Ep13 - Burnout (with Nav Rao)

Welcome to Bytes in Balance, the podcast where we navigate the wild world of software engineering together. I'm Dan and this is Demian. 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 vent 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.

Hello, folks. We have a guest today. Hello, Dan. Good to see you again. Hello. Hello, NAP. Thank you for coming. Howdy ho, nice to have you. Nav is a, he calls himself a floating software engineer, which I think is kind of a freelancing, also a way to talk about freelancing. He has worked in early stages, startups in New Zealand and Australia. He has 10 plus years of experience, and I'm really excited to have him here.

because how this conversation actually started and i'm gonna tell the story a little bit we were like fooling around linkedin as sometimes we do and i step into your profile i saw your tagline that says like engineer recovering from burnout and depression i was like oh that connects with me

Right? That could be me. It's connected with a lot of people, to be honest. I agree. And I love your sense of humor, by the way, on LinkedIn. It makes me laugh. Some of the humor that you put there. And we had a conversation. I have this thing of reaching out to people.

to have e-coffees. And I've been doing this since I quit Amazon and I love it. And if anybody listening this actually wants any coffee, I'm always open to those things. And we have a great conversation about burnout. You told me about a few things that you are doing.

some of your perspectives. I love that we have to have this conversation. Dan and I did an episode on Burnout, shared our stories, etc. And I think it's a topic that we should be talking more in the industry. It's an important topic. So welcome now to the podcast.

Yeah, no, thank you for having me here. I'm glad someone's finding my LinkedIn humor appropriate. That just started out of a sheer displeasure of being on that platform. Gratuitous self-flagellation. I think is the way I would describe a lot of my LinkedIn experience. Yeah, it's all really toxic hustle culture kind of crap. Yeah, it is. And it's from people who you don't think would be listening to that kind of content.

I feel like they're not really hustling, which is obvious, but they've signed up with a coach that's probably told them how to get more views on LinkedIn. And then they're following some script to do that. So there's such a difference between the people that I've spoken to and their content that it's almost like split personality.

Yeah, and it's sad because I like connecting with new people, you know, and having those experiences. And when you jump into LinkedIn, you see so much crap, which is like, oh, man, this could be so great. But it is the algorithm, the influence. And I'm hoping that we are going to move towards an anti-influencer situation eventually. I actually think we might want to have more influences, but maybe scale down a little bit.

So there are less Mr. Beasts and less these giant entities, but more smaller groups of a thousand followers or 10,000 followers. I'm not a big fan of that huge cult of personality experience, but at the same time... I can't see any better way to counteract AI slop than humans. Real humans putting out real human generated content. Exactly.

and reviewing content out there as well. Because the only issue is just that these real humans are constantly battling the algorithm and therefore they're putting out more and more slop to effectively make money. So is there a way where they don't have to do that? You could not care about making any money like us. Oh, yeah. And then you wake up in the morning and you think, ah, I would really like some scrambled eggs at my favorite local cafe. But I don't have any money to pay for it. Exactly.

Think it's definitely a tricky thing I do some photography and I follow a particular folk that it's actually in that thought process of, guys, what are we doing? It's the whole influencing thing is YouTube is full of people that it's great at making YouTube videos and getting followers, but they do probably nothing about photography ultimately.

I think software applies the same. It's the algorithm eating everything. Maybe when I talk about the influencer, it's like, try to figure it out, which is that next thing that can somehow compensate the algorithm and try to make a better world and a better social media. And I wonder, coming back to our topic, if there is some connection with burnout there too. Even social media and selling us what you are supposed to be or what you should be versus what you actually can be.

There's a person on YouTube, Katie Morton, maybe? I'm not 100%. I'd have to Google that one. But basically, Katie Morton is this individual who I think comes from a science background or a psychology background and...

has done some YouTube videos on influencer or creator burnout, specifically creator burnout. And a lot of it comes from comparison. We were probably comparing ourselves to everyone else. My career was very much a mix of agency, early stage startup. For a long time, I compared myself to AWS engineers or Microsoft engineers or the like.

And it felt like I had to work late nights in order to get to it on a very short tangent. I had a friend who was studying late nights for months on end in order to get a role at Facebook. and failed two times but on the second time he was actually flown over there this was in new zealand he got pretty far yeah but he had burned himself out to get to that point It was one of those things where like now coming back, I also think that could have been me.

The only difference was I didn't continue to pursue that FAANG-related role, but instead I decided to deepen myself in the generalist space for early-stage startups. Yeah, I think that's definitely a thing that has gotten worse in the last couple of years, like specifically FANG hiring practices. Like both me and Demian do this career interview coaching with people. And so we're constantly talking to people who are going through this. And like Facebook is the worst of the worst too.

terms of I think they just took the dial on their interview difficulty and just cranked it up three to four years ago because they have so many more candidates and so many more people trying to get a job there. From their perspective, it's easy to scale their hiring by just throwing more and more difficult, stupid

math kind of leet code problems at people and just crank up the difficulty there to, oh, you got to solve two of these in 45 minutes now or whatever. You know, it certainly wasn't that difficult to get into Fang. Well, when I got in or in like 2016 to 2022 or whatever, I mean, I don't want to ramble about that, but it's an interesting angle to burnout in the last couple of years. I think the tech industry, the tech hiring practices have gotten more and more brutal just because of everything.

I see a lot of mentees on that track and they reach out once they say, I want you to train me for passing the interview to get to fine and blah, blah, blah. Sometimes they have great jobs. They are having fun.

But that's all they care. It's like they want to get to fang, fang, fang, fang. And it's like, are you sure that's what you really want? And I normally don't take those mentorships that are just about that because there's not much I can actually tell you. Just go grind, lead code, et cetera. But it's kind of sad to see. And don't get me wrong, right? I went through Fang. I learned a bunch of things there. That was great. But I don't think my career would have been worse if I hadn't.

Yeah, Nav, it was interesting you talked about comparing yourself to AWS engineers. We worked with and were AWS engineers, and all we saw were people comparing themselves against each other. Or even we would compare ourselves to engineers from the higher quality, the higher tier fangs, because Amazon's always been at lower.

tier fang right that's how it's looked at internally we would look at netflix or now it's probably nvidia or open ai or whatever you know oh yeah go there if you want to make way more money and work on that next tier of things i think you can't escape the whole comparison game anywhere you go. I'm just wondering, with that comparison game, there was this joke on a Craig Ferguson episode. This is like late night with Craig Ferguson. It's like a really old late night show in the US.

I think it got replaced by someone less charismatic. But anyway, Craig kind of talked about growing up in Scotland and his dad was a postman. That was his life. He was going to be a postman. So he thought maybe he would end up being a postman because that was his career. And he said everything changed when he saw this person on TV. And he thought, oh, I want to do that. of course this is probably hyperbole and he is an entertainer after all but it makes me sort of think

I grew up in Fiji for the later part of my teenage years, and gosh, there's almost nothing there, really. And I'd been in the States, so when I went back to Fiji, it felt like going back 20 years. I was watching episodes of MASH. and i love lucy probably more than 20 years if you really think about it and almost no one in my neighborhood had a super nintendo or even a computer

So I was the only one with an aging, I think it was Compaq back then, floppy disks and zip disks. And my entire world was just in that machine.

And then when the internet came about, my world opened up and I had greater possibilities and more things I wanted to do. But I sometimes wonder... gosh darn it did that just lead me down a really bad path like would you have been happier just staying within what you had you mean or maybe

Or maybe, I mean, how do you define it? How do you know for certain? Is a person who is a farmer who spends their life on their farm happy about their farming? Or did they just do it because they thought they couldn't do anything else? Who knows? Yeah, it's funny. Lots of software engineers and tech people jokingly talking about retiring to farming.

And it's like real farming is actually either really backbreaking hard work or it's just constantly stressing about what the next season is going to bring and dealing with massive loans and subsidies and all kinds of crap like that. But I think that we crave that simplicity of life. That's what it reflects. For example, I come from a tropical country.

You don't have to deal with winter. Whatever you throw in the land, it's going to grow. Just grab your hands and grab a banana. And I suspect that some of those countries actually don't progress sometimes technologically because it's like, why bother?

man it could be such a simple life to some extent and we live in this modern society which expects so much from us we work at companies and industries expect so much from us and we are always under the shadow of something else going on and happening right now is a and people get a lot of pressure with AI, we don't realize.

The amount of pressure that we do have constantly on us and burnout could be coming also from that too. And I think when people say it's like, oh, I want to retire and become a farmer. Yeah, sure. They don't know all those complexities, but that's what they are craving. It's like, hey, can I just, you know, grow my food in the...

backyard and send the world a little bit to hell maybe and they're responding to all that pressure and they want that feeling of just being disconnected for a while and yeah that's all understandable

Yeah, and there's also that physical labor, right? As self-engineers, look, it can put a twirl on your body, but just get a really good Herman Miller and you're fine. I think there's something to be said about like actually physical labor. It makes you feel at the end of the day like you just did something. Well, I don't know if this happened to you guys, but I got into computers very young, like nine, 10 years, something like that. Maybe some of you guys did the same.

And it has been, you know, in this world for a long time. And it was my world for a long time. I grew up a little bit in the country. There were opportunities to do some labor, gardening, etc. It was never my thing. I never identify with that. But it's interesting, the older I get, the... more I actually crave that.

the more I crave like, OK, close the laptop and just look outside, go outside, grab something, shovel, make a hole in the dirt and put a plant down there or something like that. And I keep thinking, for example, of my dad and how he would laugh in that sense. No, because it's like this.

that was 16, 20, even 30 or something that would never care about that thing. And now it's craving it back. It's fun to think in that sense. And I think it's the digital world gets too complex and we crave that simplicity.

So Nav, I'm curious, what does your working life look like these days? Are you fully employed? Are you freelancing? Did you go through sort of a burnout and quit your job phase? Like Demian and me, I don't have the context on what you guys already talked about. Man, that's a good guess. Wow. Well, it's what I did and Demian sort of.

yeah i've actually gone through that stage maybe three or four times with different roles basically you hit nail on the head and last uh guess i was in an agritech startup the role was incredibly simple they wanted a data engineer and didn't have a lot of data so all they really needed was just some really complex s3 rules i set that up and led a small team to understand data from a geospatial lens as opposed to a simple conversions and 2d metrics

And I was just burning out. I was too much politics. It was a startup, but even then, there were a lot of people who had come in from larger orgs. And when you have people from larger orgs come in to a startup and they're not first principles focused, they bring everything from their previous role. They bring all their policies and all their things that worked for them at their corporate gig. Absolutely. Yeah.

And it didn't work. It absolutely slowed things down and it created more strife within the organization. So I had to deal with that. I had to deal with that as someone who was trying to manage two juniors and also unofficially managing some other teams because they weren't having a good time.

I just thought this isn't working out. I mean, I've literally got leadership gaslighting me. And I just thought, all right, I'm done. I closed the door on that one. I was luckily at the time, literally a day a week. helping a very early stage startup get to a stage where they can have customers. And so a bit of like a fractional lead role. It was serendipitous that when I dipped out of my full-time role and now I looked at my income and thought,

Well, I got none. That one startup that I'd helped was in a position to actually bring me on for like some paid days. So far, it's basically been that. I have been doing that and that's enough for me to pay my rent. pay off some debts, but nothing to save. On the side, I've just been exploring whatever random idea would come to mind. So yeah, kind of similar to us, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So definitely doing my blog. I'm really enjoying writing that.

but also just other random things. Yeah, it connects heavily with also my story. I think for me was like, this is not fun anymore. What I was, what I was doing. This is not fun anymore. And I just crave that fun. It's the reason I got into this. You get into computers because you turn on this thing that it's marvelous and you type a few things and that thing starts doing what you told it to do. What amazing that is. And that's fun.

And there is a moment in which, yeah, it stops being fun. It's politics, deadlines that doesn't make sense, that just don't make sense at all, and a bunch of things like that. And it's like, okay, so I can't. I just don't have the energy to keep going. And it's getting out and trying to figure it out. out and find it and find awesome things like this podcast, for example, that for me, it's an energy producer in that sense. I think people think that burnout is just

I'm working 11 hours a day, seven days a week. I'm going to get burned out. I mean, sure, there is some of that for sure. But I think it's beyond that is the lack of that energy, the lack of that purpose, what actually ultimately drives you to burn out too.

Yeah, I found that to be true. Like in my later years, when I was sort of more burned out and more frustrated, I wasn't working as much. There were actually some times where there was a lot of pressure or some big project and I would work a lot. But most of the times when I worked...

a lot of hours, it was because I was actually really interested in what I was doing and I was really excited and engaged and I would just squeeze it in here and there where I could. When I was really burned out and frustrated, I was probably working like 30, 35 maybe, just like phoning it in.

to be honest that made it all worse because I wasn't able to find something that I was passionate about I was just keeping up with the bare minimum of my different commitments and stuff but not really engaged or passionate yeah absolutely There are definitely different ways to burnout and that you've just described is exactly how I felt. Well, yes, there was a lot of terrible leadership. There was also...

simply not enough work that actually motivated me. As much as I liked being a manager and helping these people out, I didn't have that many direct reports that kept me that engaged. So I didn't really have 40 hours of work. My team did. But I didn't want to take on absolutely everything that I gave them. I had to almost break work down for them. So they had a great time doing it. And I would go off and do the more mundane.

Honestly, I do love a good architecture, a review or a diagram, but it is boring. I'd much rather actually prototype and write code. It probably made you a good manager. You know, your teammates probably had a good experience, but that probably took a toll on you too. I can tell you that one of my greatest joys was probably, it hurt me a little bit.

But when I had these junior engineers for a while, I was particularly this one junior. So I had a scientist who was trying to transition into learning how to write more code. So she had come from a geospatial background.

Luckily, Python. And I really enjoyed pairing because when you pair with them, you get a chance to sort of kind of write the code, but also show how you're writing the code and give them an opportunity to come along with the journey. Fascinating experience. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

And if you've read my LinkedIn post, you also know that I basically just make jokes almost all the time. That's what I'm doing. I am just constantly making jokes and writing code and also answering questions about why am I doing it this way or why am I doing it that way?

yeah and you're teaching another person right that's really fulfilling too it is very fulfilling it's absolutely fulfilling because you get to see their skills develop whether you were the one that helped them do it or not you get to see them develop further and unfortunately that also means that they don't need to pair with you as much so now you're sort of like ah do you want to pair on the problem it's like oh i don't know i think i've got it some well geez okay

yeah that was definitely like the part of my role that i really enjoyed and it was also learning a whole different world geospatial satellite data being able to like understand the difference between pixels that define water and pixels that define a tree and i thought that was really fun But yeah, the burnout in that place was definitely more boredom and emotional than it was in some startups where the burnout was 80 hours a week.

When bureaucracy kills things to some extent, it's like, I'm a builder. I like building things. And if you put a bunch of bureaucracy and a bunch of processes or policies or whatever in front of what I am trying to build, and I'm not disregarding policies and bureaucracy at all. is required, but you need to figure it out.

You're fighting the wrong battle. Instead of building the thing that you want to release, you're fighting the bureaucracy, the policy, the whatever. And I think burnout also comes from that. It's like, well, what is the point of keep fighting the system I want to deliver? And the system is not necessarily helping me. to deliver the system, I mean policies, bureaucracy, etc.

Another interesting thing is that I think teaching is amazing. And what you have described, it's an amazing story. I had a professor at the university that said the person that learns the most in a classroom is the one that holds the chalk. I experienced that also firsthand.

when I taught a little bit for six years at the university. And it's like, even with my mentees, they don't realize that I am learning from them. It's not that I'm just giving, giving, giving. It's that I'm learning from them. And I enjoy that a lot too. I should say...

It was a very selfish thing. I just really liked the feeling I got from teaching. So it's not so great like altruistic, oh my gosh, this person is trying to like change the world. No, I just felt good doing it. And maybe in a bit of a narcissistic way. enjoyed feeling smart so hey whatever your qualms about teaching just know it doesn't have to be altruistic if it makes you feel good do it

Yeah. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think we all have to find ways to find stuff that's like useful, pays money, is fulfilling, helps people, whatever. Some combination of any of those things.

And it boils down also circling back with burnout. I think we've been talking about what are those things that actually burn out people. And we haven't talked about hours fighting the wrong battles and things like that. I also think that purpose is an important one. I think I'm in a stage of my life. which I rather make much less money.

but have way more purpose than make a ton of money and have no purpose. Like I think mission is really important for me at this point. That's part of the connection. There is a moment in which you are working for certain companies, etc. And you think like, what's the mission here? What am I really...

doing here to make people's life better or make the world better or just have some type of impact on that sense. I mean, sure, you're delivering things that are making a lot of money for shareholders or whatever. Like, does that really make sense? I think when you start questioning that and you try to keep. going, burnout actually comes from that too. Yeah, I like to think that my future is me laying on a hospital bed, someone holding my hand, and I'm just pleading and asking.

Did I bring enough shareholder value? Just as I slip away. You're right. Absolutely. I would really like to bring purpose or fulfill purpose and make a lot of money at the same time.

There's definitely been times earlier in my career where I was motivated to make a lot of money. And I don't think that's necessarily selfish. I mean, you're building a future for yourself and for your family. And unfortunately, in the US, we don't have much of a safety net. And that's the whole thing you have to think about.

I've been motivated by how much my own paycheck is going to increase, but I've never been motivated by how much money is this thing that I built going to make the company itself. yeah absolutely i think that motivation changes a little bit with the early stage startups though because you're so so close to your founder whether you're the founder or you're a first hire you are kind of motivated by this idea of growing the company and

And that's a pretty scary place to be in as well, because the failures in your code base, the bugs, whatever, can make such an impact on your ability to close a deal and your inability to maybe meet a deadline that could be very silly. Actually, let's be honest, it is very silly. has an impact on whether bringing in enough money or reducing the burn enough that you can continue for another six months to a year.

That is definitely like another stressful thing that you find possibly different between an early stage startup and a larger scale up or a larger established organization where your business owners, your shareholders are a lot more divorced from you in your day to day. That reminds me, you can call them startups, I don't know, in Venezuela. For five years, they pay the bills until the Venezuelan crisis kind of hit.

But the person that owned the company, co-owner or co-founder of the company, whatever you want to call it, the concern was precisely that. How many months of life do I have? I can pay the salaries of these four people for the next six months. Woohoo! Right? It's like, okay, we have six months, clock is ticking. to actually get some contract that actually is going to keep producing and yeah I totally can feel it in that sense

There's one thing that you sort of mentioned a while back, but you kind of mentioned how you didn't enjoy organizational burden. And that doesn't go away, right? There's this conventional wisdom that, oh gosh, okay, you're burning out, go out and touch grass.

And I've gone out. I've touched grass. I'll be honest, I've even smoked it. I've done all of those things. But when I go back to the company afterwards, it's the same organizational burden. I think there's this idea that with burnout, rest is all you need. But you can't leave a situation, come back, be in the same situation and expect to continue on. How do you know you are there? It's a hard thing because sometimes you are having hard days at work.

Sometimes you're just having hard weeks. That's fine. How do you know that you have got to the point in which you are burnout? And who do you know earlier than later, maybe even? At least in my two experiences, the moment that I got to the point in which I realized, like, I'm born out. This is not working. At that point, it's too late probably to actually do something on whatever environment I am right now to recover.

In both cases, I ended quitting and moving to something else. In one of the cases, I was lucky enough that I had these two companies that I mentioned, you know, and I moved to a teaching position at the university. And it was a completely different thing that actually gave me the breathing room that I needed to recover.

last case in Amazon it was like just need to quit then it's not that I can zoom to another job or whatever just I'm done with the industry for at least some time maybe if I had caught some of these things earlier that would not have been the case so it's like how do we know early enough how do we

know when we have finally got in there and what do you think what do we do what are alternatives that people have I actually have a theory that you can capture it you absolutely can't figure it out it's called AI

It's not necessarily AI in its own right. I think there are models that you could probably use. If I had to go back, and like I said, this has happened to me four times in different ways. One through boredom, one through stress, one through personal crisis, and another time through stress.

And in every single time it's happened, there are things that stand out. Maybe it was this particular blog post that you read, Damien, but there was this talk I did around considering burnout from the perspective of the gambler.

Here's a poker game. Now, when do you know when to walk away? How do you know when to walk away? How do you know when to fold? I think there are like elements of that that I've been sort of mulling over in my head. I'll give you an example. Does your dialogue change on Slack? Do you find yourself being more and more cut? Do you find yourself using less candor? Maybe more candor?

I like to make jokes. I make it all the time. And I created a Simpsons channel in my old workplace because who doesn't like The Simpsons? Seasons 1 to 10. I think if I look back in hindsight, you could probably tell that something was wrong based upon my activity.

your involvement in that in those channels yeah you could tell based upon the fact that i was working a little bit later on certain days and pushing out prs but it's not because i was working the whole day it's because i couldn't work the majority of the day Now, is it because of meetings? Is it because I simply just couldn't function? It's hard to measure that part, right? Because there's a whole bunch of things that go on that isn't just writing code. So obviously that's difficult to measure.

But I think there's signals in your workplace environment and in the tools you use that can help identify that you're slowly creeping into burnout. Yeah, I got feedback similar to that one time. It was a long, long time ago. I think it was my first team at Amazon. And I had been there a while. I think I had been there like four or five years at this point. And I got feedback from someone else, someone I really respected, who basically said, you are becoming really cynical.

And I looked at it and I was like, yeah, I totally am. Because in meetings I would be like, oh, this is never going to work. We had this mountain of legacy code that we had to deal with. I wasn't hopeful about our ability to crawl out from under this. And I wasn't able to see. Yeah, I was basically.

burning out so i've looked at that now a couple of times again in my career of like if i start seeing myself getting really cynical about things that's a signal to me that i'm getting more and more burned out it's hard because that is a natural part of my personality to like

see problems and point out flaws and think of the worst case scenario. I think that's something who I am. But when I notice it getting really bad or trending towards the really cynical part, that's how I know I'm getting burned out. yeah i love cynicism i've grown up with that as a form of humor i watched daria i watched those tv shows growing up i think there's an old simpsons mtv joke i'm the mtv era i feel neither high is no lows that's my personality

But it's always relative to my environment. If I'm talking with a bunch of junior engineers who are just coming into the industry, I know enough to temper my cynicism. But you can tell when I'm burning out, I'm not careful. I am just a very different person. So is there a way to define, to measure that these are the traits that make up this individual and these are the anomalies? Now, I'm not saying the burnout, but I'm saying, hey, something's up. I agree.

In my case, it's anger. I don't think of myself as an angry person in general. I love talking to people. I love explaining the same thing several times if I have to. It's just fine. But when I find myself getting harsh to the point that I have actually ended meetings and then talking with the person I was talking and saying like, hey, I'm sorry if I was harsh. And they don't notice it. I notice it. They are like, no, what do you mean? But I notice it enough to say something.

things going on here you're talking about this as a self-reflection tool to some extent or you're thinking of an automatic way i'm curious about that perspective look we can talk about automated ways to do it but i fear that it could be used against you Yeah, I don't want the AI assistant to be like, you sound like you're getting cynical. Go take a walk. I'm not going to respond well to that. Yeah.

Or probably what's worse is management just saying, all right, this person's burning out. We got to find someone new. Yeah. Let's be honest. There's so many people out there. And maybe this is my cynicism coming out again. But I think we're more than likely going to see folk. try to avoid the problem by pushing you into a pip or getting rid of you or moving into another role.

Yeah, that's one thing I'm wondering about is so all those things, it feels like in the last couple of years, the tech industry is getting less employee friendly. A couple of years ago, when everybody was desperate for software engineers, you know, it felt like there was this culture of companies cared about be a good. place to work.

It feels like there's a lot less of that now. That doesn't seem to be helping my burnout. Me thinking about going back and getting another full-time job. I mean, I'm looking for part-time work. I want to be coding and doing side projects and stuff. I'm enjoying all that. But I'm kind of thinking, at some point, I have to pay for college for these two kids.

Like I'm going to have to go back and get a full-time job, but man, I don't really want to right now. And I wonder how much of that is just the state of the industry. And will that get better over time? Or is that just my own burnout and cynicism? I just feel the same. No difference there.

I am in a position right now where I need to stop making some money. I don't have dependents in the form of children, but I do have a mother who is elderly and I need to think about her. What happens if she gets sick and blah, blah, blah. So... I have looked at roles, I've done scans, and I've come across some pretty awesome opportunities, and then just sat with it and realized,

I can't do this. It sounds great, but I just know it's going to be a couple of Jira tickets or linear tickets or whatever, and I'm just going to just not have a good time. I do the same thing. You can already project forward and already know exactly the flavor of bullshit you're going to encounter. And it's like, oh man, I'm in the same place.

You went through it for real life. I won't say the name of the company, but you briefly joined the company and tried it out. And man, the things you described there. Yeah, I mean, it was like, nope, not working. Definitely. It's a very interesting commonalities that we are seeing.

I've actually got a short interview with someone immediately after the session and I've actually been very upfront with them and I just told them, look, I think I could be the kind of person you need for a couple of days a week. However, I'm wary of the fact that you're a very early stage startup and your personality is definitely go, go, go. I have dealt with burnout. I'm still dealing with burnout. So I would love to have a few chats with your engineering team only so I can understand.

what you actually need and whether I have the cognitive capacity to do it. And then we'll carry on with the rest of the interview. That's what I've asked for. And I've had to be incredibly upfront with people because I am, whether it's a full-time role or a part-time role, I'm just upfront now.

I know it could probably impact me later, but I feel it's better to do it now than land a role and hate it. Yeah. And I think it's incredibly healthy in the sense that it narrows down what you are looking for. It helps you to find what it is for you.

I went through an interview like five, six weeks ago or something like that, and it didn't went well. I got back like a bunch of weird feedback. I ended really angry about the whole thing. There's one of these weird thing that you are not even talking with an engineer. It's an HR.

person that has no technical knowledge and they throw the problem at you, they just record and you're talking out loud to the camera, you know, and just grinding through the problem. I can even talk to engineer and tell him like, hey, does this make sense? What are your thoughts? And have that thought process. And then I get a bunch of feedback from.

the code itself. And I'm like, what the hell? I even talk about a bunch of these things in the video. And then I realized that they're just quickly looking at the code and saying no or whatever. And they're probably not even watching at the video or listening at the whole thing. It's like, it's funny. It made me angry. And I had this conversation.

with my wife and whatever and she points out like but that's a place you probably don't want to work at and it's like yeah that's true that's a place i don't want to work at That's a terrible experience. That's such a low investment on their part. You're the one that has to record this video and recording a video talking in like a one way conversation. That's awful.

Yeah, we probably are in a moment of our careers in which we can say, this is who we are. This is what we have done. We know that we can bring a lot of value in the table, but being upfront in the sense that this is what we're looking for. And if it is not for you, that's great. Move on.

So it's a very interesting perspective there. It's definitely going to narrow down the companies that are going to say yes, for sure. But I suspect that the ones that say yes and that find you is going to be a good deal for both sides. oh without a doubt i just wish there were more opportunities out there so that probability was higher i think you're right in that all this ai talk all this anti-employee

I don't know when it started. I generally don't know when it started, but I do think that, yes, there was way too high a market for engineers. I could get a role and get paid. pretty dang well. And then someone else could be hired in six months with the same role as me and get paid so much more, almost 1.5 times more. And I would just sit back and think, should I just quit and get rehired?

It's easy to look back on that and realize it was kind of a bubble, but at the time it felt, is this going to keep going? It was just weird. Yeah. I accepted a role there was a smaller company with a senior position and I thought wow this is the company I want to work for this is great I love their ethos and all that kind of stuff And I didn't take the role because again, massive hiring. Someone offered me a lower role, like a mid-level role, but at a higher salary.

than a senior one. And I thought, I can cruise a little bit. I can have a really chill time. Until I realized my personality is not that. My personality isn't... Oh, that's a problem. Well, that's for the seniors to tackle. I will just mosey on and do this ticket and then just call it a day. I kept getting involved as much as I didn't want to. I kept getting involved because I'm enthusiastic. I'm curious. And once you show it and the organization.

around you know, Sid, they will take advantage of it. No, yeah. Do not show your talent. I think it's like a skill. we definitely saw the bubble was going to burst the first sign was probably the elon musk and twitter fiasco it felt like and this is just to me because i'm not in the valley i'm looking at it from the outside in here in australia but i started seeing companies in australia start to parrot the same

things that he was saying and i wasn't necessarily disagreeing with some aspects of it because i definitely saw a lot of squads they call them squads in the last order that i was in that weren't doing a thing they really weren't doing a thing they were cruising Gosh, I had a simple time. And I saw a couple and I was in a platform team and platform team was completely smashed. You know, we used to define ourselves as the else team. So all the squads were if statements and we were else.

Like the buck stopped with you. It absolutely did. And I kept seeing all these other squads. Well, not all of them, obviously, but some of them with such a small, specialized function. The majority of their work was just to have stand-up. Yeah, there was a time where, I mean, especially the big companies, I mean, that's the only perspective that we have, because we were both at Amazon during that time. Well, before that in the bubble, I guess.

Yeah, there was this sense that there was infinite headcount. We could hire as much as we could find people. There were lots and lots of programs or projects or teams that were funded that didn't seem to have a lot of chances of making lots and lots of money. But I think companies were just like, whatever. We got to be investing in all these different things. One of them is going to take off.

I call it the shotgun approach. You have so much money that you just start firing shotgun shots toward the wall and hoping that one of those small bullets will hit the thing and the other ones, you don't care. It's got to be more than a shotgun, right? Because shotguns like the shells will often hit a target. So it's something definitely with a lot more splatter.

True. You know, we saw this here, people jumping from Amazon to Facebook, from Facebook to Google, and then back to Amazon and doubling their salaries in the process. There is a story of somebody quitting their job at one of these big tech companies, and the person had got promoted.

very important promotion and it got to a point in which because of the stock and equity and broken promises or whatever he was making less money have more responsibility than before the promotion and the story as I was told is

person talks with the manager and says like, yeah, you know, I'm quitting. This is crazy. This guy got promoted and he's making less money. And the manager says like, well, I mean, now it's an involved. Now it's an employer market. It's as simple as that. When two years ago, people was jumping and whatever and doing these things. and getting double and triple salary. And this guy told me, he said like, but you know, I stay here. I tried to help you. I did not do that. It was that crazy.

yeah the big overs won't look out for you yeah they won't if there is something that we have learned from the industry in the last three four years is that these companies will say they care they don't reality is that you have to care about yourself and when it comes to burnout you have to care about yourself You have to have your plan B. I should also say I don't think early-stage startups are necessarily going to care about you either. Don't disagree on that, yeah.

Obviously, this amounts to almost every employer-employee relationship. I'm saying that with a cynical lens, but what I've noticed in these startups, especially startups that are VC-backed... is your employer has employers to a degree. They're the investors. And if they're VC backed, then it's great that your CEO or your founder cares about you. But ultimately, it's not going to be at the cost of the business and what the investors say.

So they have to choose something. And you might be in the firing line because they want to keep that business going. It's not such an antagonistic relationship where, oh gosh, you cannot trust any employer. Just know that the needs of the few sometimes outweighs you. Yeah, and I think it's how the system works.

The problem is probably that some people is not aware of this. Some people connect with these companies and enters in these relationships thinking otherwise. And in some cases, these companies foster this. It's like we're a family. We build these connections.

worm and etc. And as humans, I think we are tribe beings that we need to have this tribe and we confuse our tribe with this stuff until it's not there anymore one day. I think the big lesson is that you need to take care of yourself. That's a very important thing because nobody else else is going to.

and it's normal you know everybody has different motivations an employee employer both of those sides of that relationship have different motivations hopefully both people get something valuable out of the relationship but this is something i talk about with my coaching clients a lot

of people who are trying to advance in their careers like think about the motivations of your own direct manager and their manager unless you're at an early stage startup it's not directly like getting customers and getting more revenue it's usually much more complicated oh your manager wants to look good in front of his or her peers

and think about that. I don't think there's anything wrong with thinking about those things and considering them. The bubble has burst in terms of imagining that companies are all going to go out of their way to care about you and personally look out for you.

Yeah, I think it can stay that way for a while longer, especially because of AI. There's a commonality on LinkedIn, at least, of these very tech illiterate individuals mentioned over and over again that, hey, I can build this and I can build that with AI. And look, they can't. It is definitely difficult to do it, but that doesn't mean that another engineer cannot do basically what a squad could previously do.

i've been using cloud code quite a bit lately at first it started out with just me trying to like review my journals and just try to get a grip on my productivity in general and i started using it for code first to just solve problems like copilot was to me

It was pretty dang good. Then I started thinking, oh, what would happen if I converted my code base into something that was a little bit easier to read and understand, like maybe a few more comments, maybe a bit of organizational structure. The kind of things you would do if you were like working in a team and you wanted to...

onboard a bunch of new engineers. You wanted your code to be readable and for someone to be able to grok it as quickly as possible. And guess what? That is so beneficial to AI or current LLMs by specifying an exact domain structure to my projects. Cloud Code can just speed through it and understand most of what I'm trying to write and can solve problems a whole lot faster. I don't need two other engineers now to probably build a product. I can do it by myself.

yeah and that's adding pressure for sure in the market there's no doubt about that And it's not helping people. I get mentees that have that conversation is that, hey, are we going to disappear software engineers? The answer normally is like, I don't know. I don't think so. But you should stay close to these tools for sure. Learn to use them. Don't get under a rock and say like, oh, no. not gonna happen and I'm not gonna use the tools or whatever because then that's a problem

But I think there is some fear on people in that sense. And it doesn't help that big tech is making these announcements of 50% of our code is written by AI, which I don't think at this point is probably a lot of BS there. That's why we fired a thousand people, which happens to be only... 2% of their employee base.

It's hard when all that's happening at the same time, right? When they are laying people off and they are doing a bunch of stuff with AI. I also don't believe that there's that direct connection. I don't think our jobs are going away. It is interesting. I mean, it is cool how effective you can be as sort of a senior.

engineer in charge of an AI co-pilot or assistant or whatever. I also don't think the profession is going to go away entirely. And I think a lot of that's just coming from the fact that it's all happening in the market at the same time. And there's a bunch of other boring economic reasons why the software industry is.

hurting too. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of those reasons going on, especially in the US, like I can see with that tax law and a few other things. The scary part here is I am seeing Claude, as an example, Anthropic team focus more and more on code. So they're moving away from this grand vision of AGI or whatever the heck they thought it was. And whether they say it on paper or whether it is on paper, what I can see in their tools that they released.

I feel like the tools are more heavily leaning towards code. Almost everything they've released improves software benchmarks and overall productivity around writing code, which to me almost feels like they're building the tool to effectively replace themselves.

Yeah, there's a part of me that thinks like, well, that's always what software engineers have always been trying to do is automate ourselves out of a job. Every language and framework and tool has always been, oh, let's make this easier to do so we can write less lines of code. And our jobs have just shifted. They haven't gone away.

All right. I think we have covered a lot of the topics that I was curious about. Something that comes to my mind is that what to do when you realize that you are burnout, how to take care of ourselves when we get there. Yeah. So again, this is all opinion.

It's all opinion built off hindsight. They will tell you to go out and touch grass, and they are not wrong. Being in nature, for me personally, is an incredibly great feeling. The sun hitting your face, not having a computer screen in front of you is incredibly awesome. That is to say, it really depends on the environment. And I know for a fact that during winter, me going outside is not nearly as fun as summer. So you can't base everything on that alone.

But doing slower activities in general is useful, whether it's reading a book, whether it's learning to draw, whether it's writing. You can't speed write. i mean you can but you're not gonna be happy with it so you're gonna want to write slower and think everything through before you put it to paper so intentionally slowing yourself down is definitely something that i personally think everyone should try

i think i see it as uh at least in my life the way i think about this is that mindfulness exercise it's we are like more more more fast fast fast to do do and then it's like in my case i have a spot in nature that i like particularly and i just go and sit down there you know Old school writing, you know with a piece of paper and just let it go

i want to also say that just because you mentioned mindfulness does not mean go out and get a headspace app subscription or a calm subscription or any of those things just forget all of that i actually think taking a walk without your headphones without music playing is a form of meditation and mindfulness

Eating food without looking at your phone is a form of mindfulness. If you just focus on the thing you're doing and nothing beyond the thing you're doing, I think you're getting most of the way there. Well, somehow I suspect that maybe later we can record that episode about disconnecting and fonts and whatever, because I feel we probably don't have interesting topics there. But yeah, no, I totally get you. It's like what you're saying about these apps is jumping from one screen to another.

to search for the answer in google and it's not going to be that now this has been an incredible conversation anything else on your mind? I know you have this talk about burnout. You mentioned something that we have not discussed about a card game, if I remember correctly. I remember saying like, hey, I want to try that prototype if you need.

Yeah, I would love to try that sometime. I think I alluded to the fact that I burnt out four times and I've changed my career in the middle of that. I actually became a marketer for a while. And I realized that every time I burnt out, it's become harder, harder to recover. This might come across as like a warning. Maybe I'm catastrophizing in some way. But I think you have to take care of yourself really early.

the game and if you think that you can just oh look i can burn out on this one startup it's fine because the next one i just need to do it once and i'm good i don't think people realize the compounding effect of it like was it worse the subsequent times basically

Absolutely. And even if you stay within the organization, if you burn out and recover, whatever that recovery looks like, the next time it's easier to burn out because you've never quite lost it. It's always there. It's like a smoldering flame. All that pattern is really still familiar for you. Absolutely. And of course, we alluded to the organizational changes or lack of. So if you're in the same environment, in the same stressful situation, we made a joke about family.

look at the fast and furious crew they're constantly getting into situations you know if they just got out of it once they'd never go back in but it just seems like they just run through it over and over again. So as much as it pains me to use an analogy on the Fast and Furious franchise, it's something you want to solve now, like genuinely now.

yeah as for the card game this was just me trying to think okay cool burnout what a fun topic let's make a fun card game out of it what i want to do eventually And yes, I haven't actually gotten down to writing the code for this because I ironically somewhat burnt out after my last talk. I was just thinking that we approach burnout with such kid gloves sometimes.

If you have an organizational psychologist or anyone in, you know, they'll tend to hire people to come in and talk to you. You'll probably notice how folks talk with this like hushed tone, almost like you're a baby or you're a child. I feel sometimes that when it comes to burnout, that's how a lot of people communicate.

with this care like walking on eggshells i personally think that sometimes the answer to burnout is a lot easier we just don't know how to make that tough decision the two of you have made tough decisions and you're better off for it even though it doesn't feel that way what i wanted to do with card game was just to have a nice open catharsis in the form of humor just like cards against humanity is to actually quite a few people when i was doing my talk on this previously in new zealand

Behind the scenes of this sort of invisible virtual card game, I had little metrics. So if you made a certain choice, you got a certain point. Now, before you know it, if you tally up those points, you'll find that you've burnt out and then some. So the course of action would be this arbitrary negative point or a positive point. I just thought that would be a fun exercise. One of the many things I'm going to continue to develop while I am not completely employed. I think it's a great idea.

I'm into prototype. If you want a rubber duck, I'm into. I have this strong attraction for card games and this type of even physical things. I love the idea. it would be great to like do something that's not completely on a computer screen right again coming back to it i would love to like learn a little bit of woodworking or something just so i can make this beautiful little board or something along those lines i would love the idea of being able to do something like that yeah i agree

All right, Nav, thank you for being here. Some final words before we say goodbye. You put him on the spot there. Yeah, you really did. I wish I had these great quotes. Actually, I will go with a quote from one of my favorite musicians. And unfortunately, it had to do with this person's battling of cancer, but you don't have to take it that way. So Warren Zevon, I love his music.

Anyway, he was on Letterman and he said, enjoy every sandwich. And I don't think that has to be something just purely focused on whether you have a terminal illness. I think what he's really getting to is, yeah, like actually enjoy the thing you're doing. and not just be in a rush to get to the next sandwich or a bigger sandwich or whatever sandwich or a pide. You don't have to be in a rush to get there. You just have to enjoy what you have there in front of you right now.

And I don't have anything more than that, really. I should have had a list. That was pretty good. I think that's awesome. All right, folks. Thank you very much for this. I think it was an amazing conversation. I'm hoping that eventually we can work out another conversation, either a follow up of this topic or any other topic, maybe digital disconnecting and things like that. But I love it.

Thank you, Dan, for being here. Thank you, folks, for listening. And up to the next episode of Bites in Balance. And that's it for this episode of bytes in balance. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into the world of software engineering. Thanks for tuning in. We would love to hear your thoughts, so don't hesitate to reach out. Connect with us on LinkedIn to continue the conversation or simply follow our updates.

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