On Real Burnout
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TL:DR; (Worth the read though)

I recently—early last year—faced real burnout for the first time and it has had devastating effects for quite some time. Up until then I considered myself to have some level of fortitude such that amongst my many failings, I managed to maintain a strong level of enthusiasm for development and work ethic in general. I wanted to work. I wanted to do well. I wanted to make new things on the web. I wanted to do this with smart people who held the same interests. Working at the last company that I did progressively got more and more dismal until it came to an unfortunate and abrupt end. All of the positive attributes that I just mentioned went away. I’m just now coming out of this after having been unemployed for almost a year, unable to successfully find work and having to overcome all the previously mentioned hurdles.

My Story.

Starting in mid-2015 I was contacted by a recruiter working out of Vancouver about a job in the area. I was living at home in Winnipeg at the time, needed the money (much better than I was capable of making locally), needed the work itself and further experience. I spoke with the recruiter, did an interview, and was left with a tough decision to make. I knew the company was a large corporate entity which I knew I wouldn’t fare well at. But, the money was literally twice what I had brought in previously and the location much better. I also hadn’t worked at a large corp. until then and was basing my hesitation upon my personality and gut instinct rather than hard experience. It was also one of the largest auction companies in the world, so I figured at the very least it’ll be good experience. It’ll give me the money and power to do something different if I need to right? So I gave it a go. I accepted the offer, said goodbye, and moved.

The day I started was an Agile workshop. Hallmark of corporate stooge hell. This isn’t in and of itself all that interesting, but in retrospect I should have started panicking. Anyway, the first few weeks were strange. I was handed a large and heavy HP “workhorse” laptop, tasked with nothing in particular and went about my business of inspecting the website to see where improvements might need to be made. I made an effort to get acquainted with everyone in the office, some of which helped me get my dev environment set up. This was a project. No documentation to speak of. No standard image, package, zip file, consistency. The code base was pulled from SVN (I can elaborate on the stack if anyone is curious) and configured using one of my colleague’s environments as an example. Everyone seemed to have their own slight variant of course and there wasn’t one base, definitely working version, to go off. The codebase was monolithic, inconsistent, slow, and undocumented. It made “going faster”—one of my supervisor’s favourite catchphrases—impossible, and “breaking things” the only element of consistency other than stress. So for the first 6 months I pushed through and things were going okay. I got along well with my colleagues and managed to get a decent amount done through sheer brute force. The arcane knowledge of a few veterans and the support of a good team helped get me there.

Six months in and my contract up, I still had confidence in my abilities, was stressed out but not insurmountably so, and enjoyed living in BC. I knew that this wasn’t a long-term thing for me, but was able to circumvent some of the archaic policies that had detrimental effects on my work. I was learning a little about how to work with large legacy codebases and on teams. I was also learning about what it’s like working in a office in which the managers truly don’t care and internal politics supersede everything. First experience witnessing blatant favouritism, backstabbing, and slightly more subtle sexism. Anyhow, managing to secure a raise and renewed contract, I pushed through into the new year. Weeks prior there was a bit of a team change up (department consisted of roughly 5 teams, somewhat arbitrarily put together from the top-down). Front-end people were moved around a bit. Not a huge change, not a huge problem. I worked closely with the other team dealing with the front-end web stuff and had a vague idea that they were going to working on a new high value re-design. Coming into the new year, management made the decision to completely re-configure the teams and then immediately start this new project. Of course, with tight deadlines. My new team, tasked with this new project, had no domain knowledge to speak of. The other front-end dev which had been integral to the R&D + planning of it was tasked with something completely different. Great. Tight deadlines to not only learn how to work with a different team, within a different team structure, switch contexts to a foreign part of the system, in a noisy grey office, and operating on a dev stack more fragile than Donald Trump’s policy decisions. So I did my best. I started trying to build a solid foundation of communication amongst team members, attempted to plan a sound process for which to get things done, and advocated for things that would help us do this. But I was also speaking with others and started looking for other work here and there. Getting my resume ready and so forth.

By this point, I was starting to really feel burnt out. My interest in open source was fading. I wasn’t encouraged to experiment with new things, directly and indirectly as a result of ludicrous deadlines, I was losing confidence in my efficacy, and wanted to escape as often as I could. I became the bottleneck in the team because I couldn’t get anything done. Meetings, noise, stress, broken builds, slow builds, not enough points, no documentation, slow hardware, slow libraries, no true responsibility, no time to improve things, no help with improving things, resentment within the team, literal alienation through isolation of team members. Going faster was a far off dream. Going at all would have been a step in the right direction. My normal emotionally mature, generally muted self turned into a much more quick to irritate and react self. It was getting bad quick.

I had previously booked a short 1 week vacation at a point that wasn’t supposed to be too busy. Management seemed irritated that I took it because the project ran straight through it, now way past deadline. It was a wake up call. I went home, collected my thoughts, drove thousands of KM, and gained some perspective. When I got back I was going to actively pursue leaving more than previously, and figure out a way to get this project done. Fortunately, I got back and was promptly fired. I saw it coming. Managers had been planning this for a while. Not a confidence booster and I was already too late. I was burnt out.

So I packed up my crap, said goodbye to everyone, met up a few more times with them (while maintaining some friends and connections) and took some well needed time off. I needed to enjoy myself. I don’t know how this would have played out had it just been that. Tragically though, this coincided with the news of my grandmother falling critically ill back home. I flew back and spent the next two months helping my family through a very rough time. Enjoying myself though I did in the time I could, it was in large part a period of time spent watching a key family member pass away. I did not look for work during this time, and all of these things coming together likely contributed to every part of this becoming more difficult.

Upon arrival back home I found it an arduous task at a minimum gathering the spirit and curiosity I once had. I didn’t care about practicing my career and now had dependancies to finance. I couldn’t focus easily, I couldn’t find anything interesting and obtainable, a multitude of job interviews came and went, and money was disappearing quickly. I was stuck. But, I still had my hobbies. Skateboarding, friends, and adventure all kept me going. I was able to maintain perseverance if nothing else. Eventually, it slowly started coming back. Very slowly. I found a unique conference in Europe to attend surrounding web graphics and climate science which I thought would really help me get back into it. By introducing me to new tech, brilliant people, and coupling it with adventure, I made a small step forward. I started working with visualization more, reading more theory, exploring subjects outside my comfort zone, and kept going forward. Still slowly, but kind of getting there.

In late December I was offered some part-time work installing a CKAN Open Data portal for a University which was not only not something I had not done before, but it fit directly in-line with what I want to be working on again. Now in March I’ve come to the end of that, made a tiny bit of money, but am still essentially income-less, unsuccessful at finding consistent work, and still struggle with motivation. On the upside, I have an idea of what I want to be doing. I’ve met more people and done more interesting things than ever before. I’ve regained a good amount of confidence in my skill, a good amount of ambition, and am still in the best health/physical condition I’ve ever been in. The mental health is the harder part, it’s been 10 long months.

To anyone here going through something similar, don’t give up. Keep pushing. Introduce variety and try new things. Meet smart people and ask for advice. Have fun. The bounce-back is very slow, and ongoing for me personally, but I think you can get through it.