In 2009, I experienced burnout. I had just turned 30 and was doing management consulting for software teams. I thought it was the coolest job in the world at first - people paid to fly me to their dev standup to tell them how to build software better! And although I didn't really have the experience necessary to be really good at it, I was capable enough to make it work. But after a fear years, I got absolutely burned out.

I thought maybe the problem was that software wasn't the industry for me. I still liked to code, but I just couldn't stomach the idea of being in another standup, having another conversation about how long a sprint should be, or discussion about why some team refuses to track defects effectively. So I decided to leave the software world behind to start a my own business. As fate would have it I ended up spending the next decade building, running, and eventually closing a sporting goods retail business.

I still wrote some code during that time that solved a few of our business needs. That code resulted in real competitive advantages that contributed to our success. And because old habits die hard and it's a useful practice in a variety of circumstances, we even had a standup to start each workday!

The experience of running my own business taught me a lot. I matured over that 10 years. And I gained enough experience and perspective to realize my burnout had nothing to do with writing code or managing software teams and everything to do with understanding what type of work I enjoyed.

I enjoyed building things. I enjoyed the camaraderie of being on a team and sharing in successes and failures with coworkers. But I definitely didn't want to spend all of my days in retail and managing retail personnel. So we closed the retail business and I have been back in software a few years now.

Looking back on why I got burned out in the first place, I realized I stayed on too long at the consulting firm. The money was great, my boss was great, the other consultants were great (although our paths didn't cross very often). But I loathed client work. I loathed never being a part of a team and delivering software. I loathed spending so much effort convincing my client to let me help. I loathed the travel. I loathed spending one day of the week at a client site sitting in their security department waiting for a badge. I loathed airport security lines, shitty airport food, late planes, luggage lines, and rental cars. I loathed cubicle hell. And I conflated all that, to my detriment, with the act of writing software.

Figuring out what really makes me tick has resulted in being as satisfied in a work situation as I've been in my entire career. My current employer isn't perfect. Business is challenging. I don't have enough budget, processes need improving, timelines are too aggressive, and priorities change too often. But now that I know what I enjoy (and what I don't) and have enough breadth of experience to better triage my frustrations. That's made it much easier to find satisfaction and be content.

I hope denvercoder is able to do the same. If he finds out that he's truly satisfied detailing cars and creates a successful business doing so, fantastic. Maybe he finds out it's just another stepping stone on a bigger journey. But as the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. And life is too short not to be happy.