've been in where I'm seeing one engineer really pick apart a design of another engineer.
And they both have their, I'm a professional mask on, but really you look behind it and there are some hurt emotions on both sides. And it's really hard. Again, it's not like you're their therapist sitting in there, but the times where I've been able to really. diplomatically say
Oh man, it looks like you've been frustrated with this other team's ability to deliver on their promises. Is that kind of where this is coming from? And not diving in anymore and being like, are you acting like a hurt little baby? Even if that's what I'm thinking in my head.
But really this gives license for people to let that out and be like, yeah, last quarter they said they were going to have this thing done and they didn't. And that's what we're concerned about. And I don't know. Sometimes that really helps the discussion.
Yeah, that makes sense. I have seen that too and I have seen people that They say they are okay. They are not okay You know they are not okay Then you poke a little bit and you start seeing these emotions surfacing and I think there are a lot of connection with this with psychological safety and so on and so forth and what some organizations need to create that environment of psychological safety to actually thrive and some organizations just don't and if they don't then you have that
that mask everywhere, protecting yourself and protecting your emotions, not showing weakness or whatever. The moment I realized that I was born out in Amazon was very interesting for me and it's kind of connected.
I had a one-on-one with this engineer every week. She was working in a really hard project and not only fighting with the project, technical aspects of the project, but also fighting the organization, which comes down the line of what you fight and I want to extend a little bit on that. And I remember meeting one-on-one with her like every week for, I don't know, two months or something like that.
I knew she was fighting hard. I knew she was having a hard moment. So we connected every week and how is it going? I would ask and she was like Okay, here comes the complaints or whatever. Okay, but have faith in what we are doing. That was mean, you know, we can do this. It's like, okay, talk with this person. Let's switch here. Let's change here. You know, and so on and so forth. Let's put these two people together in a room and talk about this and...
the right thing you do a little bit in that sense and and constantly doing this for eight weeks or so and then one day we just meet in the one-on-one and i say like how is it going and she's like And I look at her and I think I got to my broken point and I am like I get it. So all my cheerfulness and my energy or whatever got to the end at that point and it was like, okay. Yeah, but there it is in a nutshell.
All of those things that are the quote unquote right thing to do. Let's get this person in this person in a room. Let's hash out this thing. Those all require lots of emotional energy. You try to do stuff like that. There's, there's always little friction points. And if you're confident that
If you go through all of those, if you jump through all those hoops and you say the right things and you have the right meetings and you write the right documents and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that ultimately you'll be successful and you'll launch this thing. I think I remember this project that you're talking about and that's really motivating.
yeah i'm passionate i want to jump in but if you start to ultimately believe that you won't be successful and that you've your brain looks at all this evidence in the past of you putting forth this energy and not getting anything in return Ultimately, this is your brain's way of protecting you and keeping you from this cycle. Not saying that mechanism works perfectly all the time, but that's kind of what it is. And I think it comes down to something else that you mentioned, which is...
So we as principal engineers have a long-term cycle. So something that you were talking about that I think is very important is like we do hard things. So software is hard by nature. And it seems that for the last 50 something, 55, 60 years that software has been around being developed and so on and so forth. Hopefully my math is correct. it is a hard thing it's still a hard thing today
And that's okay. And we as principal engineers, we are used to deal with these hard things. We are used to deal with these long-term windows or goals. And I think that's not the problem. I think the problem is when you realize that you are fighting an enemy that you cannot defeat and it's not the right enemy that you should be fighting.
If you are fighting, for example, a culture that you know what you are being asked to do with the amount of resources that you have, it is unlikely to happen and this becomes a chronical aspect of it. Yeah, well, I disagree a tiny bit here. I don't always think that when you're getting burned out, it's a sign that you're fighting the wrong battles.
Sometimes these are the right battles. It's just that you don't have enough resources or there's too much momentum and it's impossible. But you don't always know that ahead of time. I guess that's what I'm saying. And you can look back and think... Actually, that was the right battle I was fighting. I just needed 10,000 more people behind me fighting it with me. And that's all I'm saying.
That makes sense. Maybe I'm trying to put the wrong example. Yeah, maybe we're all stretching our metaphors here, too. Yeah. Let's imagine that you're trying to launch the next generation of software XYZ. And that's okay. That's a valid launch. term goal that it's achievable but at the same time you are dealing with a huge amount of technical depth with a huge amount of operational burden
that is keeping a lot of your best engineers tied into dealing with that operational burden. And you definitely don't have resources to add more people to this thing. Can't convince leadership that all of these things are dragging you behind It's a very very tough place to be to some extent it's like you are trying to launch a cutting edge next generation of something on top of something that it's incredibly legacy at this point and
You even have the acknowledgement maybe that yeah, that's the case, but we cannot fix this. You have to go into this direction and build it on top of that. I think it's when you get put beyond challenging situations. Challenging is good. It's okay, but when you get put in absurd impossible situations is when there is a lot of opportunity of burnout creeping in. Yeah. It's one of the possible causes, right? Definitely. Definitely. And when I've been in situations like this,
a lot of times I didn't realize it. Your example essentially requires you to at some point sit down and do the math and be, okay, our engineers are spending 80% of their time on operations and stuff like this and 20% of their time barely on new features so obviously the math doesn't check out.
But a lot of times it's more complex. And when I was less experienced, I'd be like very hopeful. Oh, maybe we can dig our way out of this mountain of technical debt. And my manager would have meetings with me. And after those meetings, I'd be like, yeah, let me grab another shovel. It would feel like it wasn't hopeless. One of the things that makes it hard is that there isn't any easy way for you to say, yep, this is the case here.
So as a principal engineer, yeah, I feel a lot more confident going to my leadership and being like, okay, let's take a pause on this. Let's reevaluate our goals. I don't think we're going to be successful, but that takes a lot of guts. to say. And to be honest, I didn't do that where, and I should have at times at Amazon, um, because that would have meant a whole lot of changes that would be emotionally difficult for me to defend. I would have to go say, Hey,
senior manager with your 20 SDEs reporting to you. Maybe you guys are all wasting your time and have been for the last six months. That's a hard thing to say. Whatever. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting connection to some of this. And so anyhow, that's what I wanted to highlight from the points that you brought into it. I think that were interesting aspects. Yeah, well, I think we were about to talk about what do we do when we recognize.
What's been helpful for you? Or I can talk about what's helped me to get unburned out. Well, I would say, and some people resist to this, I know, but I would say get a therapist. find one that actually knows a bit about this and can help you navigate through things. Get a therapist. Get a mentor that can help you navigate through things that can give you different perspectives. In some cases, you may be taking certain things too seriously, but they are not really as serious.
Something that I would say is very important is be very careful with energy sinks or energy drainers. And this could be situations, this could be people. If you are in a context where something is not going well and you are in a leadership position and you have built trust with people, you will see that there is people that tends to complain so that's an interesting factor that i found out you have to be careful because that's an energy drainer and there's nothing you can do
I think what I'm trying to say is that be very careful with energy drainers in general. Take a step back and try to think, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Do you really like to do it? Would you be happier doing something else? Would you be happier in a different role, in a different team, in a different company?
Thinking a lot through this and trying to be realistic, it's extremely important. Coming back to identifying these situations in which this is just challenging or this is just an impossible situation where you're fighting against things that you should not be fighting, that they may not.
sense and that you know that you don't have the influence that despite of seeing them and understanding how they should be changing and proposing the changes and so on and so forth, you ultimately don't have the influence to really changing them and they are not going to change. So I think that awareness it's important. I don't know, I'm pretty sure I'm missing things. What do you think? Those are some of the ones that I have in my mind.
Yeah, definitely. I left this section to last because I struggle with this. I don't have an easy set of bullet points that I spit out that I routinely apply in my own life, but... I think one of the most helpful things that I've heard others express to me that is helpful is just an awareness of how difficult it is and a general sentiment to not punish yourself too much. A lot of the cycles that I fall into when I'm burned out.
are not only, oh, I'm cynical about this bullshit project that I'm working on and blah, blah, blah, but a lot of it is also self-inflicted. So I'll sit there in my office staring at a blank, empty document that I'm supposed to write by the next morning. and just like sitting there like punishing myself frustrated with myself because i can't do this telling myself all these bad things that i'm useless or that i just need to sit down and do this and i don't know stuff like that
It's not like I have an easy solution not to do that, but I think it's ultimately just awareness. So I think that's one is just trying to be kinder to myself and recognizing when I'm in one of these cycles. And I actually really liked what you said about paying attention to your energy drain. retainers. This is a good way to phrase this. And I think you were talking specifically about people, but you could apply this to
projects and areas of work. And if I think back to the times when I was burned out, of course, this wasn't like this easy bar graph or this line graph that went up over time. And here at this point, I was burned out, right? There were multiple things all happening at one time. Some of these projects were energy drainers and ultimately burned me out. Some of these were...
I don't know what the term is for the opposite, but things that I would invest time and energy in and I would get stuff back. I would feel good about myself. I would feel like I was contributing. And so one of the things that did help and that still helps is just being aware of these things.
things, making sure I was telling myself, oh yeah, like this is one of those things that I feel good about. I'm going to invest time in this. This is one of those things that sucks every time I'm focusing on this and it doesn't, not to say that I would always.
ignore those or neglect those because sometimes those are the most important things but at least telling myself oh yeah this is one of those energy drainers but i told my boss that i would go have this meeting with this other person so at least i'll do that this helped me at least mitigate it and Be aware of it. Your first suggestion, get a therapist. Definitely true. I'll also say it's one of those things that is easier said than done.
I've seen a couple of therapists and originally I wanted to specifically find someone who had experience in the tech industry. And I did find someone that I thought was going to be really good and ended up not working out. I couldn't see them for some reason. I was living abroad at the time. And ultimately I did have a therapist at some point, but I didn't have very specific goals in mind.
for what I wanted out of it. And I never did a good job of vocalizing those, and he never did a great job of pulling them out of me. So it became someone that I checked in with occasionally over time. But I struggled to really solve anything long term and dive really deep into some of my negative cycles. Ultimately, I did connect with another therapist.
on a completely unrelated topic. And I did make some progress in sort of identifying, like looking back at times when I was struggling at work and being like, oh yeah, I was suffering from anxiety around this. And I can now...
point to these thought cycles that I would get in that would lead me to these kind of behaviors. So I'm echoing your sentiment, but just having some awareness that it's hard. You may go through multiple people. You may struggle to define what is the question? What is the thing you're trying to solve?
What is the thing you're trying to get out of it? That evolved for me over time. That makes sense. I think a couple of things coming from your comments is like, it is not an instantaneous process. It is a long... term process, a build-up until you get there, which actually makes me think that
awareness of how are you feeling is really important as a preventive mechanism that doesn't come supernaturally to me and i don't know if that's we're both men and we're kind of socialized that way i think that's part of it i think there's a word for that I'd have to go look it up. You know what I'm talking about? Maybe not. No, absolutely. I know what you're talking about. And I think in my case was to shield myself behind the expression of I'm a professional.
Right. And it kind of means I'm a professional. Hence, I don't bring this type of feelings to workplace because I'm a professional. And again, I think there are good things of that attitude of thinking that way.
uh but on the other side you need to be a professional that it's also connected with your feelings yeah i think and it's aware of what's going on to that extent i think people and i've done this too are using it as a shield to not recognize and not process their own emotions something that helped me incredibly was and i still do it today was talking to people
about this whole thing and i think part of having this conversation is again as we say in the introduction of the podcast it's therapeutic for us and i think it's very important because when you talk to people you start finding the same feelings in a bunch of other folks and when you open to right people you start seeing them opening them to you and you start
double checking what is the expression of this like checking notes yeah comparing comparing notes and realizing that is you are not going through this alone a lot of people is feeling in a similar way and that to some extent alleviates the the pressures or the heaviness like as you said i'm gonna go to this meeting which is an energy drainer i really don't want to do this but i committed to do this and it's important for the team so i'm gonna do it it's a way different attitude to it.
you get something different energy-wise than when you just go and not acknowledge all those things. Yeah. The biggest thing is just being aware. I know I'm saying that a lot and it sounds repetitive, at least to me, but it's a huge thing. And this was new. This is not something that I've always done in my career. being aware of all this stuff. Honestly, it's really only since I left Amazon. That was less than two years ago. I'm 38.
So it's not like a large chunk of my life that I've been in touch with these feelings. But since I left Amazon, I realized that I was getting pretty much all of my social interactions, all of these things that we're talking about validation from other humans, connect. to other people i don't think i really explicitly acknowledged that i was getting that out of work i just told people and it's still true that i'm an introvert but i get all my social interactions out at work well
when I quit my job and I lost all of that, I actually struggled a lot. It sucked. And I've started realizing that, oh yeah, when I do have coffee with a friend and we commiserate about this bad manager that we had, oh, I got some validation that I wasn't crazy. I got to connect with another person that's now going and doing other interesting things.
that feels good. I didn't do that intentionally, even up until when I was at Amazon. It's taken me a lot, and I've had to go through a lot of growth to recognize, oh yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm connecting with another person, and that's making me feel good. I think a lot of the, and I don't know if this happened to you, it happened to me. I think, ironically, by not being working on big tech or anything like that in the last year, I actually think I grew a lot.
And I think the reason of that is that when you are in the job and in the center of the problem, the storm, however you want to call it, sometimes you don't have time to think of a bunch of things that you... probably should. And you are just in solving problems, doing things, connecting people, coaching people, et cetera, mode. I think for me, it was very interesting through the last year to actually think about my career. It's the first time.
20 something, 25 years or something like that, that I can actually stop and think. A lot of things about the last eight years at Amazon are about things that happened before. And it's very interesting the process of thinking, seeing things with clarity that I probably would not have seen.
with such a clarity two years ago no i definitely agree and really i enjoyed my time at amazon for sure and i think any big company it would have been similar i think i would say the same thing what am i trying to say here i have the same experience And it is kind of working at a big company, working at any company constrains your thinking in a way, because I also have done the same thing.
And if I were to try to do the same kind of thinking while I was employed, the end result of that thinking might be that I should go fuck off to a beach for a couple of weeks and not work on work. And that's just not compatible with someone paying you a paycheck to work 40 hours a week.
And so even if I dreamed of that, I ultimately couldn't have that open conversation with myself where I decide that's the best course of action. Yeah. What do you think about The impact of having things outside work depends what you mean Projects coding projects No. I mean, if you want them to have them, absolutely. If that's your passion project, absolutely. Don't feel bad about it. But there's already this huge pressure that people feel to have to do coding outside of work.
i don't think that's healthy to feel the pressure if that's not what you want to do as far as hobbies there have been times where the only hobby i really had was work i'm not going to say it's super healthy but at the time it was okay that's what i was investing in Now that's not true. And I can point to lots of things that I want to have outside of that. I think the biggest thing that is important to have outside of work is friends.
I didn't have a lot of personal friends outside of work. Of course, you have work friendships. But again, that goes back to what I was saying before. I struggled to intentionally maintain those friendships while I was working.
just just because that's where a lot of my emotional energy was going to so it's easy for me to say oh yeah i should have maintained those um but at the time i didn't have time now i do and i'm recognizing what benefits i get out of avid having it and i'm refreshing those and all that i don't know what would you say yeah i think you should look for same as you should avoid things that drain energy
You should also look for things outside work that bring you energy. And I think they should be friends. And in your case, it worked that it has worked and you're realizing the importance of that. In my case, I do enjoy doing certain coding outside work. These normally are things that are completely unrelated to whatever I'm doing at my job.
a profound like for doing them and things like that and it's like creating a toy for me not to some extent and then i find joy on that but i think doing other things you like photography do photography i do photography or exercise or whatever i think it's really important if you find yourself doing those things and getting energy that's the critical part whether it's an energy source or an energy sink
and there there have been times in my career and i'm sure for years where coding was an energy sink and no matter what it was when you identified you were burned out probably you didn't need to be coding you shouldn't have felt pressure to continue doing it at that moment Yeah, something that has worked for me, and it may not work for everybody, although I think there is a lot of science behind this thing.
it's exercise oh yeah it's i i think it's essential to prevent and to overcome burnout is try to figure it out some routine call it running cycling whatever people likes to do and try to find time to do those things it's very hard to get into it once you've been out of it and it's hard advice to hear i know i've fluctuated at times and the times when i needed it the most were the times where i was most likely to
no screw it i'm going to sit down and sit on the couch and do other destructive things it's really but you're absolutely right The benefits you get from it, the mental benefits, and of course, physical benefits. The mental benefits are really what I like about it. It really does clear your head and you solve a lot of problems. I went on a run this morning thinking about what I would talk about on this episode. Hugely beneficial.
I agree. I found out that it controls my mood and it's really important for me and that when I am in this situation in which I'm in the coach and I want to do it and when I finally get the willpower to go and do it and get it done. After that, I feel incredibly well, right? And it's like, you realize that it's silly to have been there in the coach fighting it. And it's like, okay, yes. So for me, it has become an incredibly piece of my life and in the last two years.
and it has helped me keeping me afloat that's been very important yeah and you have to pay attention to that again being aware of that cycle you know that initially it's going to be some amount of pain but you you train your brain to look ahead and think about oh man i'm going to feel so good when i finish this
um and even when you get out of the cycle because it happens you get into the bus you start doing a lot of exercise and then sometimes you have three weeks that are a disaster in that sense but now i get to the point in which after those three weeks i am like oh I need this. I start connecting the way I'm feeling to the lack of exercise and it's like, okay, it's one additional motivation to actually go and do it and get it done.
Alright folks, I think we've been talking for a long time at this point about this topic. And I think it's a very important topic, very complex. And I think it's a topic that people should keep talking about it. And we probably could keep talking about it for a while. We haven't mentioned, for example...
things like the connection between social media and burnout, which I believe it exists. And I could talk a lot about that, but I don't think it's worth at this point making this conversation even longer than it has been. So anyhow, I think it's really important to raise awareness about this.
and about mental health in the job than burnout. So I think it was worth talking about this and it's worth keep talking eventually in the future, maybe when we find another opportunity. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I had a really good time kind of... diving in and trying to summarize what I think burnout is. And I'm excited to explore this topic over time because I'm sure that
things that I say now, I'm sure that when we revisit this topic, I'll probably have a new and updated understanding of this. I can have new examples. So yeah, this is definitely something I see revisiting in the future. Thanks. All right. Thank you, Dan, for the conversation today. I think it has been great. And see you in the next episode. Sounds good. See you next time.
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