Developer Burnout - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

I think it's everywhere except Tik Tok still but we're we're working on it and I'm not quite centered how is this going to work I got to be more that way or that way this way I don't know we'll figure it out I'm trying to watch it on Instagram to make sure I'm in the center but it's delayed so it's basically impossible to know maybe maybe there that's good um today's talk is going to be on burnout so I'm going to put a link I think I can send it in chat here so this is a newsletter article I did um burnout is not unique to my newsletter article or anything like that so I want to talk about burnout I think it's really important and one sec I just want to make sure YouTube is working here because that's going to be tomorrow's video that goes up just one more second here okay it says excellent connection but then there was no video okay so couple couple things hopefully um my mic sounds good I've had a nightmare of a time for the past like over 10 months recording stuff um it turns out it has nothing to do with my microphone it's entirely my laptop computer which has been infuriating so I finally just s switched everything over I have this this gaming machine that's a few years older and I said hey like there's a lot of similarities with doing video editing and recording and stuff in video games I might as well set this thing up to do my streaming and my video recording so that's the plan and of course first time I tried it the mic sounded a lot better so hopefully it's coming through pretty good so as usual with these I'm going to be talking about a topic so it's going to be burnout but I do want to make sure that if you are watching live that you can you can ask questions and that kind of stuff right it's uh it's entirely meant to be for you so if you have questions please type them in the chat I will be watching hello Maria looks like LinkedIn chat is working awesome topic today yes I think bernot incredibly important so um like I was just saying right if people have thoughts comments add them to the chat I'll try to read them out and answer them as I'm going uh but I'm kind of going to go in the order that I wrote about it so kind of want to talk about like what burnout is um like what signs there are because I think when people talk about burnout there's usually like a it's like the most common kind of way that we would describe it right is like pretty common for people to to Define it like it's you know um being stressed out being exhausted like there's you know there's very common things that we associate with burnout and I want to look at a couple of variations of them cuz I think that's important I'll talk about my own experience because I think it's a little bit unique and it's one of the reasons I like to talk about it um not because just want to tell you my story over and over but U more like I thought I was immune to burnout and I want to share that because I think it's a it's a helpful story to go over so we'll do that and then we'll talk about different things that you can try to work on for addressing burnout and um when it comes to guidance around that it's it's really like it's going to be so situational I can't just you know give you blanket advice it's going to apply to every every person every software engineer right it's going to be situational for sure but we will go through that so hopefully it's helpful for folks and uh yeah so with that said well what is burnout right so I would say the way that I Define it is like this this feeling of being overwhelmed exhausted I rate um oh awesome there's looks like the Instagram chat is actually working hello on Instagram I don't think I've seen the chat messages come in before so this is cool but yeah like generally an overwhelming feel of exhaustion um you might notice that you're irate at work you're uh disengaged um a way that I like to kind of Define it and I know it's not the same thing so please don't uh conflate that I am saying it's the same thing but I kind of think about it like depression for work right like depression for example is not just being sad right there's a lot more to depression than just feelings of being sad and similarly with burnout I think that it's more than just being tired or more than just not liking something there's other layers to burnout that that exist Beyond just like this simple I don't like this project or this week was hard um so I think that that's important to to kind of call out and from there if we start thinking about these things right so like what is that going to mean if you're if you're burnt out because this is important to think about burnout right I'm just some guy on the internet telling you about burnout you probably heard about it before but why does that matter and it matters because not only is it going to have negative effects on on you at work but also in your personal life depending on you know how how long you let it go unchecked so what does it look like when you're going through burnout well I mentioned you're going to have feelings of being exhausted you're going to be disengaged irate think about how that plays out when you're at work to start with because this is really centered around software engineers and we'll start with the work part because I think that's a pretty big aspect for for most software Engineers is thinking about their career thinking about their work and if you're noticing like that you're disengaged in projects that you're working on like how do you think that that's going to translate into your performance on those projects right like probably not very well and that's not to say that you know it's it's a rule like you're disengaged therefore you will do poorly on them but more likely than not you're disengage you're going to be like you know you're not excited to go do the work you'll drag your feet a little bit maybe procrastinate on things you might not put in your best your best effort the best quality deliverables because you're just not into it again that's not to say that it's impossible it's just that it's going to feel like there's a lot of resistance right I don't like this project I could be working on something else this project sucks but this is only the one aspect of the burnout part right like you're noticing I don't like this project right there's more going on but you're disengaged with the work you're doing you're going to have other people start to notice this as well right so your manager might start to notice that hello on Instagram I see more messages coming in they're not coming into the Shar part though let me just move this over so I can um I can make sure that I'm addressing you guys if you have questions because that's not really going to be fair if I'm watching one chat and then Instagram people have questions and I just totally ignore them so it's in a better spot now so hello on Instagram thanks for joining so when we think about our ability to do well at work when we're experiencing burnout it's going to be very likely poor quality work you're going to have people start to notice it I mentioned one of the things that you might start experiencing is that you're you're being irate and what I mean by that is like you might start to have a shorter temper right you might feel frustrated when you're working with other people you could think about you're putting up poll requests and you know you have people that are commenting on your poll requests and suddenly you're like nope like I don't want to deal with this and it's like the most simple things but this is kind of building up over time time it's not just you're having a bad day your personality regarding this stuff is starting to change over time so Maria said on the LinkedIn chat I try to be attentative to the signs when I start feeling exhausted annoyed unaccomplished unappreciated absolutely right so we will get into some this is like the next part coming up is like these signs that we can look for so when it comes to work right there's a whole bunch of sort of negative consequences that come with being burnt out and in my opinion it starts to feel like a vicious cycle because not only are you is your personality regarding things starting to change like like I mentioned being irate um you're disengaged because the projects are you know you're burnt out from working on them you have all of these negative things that start to make it so that work becomes more challenging you're disengaged with it and then as a result like your performance starts to drop and then like you're kind of just going down like I said like it's a bit of a vicious cycle it's a bit of a negative spiral to happen so we want to get out of that now it's not just work right so these types of things often bleed over to your personal life as well which is another reason why this is so important to talk about because we want to make sure uh and it's not just specific to software Engineers right we want to have a good work life balance we're going to be doing this stuff for a large majority of our lives so we want to make sure that we're that we're enjoying ourselves we have to work hard make sense there's going to be a lot of challenges to to go through but we don't want to have like going through life or we're just like resenting doing work hello career code Hindi on Instagram thanks for joining so with all that said we start to think about how that's going to affect our personal lives right so you were going like the IR rate one I think is a really big one you start to notice like you're being irate with people at work well what about your your significant other right you come home from work or if you're working from home you're already at home and it's even worse because the the lines start to blur even more so and you're thinking about the interactions you're having with your partner and you're already kind of exhaust you started the day exhausted you started the day fed up with people at work not because of them in particular but this is just like you're kind of just living through this and it sucks and then your partner says something and you're all already kind of on edge and you know so all of these things not only build up at work but they can have an effect on your personal life as well so if you're thinking hey I haven't really had a problem at work maybe not a big deal like maybe think for a second that this could impact your personal life as well not just your significant other this could be with friends and family as well so keep it in mind so kind of talking about what burnout is sort of the effects of um and Maria kind of started hinting at like this next part right like the signs of it so uh I I think that and as we get later into the talk we'll talk about like I I want I don't want to say necessarily just preventative measures but even things like once you're experiencing burnout how can you kind of steer through it right and one of them this is a bit of a spoiler but like one of the main ones that I say is like just having awareness of it so going back to what Maria said in the chat start to feeling exhausted right I think that's a big one exhausted annoyed and then she has two others here that say unaccomplished and unappreciated I want to focus on the first two just to round them out because I've already been talking about them but if you think about the work you're doing as a software engineer right it's not physically taxing and sometimes you'll have long days working through solving hard problems and stuff like that and you're like man yeah like I feel pretty tired from going through that like it can be tiring but imagine like starting your day and you're already exhausted from the the problems you have to go look at you haven't even started work yet you're like I'm exhausted like thinking about having to work on this project right and it's not just one day this is something where you're like it just continues and builds and builds and builds um and yeah I'll I'll come back to the comment uh on Instagram here about uh like estimations and like one thing going wrong and derailing it I want to just kind of finish out this topic here and I'll answer that so the next part about feeling unaccomplished and unappreciated these are more like I think they involve a little bit more awareness too because sometimes the the other symptoms like feeling annoyed or feeling exhausted I feel I'm not not a psychologist but I feel like sometimes these ones are a little bit more in the Forefront right you probably it's probably easier for for you to have awareness that you are feeling annoyed or that you're feeling exhausted but I think it takes a little bit of uh introspection to kind of realize hey like I am feeling maybe like unaccom or unappreciated just a little bit more effort to kind of realize hey maybe that's what's going on here like I don't know like different levels of these types of feelings but I think maybe a little bit more effort put in and I absolutely agree with Maria on these you might start saying like Okay I was working on this project this is just an example you've been working on it for months now and you kind of feel like it's not really going anywhere and you truly might be making progress on the project you're making progress towards the deliverable but you're just feeling like like for what like there is no sense of accomplishment as you're going through it even when you do finish it great it's done right unappreciated you're going through you're doing this work you might start realizing like this has felt pretty crappy but like it's maybe there's some uh some feedback loop that's missing right so you might start to notice that as well but these are all individual things and burnout is is a lot more than each one of these things on their own but I think it's important for us to kind of address some of these individual feelings because once you start to notice that you have a handful of them together over a prolonged period of time there's probably an indicator that you're experiencing burnout and I would think about it like a spectrum as well right like if you you start to notice it early there are things you could do sooner to help prevent it from getting worse okay before moving on the question in chat on Instagram was have you ever come across this you take a requirement then one step goes wrong and the whole story estimate gets messed up so absolutely um this is sort of a consequence of doing estimates and they're estimates for a reason right so when we estimate things and if you're using story points in general it is an estimate for a reason we don't no one has a crystal ball unfortunately that would be totally awesome if you do have one please let me know because I would love to use it but um when it comes to estimations the reality is you're going to be wrong and at least for my experience we're wrong uh significantly more often than we're right so if you are struggling with that and saying hey we estimated things something didn't go as planned now the whole thing is off instead of just going well we said it was this many story points therefore we got a like that's the constraint um I think that that's maybe not the best way to go about it because the reality is different than you expected and you should you know have a conversation about that if you're doing standup meetings talk about it with the team and try to Pivot if it makes sense to if you've completely derailed something try to Pivot um but this is what standup meetings and stuff for four you're supposed to be able to bring these things up and make adjustments depending on how your team does stuff you might say hey we keep the estimate but now we understand that like this current work is out of scope or whatever you make adjustments but some people like to keep their estimates if you're using story points you keep them consistent other people might change the mid-print you might say like Hey we're going to carve this workout now it's instead of a seven point seven story Point item it's now a uh we're going to take part of it this is a three we'll do part of it and then we'll push out more work for the future there's tons of ways to do this but uh just keep in mind that story points and estimates are estimates they will be wrong okay um back to burnout so I wanted to talk about my experience with burnout because we just went through what I would consider our pretty stereotypical traditional feelings of burnout right you'll have the exhaustion the being IR the disengaged um Maria called out like unaccomplished unappreciated all these sorts of feelings kind of Stack Up Pro long period of time so my experience with burnout is a little bit different and like I kind of said at the beginning of this stream I kind of I thought that I was immune to it which sounds pretty funny in hindsight uh I don't think I consciously was like nope burnouts never going to get me uh like I'm better or I'm Different I think it was more like being in situations where someone was saying and I'll explain this but someone was saying like seems like you should be experiencing burnout and I was like nope like still good to go so the context the story here I worked at a startup for a a long time before Microsoft I worked there for eight years and this was a startup that was in uh the digital forensic space and for me i' never done digital forensics in my life I you know graduated from University and when I took the job at this startup uh I actually talked about this in one of the streams for impostor syndrome and I remember going into one of the first meetings with my boss and he was asking us who knows about like file systems like fat 32 NTFS file systems and I just remember being like oh no what have I done I know nothing about these things and guess what we do digital forensics like maybe I am an imposter and so this job was was awesome though and the the mission I guess is the way that I would put it and we actually talked about this a lot of the company the the mission that we had was really about being able to to help law enforcement and other investigators be able to uncover the truth and while that seems kind of general and high level a lot of what we did involves saving kids which I think was um you know one of the main drivers so a lot of the time that would be helping people who are doing investigations for crimes uh in particular helping catch pedophiles and I say this honestly I don't know if I will ever in my life do more impactful work than that so you layer that part in where you feel like I'm having you know a huge a huge impact because even if you do you know one feature one bug fix that an investigator can use and that helps to save a child like to basically help catch a pedophile so they can't commit any more crimes you're like worth it right like doesn't doesn't matter what the cost was like absolutely worth it so work was always very motivating based on the mission um the people I worked with were were amazing as well right so it was really cool to be at a startup that was you know like eight people across the whole company um we were in an accelerator Center actually it's called the accelerator Center in Kitchener waterl area in back in Ontario small small little place and it was like you know I think we were the fastest company to graduate from that program so we got our own office in waterl and you're just with people that are passionate about what they're doing and the entire time just felt like holy crap it's so good to work with these people by the way no one's paying me to say this so this is just a true story about my my work history um and we worked a lot and I was fortunate that like for me I didn't have maybe this is unfortunate I guess fortunate from like a work perspective but I I didn't have a girlfriend I had nothing else really going on I was like I like to play video games I like to go to the gym and I like to work I love to work and often what was happening was that I would be working and then go to take a break to play video games or something and this is like working at home after hours and then it would be like why am I like why am I playing video games or why am I coding my own stuff because like if I just do work I know that it's going to translate into having a positive impact I know that if I go do more work it will literally help the company will help us help other people catch bad people and I never in the eight years that I worked there I never felt like I had someone being like look you better work late yeah we had tight deadlines but like no one ever forced me to do anything and I would work nonstop and I did that for almost the full eight years I was there and so I mentioned hey someone was telling me like hey it seems like you should be going through burnout so I had an awesome HR leader her name was Kelly Braden and Kelly would tell me she's like you are working too much you were going to burn out and this is where I was saying not like I thought I was special or different but I was going like well I'm not I'm not burning out and I was thinking about all these different burnout things I talked about earlier and I did disengaged with work no am I feeling exhausted No in fact I could stay up late coding for work and I would do this sometimes I would stay up you know till midnight 2 in the morning coding and then roll out of bed I lived like a this is embarrassing I lived like a less than five minute walk to work and I would still drive there because I was like it might rain or something um so you know I would roll out a like right before I have to be at work brush my teeth I don't not a huge breakfast eater get to work code right like I was always working but not exhausted not disengaged did I feel appreciated yes did I feel accomplished yes I had all of these things that were not burnout signals quite the opposite I love what I was doing I was very energized to do the work how was that burnout and I did this I did this for months I did it for years so burnout for me looks or looked different because I've experienced burnout since then multiple times but during this part of my my life and work for me burnout looked very different and one of the things I want to highlight uh like as a takeaway from this talk right is that yeah we talked about the signals of burn yes we're going to talk about some things you can try to do to navigate burnout but I think the most dangerous thing about burnout is that it can creep up on you and that's why I think awareness is one of the biggest things the biggest tools that you can leverage for Burnout so if you're aware that burnout can look different and you're aware that it can creep up over extended periods of time then you might be better equipped to do something about it so did this for years I'm working basically Non-Stop and there were a couple of signals over time and one of the challenges was because I wasn't doing much else there wasn't a lot of opportunity for for getting these signals that something's off but before working while I was in university I was pretty social I like to go out you know to the bars I like to go to House parties and stuff like that um I'm introverted I'm shy like if we were going out with friends or whatever like yeah I'm going to go have fun it was you know I'm sick of being at school for the week I I want to go have fun with my friends like absolutely I look forward to the weekends and and just going out and what I was doing was just work after I graduated so what I started to notice is that when those types of things would happen suddenly I was having challenges suddenly it was like I don't really know if I want to go out because it's a little awkward I'm around these other people like and it's not the work people because in the beginning it was fine i' be going out with work people and it was great but it started to be like going out meeting new people was awkward and I noticed this in particular in situations where I should be extremely comfortable so some of my best friends from high school for for example be like hey it's been a while we're going to go meet up at so and so's house there's going to be some other people there and I just remember this feeling of like nope not me not going to that why why do I not want to go see my best friends why would I not want to do that and that's when I started to notice uhoh I think Kelly was right and I think Kelly was right because I was experiencing burnout but it looked different it wasn't oh I'm disengaged with work I'm not irate you know I feel accomplished I feel appreciated all these things but the burnout for me was that I don't I don't have a good way to explain this I'm going to try my best it was like you need if you're experiencing burnout if you can draw I don't it's going to sound kind of like woo woo I guess but if I can draw energy from other places is then I can you know stick to what I'm doing and because I wasn't doing a whole lot except like going to the gym and working you know there's not I I I basically was able to to tap into all my other time of the day to do something I loved but what I wasn't doing was spending time with friends I wasn't spending time with family I wasn't spending time on my other Hobbies I even stopped playing video games because I thought I don't need to play video games I can just work and get more done I like working for me burnout was different because I replaced all of the other things in my life except the gym I even was I was sacrificing sleep without even knowing it right like I'll touch on this in just a moment about my sleep patterns but I gave up all these other things so I could work more but that only goes so long for me it was years which is great but then I reach this point where I'm going oh crap I have like extreme social anxiety now I have nothing else to tap into so if work keeps go if I keep doing what I'm doing with work I'm going to reach a point where where do I I'm already lack like I don't have any social skills anymore I'm awkward around people what else like like I don't have anything else to give up like my health and this is where the Sleep part's going to come in I was I didn't realize this this is kind of weird but I so I don't like coffee but I love caffeine and so if anyone who's who knows me personally is watching this stream they'll know all about this I go to the gym I don't like coffee and I love caffeine people who go to the gym are very much into pre-workout right A lot of people are you go buy pre-workout you get caffeine in it get all the energy you need except for me I'm like well pre-workout costs a lot of money so if I just buy caffeine powder in bulk which is extremely cheap by the way I was like I can have without exaggerating like decades worth I had 20 years worth of caffeine for like $100 I just have caffeine powder and what I didn't realize I was doing just staying caffeinated non people talk about like how much coffee they drink as programmers I don't drink coffee I have caffeine powder and I was having over a gram of caffeine a day for years I thought this is the scary part I thought that I had got up to around 800 Mig but then I realized the scoop I was using was not a 200 migr scoop it was Mig so I was having so much caffeine just to keep me me going and thinking nothing of it that I I am narcoleptic now I have my sleep is incredibly unwell so I am doing like I talk about this in my Vlogs that I do every week but I'm trying to basically uh not totally stop caffeine because I think there's benefits to it but I'm I'm just relooking at my my caffeine intake and it's extremely difficult because now I have issues where um like I need to nap sometimes multiple times a day and I can fall asleep instantly um so it's not not a good spot to be in but again going back to burnout I was trading other parts of my life basically so my health was actually being affected I didn't think so hey I go to the gym every day I eat well but my sleep my sleep has been destroyed the caffeine intake did not help but these are things like I wasn't thinking about and I think that that's important to mention for folks watching this is that going through burnout now that I've kind of experienced this and also like sort of what I would call traditional burnout is really like you are you're sacrificing other parts of your life and it's over time so you're taking the energy that you would be putting into other things that you enjoy right in in most cases and now you're giving up the time to do that to work on this project or you're putting up with periods of time where you're not feeling like recognized you feel like you're not making progress and that's you know that's demotivating you over a long period of time but you're putting up with it you're kind of putting in more energy to keep going it's just not sustainable so you burn out so for me uh I've written posts about this before actually the uh the way that I kind of got or out of my burnout was like I I don't know how to stop working because I've been doing it for so long that way that to to do less or to do it different would make it seem like I'm like I will have another problem now I'm I am going to feel unaccomplished if I have to stop working so much and this is important because it's not a matter of like I'm not saying that I am a better worker than other people I'm not saying I am better than other people I'm saying that I I might even be worse than other people but I was working more so now if that was one of my strengths that I can work more what's going to happen when I stop right my my sense of value me being able to have what looks like high throughput because I'm working so much is going to feel diminished so I have to go well how am I going to convince myself to just like this is one of the core parts of my life working this this company's called magnet forensics working for magnet forensics was like was my young adult life and it sounds kind of weird to say but I love doing it so you know how do I convince myself to work less so uh just reading Maria's comment in the chat here uh very interesting thank you for sharing I notice I tend to have this identification with work sense of self equals work yeah putting it first in my life and thinking about 247 how can I bring more value yeah and this like um this is literally how I operated at Magnet forensics I never had this problem call it a problem I never had this mindset before working at Magnet like I said no one made me do it that way it was just so motivating to do it I was actually quite the opposite as an intern and it's kind of embarrassing to say again I've written about this and it's public so I'm not it's embarrassing to say but like it's the reality I was kind of like I'm going to do the minimum I have to do CU like whatever I want to do other stuff like that's just the reality but after working at Magnet my work ethic is completely different so another another comment here from you YouTube in the past when I worked for an amazing big tech company I thought I should give my maximum all the time yet I started to notice excessive dedication led me to poor performance due to mental fatigue absolutely thank you for sharing that um I think it's good for people to hear that um you know making assumptions here right but probably many years and working in Tech right if you were working at Big Tech and kind of doing this for a sustain period of time like yeah um so I'll I'll say it again in case folks didn't hear or they're not reading the chat but but started to notice excessive dedication led me to poor performance due to mental fatigue yeah I think I had been propped up on caffeine in ridiculous amounts to compensate for that so that that's another example of like how like what am I giving up to be able to sustain that right it's all about sacrificing something here okay so what did I do well I had to do something that would literally force me to be not working and one way to do that and I recommend it because it's it's awesome is to get a dog I got my dog lla I try not to get emotional lyla's still with us so it's not like she's passed away or anything but like I would say lla saved my life because lla forced me to be out of the office at certain times of the day she's a puppy right so you get a puppy you have to go you have to go home to take the dog out for a walk you have to go get out of the house and do other stuff um so lla absolutely saved my life I was able to start you know I could go to the dog park I had something else to socialize about that wasn't just work so started to build up more of an identity I started to get into modified cars after that I don't recommend that for anyone that's a really bad idea um but that allowed me to go meet other people and socialize and start just building out more of like who I am but if it wasn't for lla I would have kept working until there was more problems so yeah lyla's been very impactful for me I've had her for I think she's nine this year so it's been a little while so yeah it wasn't it didn't take me the full eight years at at Magnet to kind of realize I think it the math is probably around four or five years at Magnet I think but it was years years of doing this before I realized there's a problem and for me it was lla was the forcing function to get me out of work some parts of the day get me out of my home office some parts of the day and have something else in my life and so yeah I think as we kind of go to the next part of the the conversation here like what can we do about burnout so for me in my situation at that point in time that's what I did for Burnout was to get a dog you don't recommend getting into modified car as funny um yeah one sec this is kind of a fun thing so I I do Social Media stuff now obviously right um I have to cough once SEC got a little choked up talking about my dog um yeah no I I like modify cars a lot um do I still have my my website I do so I'll switch my screen here yeah there's my car it's no longer purple it's actually black now but I do love modified cars but yeah I don't recommend anyone does it cuz it's a big waste of money um that car has been in shops more than it has been on the road so I do not recommend it to anyone but that's uh it's how it goes but it was something like I said you know after getting lla after starting to kind of rebuild other parts of my life this was an opportunity for me to start doing other things and I think that was is really important so what can we do about burnout and the the thing that I mentioned earlier in the conversation right was this you know the ability to be aware I think that's the most important part and you know I I appreciate my my HR leader Kelly at the time like I was clearly not aware and she was clearly aware she was very clearly aware because she's awesome with people and she was doing what she could to let me know hey look this is going to be a problem if you don't do something about it of course she can't force me to do anything about it but she was being a good person a good friend and and letting me know like hey watch out it's going to get you um so I do appreciate her doing that but that's why I think one of the first things and the most important things we can do is build awareness so understanding what burnout can look like understanding that it can look different for other people and I think if you have that in place and this is the case for a lot of things right if you don't have awareness about a problem how can you ever expect to go try to improve the situation just like fundamentally right I think if you always need to rely on other people to have the awareness not a good spot to be in although that's helpful but you need to build your own awareness for these types of things and you know I'll go back to what Maria said earlier on on LinkedIn it's in the chat but this idea of like she's saying be attentive to the signs so when she starts to feel exhausted annoyed unaccomplished unappreciated all these things if you recall what I said when I was talking about my story though this idea that burnout builds up over time so when you think about awareness and this this idea of something happening over prolonged periods of time it means it's a lot harder to gauge so you do need to have like you do need to work at trying to build Awareness on this it's not a matter of hey today I don't like this project or today someone left me a code review comment and it wasn't I didn't think it was nice I didn't like it and therefore I'm having a bad day now I'm burned out it doesn't work that way you're allowed you can have bad days and I'm not trying to minimize that I'm sorry if you're having a bad day we all have them but the burnout part happens over prolonged periods of time and I don't know I'm not not a scientist and I'm not pretending to be but like I don't know I wouldn't say like you must wait at least 3 weeks therefore it's burnout but like it it will take some amount of time for these types of things to accumulate and you start realizing like I'm kind of not in a great spot uh like mentally emotionally and potentially like physically right so if I go back to what was said in the chat give my maximum all the time but started to notice excessive dedication led me to poor performance due to mental fatigue again I'm making assumptions about this comment but it probably wasn't like right away like oh like y that was I was kind of struggling through that project that was a month long and that's got to be cuz I'm burnt out from giving my all like it was probably over longer periods of time even in that situation so if we start to build awareness like how do we go about doing that and this I'm not going to prescribe anything for for everyone right like it's going to I said this at the beginning this thing is going to be situational I do think it's important to have periods of time for yourself when you can reflect on how you're doing um you can kind of treat your life like like agile um no but like if you think about continuous Improvement that kind of stuff you can apply that those Concepts to yourself right like when's the last time you sat down and just like reflected on how things were going on your mental state your emotional state for some people it might not have been that long ago for other people you might be like that sounds stupid Nick like I've never done that I mean maybe try it um I I honestly can't tell you when the last time I've done it for myself is and so this is a good reminder for me as I'm talking to all of you about this like I'm probably due for a nice honest conversation with myself and probably do for saying hey maybe I shouldn't wait until I can't remember the last time to do something like this because I think it's important actually um no this is this is another good story and I'll keep this one brief but uh I for different reasons not uh because I I gave you my story about burnout and how it looked different but um I switched teams at Microsoft earlier this year and this was a bit unexpected for me I wasn't going I wasn't actively looking for um for a team but it was it was far too coincidental to to turn down the offer to at least apply and this would this was a situation where I was starting to realize maybe a little bit I don't want to say too late because it worked out perfectly just very coincidental um I've told this story in a couple of different uh forums but um I so I loved working on the deployment team team I thought it was great I worked with great people I like the space we're in but I remember saying to my wife one morning B something along the lines of like where some of the the gaps were for me like I'm starting to realize like this isn't really I'm not feeling accomplished right going using Maria's word words um I don't know if I would say I wasn't feeling appreciated I feel like in some some aspects yes and some aspects no but was kind of feeling like hey like I feel like I've been doing what I should be doing for like three years now and it's kind of like it's just not I'm realizing it maybe it's not really there for me which is interesting right like I wasn't actively reflecting on this it just kind of came up and I told my wife that in the morning and that same afternoon I had a meeting where my current manager talked to me about uh how they were looking for uh to hire managers into the team so there was an opportunity I still had to go apply and everything and so that's you know it's not like I just walked into a job and it was like here you go but it was like Hey like you know we are looking and are you interested and I just remember thinking like I just had this conversation this morning I'm very conservative when it comes to to jobs and things like that like I probably knowing myself I probably would have waited until it was a problem until I was burning out I was just starting to have awareness of it and I just remember being like I mean it sounds like an awesome space so I'm like yeah like I think I I do want to you know apply for this but it was coincidental so that was the last time I had a little bit of reflection for myself and I think that I should do a better job of that going forward so that I'm not in a bad spot so that's the first recommendation maybe two-parter right awareness and then how can you have awareness while maybe building in some type of um you know periodic check that you can have with yourself even if it seems silly you're like this seems dumb I don't want to waste the time doing it I don't know like it doesn't take long you're just doing it with yourself right you can sit down you can write some notes uh I would probably recommend writing it on paper just so that you're like actively doing something um so another comment in the chat here so notice my performance was being affected after working on the same project for one year was also my first job in Tech yeah um I act uh recently the last team I was on I had an employee that was on a project for over a year and um the there was so there's a lot of small pieces that like that go into this project and I had conversations with him throughout the year being like hey hey like I like I have I have awareness for other better awareness for other people like I want to make sure that this is still engaging work it's still challenging you still want to be on it um otherwise like we can pivot I have to sneeze why do I have to sneeze come on okay it's gone it's going to sneak up on me just like burnout um but no like in all seriousness it was like Hey how do we make this like do we need to Pivot do you want to keep going and we ended up finding other excite well I'm going to call it exciting ways we found like different um different spins or different changes we could make within the project that would kind of breathe more life into it um but honestly if I reflect even for that individual that was probably too long um but I do think that there was a lot of interesting growth opportunity so he probably stuck it out um and he he did a he did an amazing job on it so I'm very proud of him but um yeah that was like trying to have awareness for someone else like hey you're on this for a while so if you're thinking like time frame wise like there's a couple examples of being around a year the first one I gave was multiple years uh I don't think it you know the minimum is a year like I said I don't know what the minimum is but some amount of time it could be you know could be a couple months or even a month I don't know it's going to be different for everyone awareness building in some type of checkpoint point with yourself maybe write it down Journal I think these are really important now how do we start taking action right so now you go oh crap yeah this is this is the burnout they told me about right or like you're starting to realize hey like this kind of feels like all those things I was hearing about um if there are people that are active in the chat if you if you've experienced burnout and you don't mind sharing what changed I would love to hear that I think other people would love to hear examples of that um obviously no pressure first of all I can't make anyone put anything in the chat second of all um I I understand that that's like a personal thing but uh I think there can be a lot of value in sharing that kind of stuff from other people as well so uh if you are comfortable sharing that kind of thing um I think that would be totally cool if you're open to it um okay so if we think about things we can do so we have some awareness Ness if people are putting stuff in the chat I'll try to read it out right so you start to become aware I'm experiencing burnout I think so probably something needs to change what's it going to be and at the beginning of this stream I said there's going to be a lot of situational things going on okay so let's take a couple of examples because maybe there's going to be some themes that come up um so you're experiencing burnout at work and let's take the example that came up in chat you're on a project it's a year long right and maybe you knew it was going to be here maybe you thought it was going to be a little shorter who knows right but you're on it say it's been about a year exact time frame is not important and you're going like I don't know like I'm I've identified like I'm starting to feel burnt out on this I need to do something um I what I might recommend as a first step is being open and honest with your manager this is going to be situational again some people listening to this would be like Nick that's so stupid my manager would fire me or something I mean there's probably some other problems going on if that's what your manager is like um I think having an open honest conversation saying like hey I'm starting to realize like I feel like my own performance isn't where I want it to be uh I'm starting to be disengaged I think if you can be open about that stuff before you have someone else telling you about it it's probably better in my honest opinion now that doesn't solve the problem but I think it starts working towards a solution because if your manager has awareness and they're in my opinion a good manager willing to work with you on this kind of stuff they can say hey well how can I support this person in their role they've been responsible for this project is there someone else also on the project they can maybe step in a little bit more and we can phase this person out into a different project there's a lot of different options that an engineering manager could consider if you give them some awareness right um I know for some people you'll be thinking like well sounds like a sign of weakness you can't even finish the project you started or whatever but you know we're human working on a project for a year that's a long time on the same thing that's a long time especially if you're feeling burnt out you're feeling like you're disengaged uh as an engineering manager I would much rather find someone who is more motivated and engaged to get them onto that work and get the person who's disengaged onto some other business priority that they might be excited about um sorry there's a message on uh Instagram what is the what is that one factor which you believe made you you and helped to be ahead of the rest that's a good question I don't I don't think that um I don't think that I am special uh I have I've been doing this for a while I guess that's all nothing nothing special in that regard I don't think I have any weird skill set that other people don't have um I don't know I try to push through being introverted and try to balance my people skills with technical skills but that's not unique something I do other people do it too okay so there's one example of you're working on a project for a while talk to your manager about it right I think that's important um this other this other aspect of giving your maximum all the time this kind of ties into what I was saying from my own experience is finding ways that you can it's it's hard depending on your personality traits and stuff right but like I had to find a way that forced me out of doing work and giving my maximum all the time I had to set I needed to force function to set those boundaries that's not going to be the same for everyone your forcing function if you need one might not be to get a puppy um but I think you need to try and find ways if you're like I keep putting in more time right trying to find ways to step back you need to be able to think about what are the things you need to prioritize for me I didn't have other things I was aware of to prioritize um now like a good example now is like so I do a lot of stuff with content creation I still work my my 9 to-5 I try uh I tried writing up to seven blog articles per week and doing my videos and stuff this year I can't keep up with it it's not sustainable and one of the you know forcing functions for me is I'm married I have a wife uh I I'm already doing this kind of stuff a lot but I like there there's a limit where I'm like if I do more then I'm I'm giving up that aspect of my life and that's not okay so a little bit more awareness now uh just reading more comments uh regarding this project thing good advice to hear going to consider as I come up on working my current project for a year yeah after some time I started noticing that doing unproductive things yeah contributed to increasing my performance even though this seems contradictory that's a that's an interesting one that doing unproductive things contributed to increasing my performance um I wonder if the unproductive things were from your own perspective but they truly were oh sorry I I'm I'm getting this now doing unproductive things for me unproductive things are playing video games right you need a break you need a break it's unproductive but it's still um in the long run like finding something where you can relax disconnect I think that's what this person was getting at sorry if I misinterpreted your comment uh another comment here curiosity and interest drives a lot of success in the engineering field yep communication and relationships figure out where you can succeed I fortunately have zero other life responsibility so can't weigh on a work life balance but kudos to you for prioritizing well so on Twitch here um this this is similar to what I was saying in my own experiences right so um yeah if you have have no other life responsibilities great there's a lot of flexibility but try to get this awareness early right I don't think that and I should I I want to be clear about this right I don't regret what I did I don't regret working as much as I did could I have done could I have had more balance sure but I don't I don't regret it um that like I regret some timing uh like that company went public after I left that company went back to private they were bought for $2 billion like I think in the end I think in the end it worked um and you know I'm still I'm I'm alive and I'm healthy and I've learned a lot so like I don't have regrets about it so uh I think you know in startups a lot of the time especially the startup had no funding it was all it was just you know profitable so no no external investors I I think that in startup land like you know stereotypically you'll hear people like working all the time I think that for startups to to succeed there's some amount of that that has to happen I'm not saying every single one's the same but for a lot of them like you kind of need to have like that bit of extra you know crazy Drive um but I think try to understand that balance and identifying stuff early while you can uh also it's common to go through periods where you lack TR in what you're doing yes 100% it's 100% okay uh but what but find what you like working on yes and I that's such a critical thing to emphasize because I think that a lot of people especially trying to get into softare engineering right see a lot of this because there's a lot of people that will message or comment and you know they they're trying to get into software engineering and I think it's a great field to be in um and I know that a lot of people are incentivized by compensation for it because you know being in Tech pays well like there's no nothing wrong with that but I think when it comes to life fulfillment like yes money money is good being able to support yourself you know your family feeling like you have safety in that regard and your Finance is important making more money feels better but beyond a certain point if you're just trading you know you're literally giving up portions of your life just to say number in Bank go up like I have I have it tattooed oh it's blocked out this tattoo on my arm I can't turn my forearm the right way this is so awkward but there's how do I do this it's Meed there's a tattoo on my forearm that's an hourglass and it has money going into in the top top of The Hourglass is money I have another another tattoo on this side um which is an hourglass and the left side has money in the top of the hourglass pouring into a bottomless pit and I got that tattoo to remind myself like if you're just living life to make a number in a bank account go up and you don't love what you're doing like you're probably going to be the person when they get to the end of their life going man I have so many regrets because what number go up like are you truly happy you can't go back and change it so yes like being able to support yourself being able to have uh you know a certain degree of Financial Freedom I think that's important because it helps us feel like we can have more freedom in the choices and stuff we want to do in life but beyond a certain point if you're making more money and you're not having those life freedoms that you want then it's not worth it so just reading more in the chat games traveling to the beach shopping watching comedy shows on the TV and simply doing nothing worked for me also yeah these are great right my boss also helped me a lot I'm glad to hear that so and you know sometimes it's really good to hear this kind of stuff from other people because a little bit earlier I was saying hey like tell your manager like have a conversation with them right I think that that's important you want to be able to have a good trust relationship with your manager they should be if they're a good manager in that role they want to help you succeed you should be able to have that kind of conversation so I'm very glad that you can share that like your manager helped a lot that's awesome so Cameron in the chat says I'm in the opposite situation I feel I prioritize my work life balance too much only two years into the field maybe my career won't become as great as it could be if I worked harder and or longer well yeah so this is a balanced thing right and it's it's impossible like I kind of made a joke at the beginning of this stream at some point where I said hey like we don't have a crystal ball um but there's there's ways to there's ways to have more impact without necessarily just working more and more or you could go through periods where you say hey I am going to work more I'm consciously making a decision I will put in more time more effort depending on what that looks like to try and get a little a little bit more ahead in some some capacity right depending on what that looks like for you you might consciously make that decision now for me and I'll you know I can only really speak from my own experiences I remember the feeling of like when I'm at this startup that I was at before Microsoft I remember feeling like like I love the work I'm doing so that's a that's a good thing I don't feel like I'm you know someone's forcing me to do something I hate like that just never happened so love what I was doing and it honestly felt like uh I talked about how how I felt like my manager at the time actually like like the CTO right so the the owner the founder he was a CTO what he did really well was that he just had a lot of trust and gave us a lot of autonomy so it felt like like I know it's not my company obviously I would not be having to work ever again if it was my company um it's not my company but because I have so much autonomy it felt like the feeling I had was like this is this is mine to make successful right if I put in more success goes up that's the feeling I had and for me that's a powerful position to be in because it's so motivating it's you get so much engagement from it it's quite the opposite when you're in a position where you're like doesn't matter if I put in more more time more effort like whatever more means to you it doesn't matter if I put in more because what changes right that's a crappy spot to to be in and you can like I I was working for someone else and I still had that feeling of like if I put in more there's more success that comes out of this and if we go back to it again Maria said this way earlier in the chat you know being like feeling appreciated feeling accomplished like I had those things so uh for for Cameron in the chat here if you're feeling appreciated if you're feeling like you're accomplished maybe there is no maybe that's totally fine maybe that's a great spot to be in but you know if you are if you're still young you're 2 years into the field I don't I don't think there's anything wrong with trying things out right if you're like hey maybe give it a time box or something I don't know but if you might approach how you work a little bit differently maybe you're like I am going to see maybe I will put in a little bit more time effort again I don't know what more means for you in this context but you could try it out right if you're if you're going through this and you're having awareness about what it means to burn out what things you might be giving up you could go try it out and see like you know what this felt rewarding for me to do that I do feel better off so I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here um so yeah I wouldn't worry about it but you know it's it's your it's your career and your life to to try things out so um you know flexibility so yeah and then you know I didn't I was on a little bit of a ramble there uh but also keep in mind early in your career just reading in the chat right you may need to make some sacrifices build the life you want yeah this person said it in one sentence and it took me five minutes of dancing around it to have a very nice sentence like that so thank you for adding that in the chat I think that's exactly right right you can you can try these things out you can see you can build the life you want I think that's a great way to put it so I do appreciate that thanks for adding that okay what are other things we can try looking at when it comes to burnout I hope I haven't been saying impostor syndrome this whole time I almost just said it and I caught myself so that's the crappy thing about live streaming is I I don't know how much I'm messing up people are watching this being like this idiot that's okay um no regrets right so what else can we do about burnout well we talked about um if you're working on projects too long we talked about um are you overc committing yourself what else could we maybe do when it comes to burnout you could maybe again if we're we're the Baseline was start to have some awareness right you might be able to if you have a partner at home or even friends if you're early in your career and so maybe have roommates and stuff like that I don't know like it you could you could have conversations with them right are they noticing that once you started a new job a new project are they noticing that your behavior is changing right you could have conversations with people to try and drive up that awareness be more in tune with it I think that's important so you can leverage like I think it's important you build up your own awareness but if you're kind of like I'm not really sure I don't know if I'm experiencing burnout right now maybe you could talk with someone about it right they can help be a bit of a I don't know like a a measuring stick for you so to speak like they can give you some insight that maybe you don't have for yourself yet that might be beneficial um you could again if you're if you're in a good spot a good working relationship with your manager you could bring that up with them say hey I've been thinking about this do you have any thoughts like could we talk through this and see maybe if you've worked with them for a while they might notice these things already right we kind of saw in the chat I was you know overc committing myself my performance was degrading well if your performance is degrading if you have any type of like feedback from your manager whether it's through compensation or something something else they're probably noticing it that's why your your measured performance is degrading right so might be worth having a conversation with them start things off but that might be a good starting point for folks um like I said once you have the awareness it's going to be very situational so you want to reflect on the things the primary things that are causing the burnout or the symptoms of the burnout I should say and see if there's initial things that you can start to work on that help with those so if you're kind of acknowledging I think I'm going through burnout and something's got to change what what are the biggest factors for you in that dissatisfaction right so to give you an example for me what it wasn't what it was not was oh man wish I had more time for other things I didn't have other things right so not not an issue nowadays like so give you a couple more examples I kind of mentioned with content creation work you got other stuff going on in life I have a wife we got three dogs we love our dogs um I have like I have I do have other time commitments that I need to keep in mind so as I'm doing other stuff I have started to notice when I was trying to write a blog article per day plus work plus the newsletter plus the YouTube videos plus actually engaging on social media I'm like okay like I don't have the time for this it's too much of a time commitment I need time back so again having the awareness affords you when you start to feel burnout you can reflect on it and say like what what's the most critical thing that's kind of getting in the way here if it's if you're noticing the biggest thing like as you're experiencing burnout is you're just like I'm really disinterested in this if you express that to your manager they they might be able to help align another project that you are more interested in so I think I'm biased of course as an engineering manager these are the types of conversations that if my employees approached me I would absolutely be like very happy to talk through how we could improve that for them and I would not be sitting there going oh man like this person here they are just whining about work like not like that at all it would very much be like I'm first of all I'm happy that they could make the time and they have the trust to be able to tell me about this I think that's awesome I don't think it's easy I think it's awesome they could do it second of all I think it's my job and my responsibility to be able to help them with these things so I'm happy to do it but I think that might be it folks um as I get ready to sign off here just a last opportunity if anyone has questions thoughts uh happy to answer any last minute things here I know there's a bit of a delay so I like to just ramble a little bit to make make sure that if people want to type anything that by the time the delay works both ways that I can read your messages and stuff but um yeah I will mention that I do this every Monday 9:30 PM PST I know I've seen Maria on a couple of times I've actually done a live stream with Maria we've done a recorded YouTube video as well she's great um but yeah trying to do these every Monday 9:30 p.m PST so we'll remind you that like if you want to see next week's live stream if you have questions that you want answered on the live stream you can message me um you're welcome Cameron no problem is that the same Cameron from YouTube as well is that two Camerons or one Cameron in two spots will we ever know um but yeah I do this every Monday and I rotate the topic uh I don't code on these Monday live streams I like making them more General about software engineering but I have been trying to code um again it's a time commitment thing I have been trying to code throughout the week sometimes it's early in the morning my time and walk through code um on Instagram really great explanation well I'm glad that you enjoyed that so I hope that helped oh yes I switched okay so it is just one Cameron not in two spots at the same time he just moved so I'll be able to sleep at night knowing that at least it's not multilocation Cameron okay folks well thanks for joining I do appreciate the all the support in the chat and stuff like I say like I do these for you guys so um I'm I'm happy that you can engage and get your stuff answered and share because again I have one set of experiences that I can share with all of you my experiences are not you know a rule it's not Universal and if you guys can share your own experiences in the chat and stuff it's so helpful for other people to see different examples of things so thank you once again I appreciate it hopefully you can join next Monday 9:30 p.m. PST and I'll see you then take care enjoy the rest of your week