[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to the Rubber Duck Dev Show. I'm Chris.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: And I'm kristen.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: I'm Coda, and we are excited to have our friend back here today.
We are going to talk about burnout, and I think this is a timely show because we're getting the new video game. Yeah, right. Yeah, the new video game.
We're gonna you know, it's getting towards the end of the year, and that's when people start, you know, getting their biggest need for a vacation. They're getting just brains are starting to want to just go, I need a break.
So I think this will be a good conversation, but before we get into the fun stuff, we can review Creston. How was your week?
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Pretty good. I do want to thank if anyone from the show signed up for the Zoom call about my course that I'm developing, the postgres course. Thank you for that. I have sent out emails to the people who reached out to coordinate times to have those Zoom calls, and I'm scheduling for next week, so thanks for everyone that did that.
Apart from that, you know how I was saying I can't remember which episode it was, whether it was last week or not, that I think it was the show that Chris and I did together. But we're talking about how I had never really stepped into the container realm for building my app and that I'm still relying on Capistrano and never, you know, went into Kubernetes and whatnot. Well, I have a client who says, hey, we want to move our database into Kubernetes, and we want to do it in three weeks. I'm like, okay, time to study.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: Has to be Kubernetes. None of the other simpler ones. Docker swarm, anything like that.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: No, they were already using it for their application, their application servers. So I think they're just basically, well, let's just extend it and do the whole thing with it.
But I don't even know docker swarm at this point. I mean, I'm getting up to speed. Like, I've download Docker, and I'm going through their whole process and whatnot thankfully, I actually tried doing this maybe it was two weeks ago excuse me, two months ago, and there was some weird thing with Linux where you had to install this, and you had to be careful of this. But when I checked the docs more recently, like, in the last couple of days, it's hard to call it more streamlined because you still have about 15 manual steps to get it up and running.
I don't know if it's the same on a Mac or a PC, but it at least was clear what I needed to do. But through that process, I got it up and running and testing out containers and running them and just getting used to using it. But of course, once you understand the docker and creating docker container, then I need to up level my knowledge to Kubernetes. So I'm getting to that point. But anyway, that's what's been going on with me. What about you, Chris?
[00:03:18] Speaker A: So I am still just really busy with this acquisition and the merging of engineering teams.
This is a level of integration that I've never had to deal with before. It's a huge amount of stuff and it's probably going to be six to eight months before things are really integrated and settled.
But we're taking on somewhere on the order of, I think, 30 to 35 engineers, which is a little more than double our team size.
So bringing that many people in all at once from a different product is daunting. It's fun, it's exciting and it's challenging, but man, it's a big job.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Out of curiosity, where's the big time?
I don't want to say time stink, but what's taking so much of the time resources to do this? Is it just having meetings? Is it trying to decide?
[00:04:23] Speaker A: There's a lot of that, but for me personally, it's mostly just kind of helping my bosses keep their plates clear so that they can concentrate on the logistics of getting everybody trained.
And I'm helping with some of the training and talking to the new folks and getting them on board for the people that are going to be in my area. But most of it is just me kind of clearing roadblocks for other people so they can do all the training and stuff.
But man, it's a lot. It's going to be fun though. I'm excited about it. But.
[00:05:05] Speaker C: You said this is double the size of your team.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: It sounds like a little bit more.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Almost tripling the size.
[00:05:13] Speaker C: So it's tripling the size of the organization, is that right?
[00:05:18] Speaker A: Well, not the organization, but our team. Yeah, I see.
It's big.
So our division of I work for Shift Four, but I actually work for Venue Next, which was bought by Shift Four, so we're a company inside Shift Four and Venue Next has acquired this other, their biggest competitor. So it's doubling the size of this company, but not the parent company.
But man, if we had time, he'd.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Draw a flow charge.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a big thing, but it's keeping me busy.
Looking forward to getting a brain break here at the end of the year, for sure.
So. How about you, Coda?
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Yeah, so we just finished a pretty big contract for us and sort of doing some work on controlling multiple robots and things like that. And that was actually a cool project because I think it was really kind of my first time ever digging into React, which I know sounds strange that I hadn't really done that before, but turns on robot land, you're typically in C Plus Plus or Python and you're dealing with these low level things.
So that's kind of the world I'm from. And we have a team that does a lot of our sort of UI and the web systems kinds of things. And so I personally hadn't really done much of that before this, but I got to use React Three fiber, which I don't know if either of you have played with. Have you?
[00:07:06] Speaker A: I haven't. I've heard of it.
[00:07:08] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's actually pretty cool.
It makes it very easy to define your scenes, your 3D scenes. And so then I was able to do that. I wrote some GLSL as well to do some shader things.
Essentially, the application this is like a fifth of the contract, but the application I'm referring to is the simulator to simulate about 1000 different robots all driving at the same time and coordinating them. And you can actually run this all on I was able to actually run it at real time on my computer on just like, my Dev machine, which is a laptop. So wow. I was pretty pleased about that. I think.
There was all this I used some GPGPU stuff, some CUDA, to paralyze a lot of things. And then I have of course, it's multithreaded. And then I used Uwebsockets, which is a server in C plus plus that claims to be 1000 times faster than Node JS. I don't know if I believe it, really.
It kind of powers the other kind of major servers and things. So I just kind of use that.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: Directly since that's a bold claim, 1000 times.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: But at the same time, it probably lacks a lot of the features, at least off the shelf, that you'd want in a production system where in terms of security and things like that, which, frankly, I don't really care much about, or like load management, probably, I don't know. So a lot of these things I don't really need to worry about since I'm concerned about one or two people usually touching this thing at a time.
And it's local, so I got to play with that. And it was overall a pretty fun experience. I learned a lot.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Cool. So, yeah, it's always fun to play with new toys.
That's always a highlight of my week if I get a chance to do that.
So I feel you, man.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: This was a couple of months, but yes.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: All right, well, let's get into burnout.
Obviously, Coda never burns out, but, you know, we everybody burns out.
I've been through several burnout phases in my career.
I even went so far as to after doing it for 20 years, I was just so burnt out on programming at all that I stopped programming for two years and went off and did something else for a while and then came back to it.
Most people don't do it that drastically, but I think what it was is that I didn't manage my burnout over that two decade period and so it just got out of control.
So I've since learned some things about how to deal with that a little better. But what do you think, Koda? What kind of stuff do you do to kind of prevent or Mitigate.
[00:10:45] Speaker C: So, I mean, I think the big thing that people talk a lot about is work life balance. And I think that's important. But there's also kind of the key thing, if anything, is just consistency, right, where making sure that you have some time for yourself. And you also have methods to make sure that you don't get overwhelmed. So it's not really kind of that work life balance per se but it's really the amount that you're overwhelmed I think that really causes the burnout and I don't know if that's sort of read a couple of things sort of about that.
I've had some issues with burnout in the past. I think I went leading up until when I started the company that I started a company. And then up until maybe three or four years in, there was a period of almost five years where I did not take a single day off.
And so at minimum, I was working two or 3 hours every day for four or five years straight, took zero vacations and just kind of went for it.
And then I got pretty burnt out. So I can tell you that's not what you're supposed to do. I have plenty of counterexamples.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So what about you Kristen?
[00:12:18] Speaker B: My level of burnout has just been more subtle, nothing big and dramatic meaning that I just question is this the right thing? I get tired of doing something I think that's as opposed to burning out it's like I get tired of doing something like a couple of months ago doing different episodes of something like doing Scaling postgres I kind of question hey, should I really be doing this? Should I be doing something else? And it's just asking questions with regard to that and saying is this where I should spending my time? Should I be spending it somewhere else? So that's most of what the burnout I've experienced, it's not anything drastic that I had to step away, but it's mostly getting tired of doing some certain thing and I don't know, wanting to change or something like that. In terms of what I've experienced, although I have had stressful issues and physical manifestations of that, I don't know if I necessarily call that burnout.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: That's just stress.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. I think of burnout as being more long term and needing more time to whereas if you're stressed and even if you have some sort of stress event or something or you break out in hives or something like that I would kind of think that's a more over, short term thing that's impacted you, even if it is work related and working too much or whatever, I think that's more short term. Whereas burnout is, I think, a cumulative build up of things over time, a longer term thing.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: And you get to a point I mean, I think of it as you get to a point where I just don't want to do this thing for work anymore, at least for a while. I need to stop doing this, not just for an hour and go take a walk. I need to stop doing this for a living for a bit. I think when you're at the point of burnout, not that you want to abandon or change careers, but it's like I need some time away from this.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: I actually considered whether I should leave my company after at one point, and then I think I kind of recognized that.
I think there's the recognition that I was very burnt out and then there was the feeling of almost being kind of trapped in that situation where I didn't really know how to end up in a situation that wasn't very stressful. Because at the time we didn't have a very big budget. And not that we always like a bigger budget, but I think the big thing for me was being in a situation where I felt like I was stuck in a stressful situation without really a way out of it. And that made it very hard to I had days where I was just completely unproductive.
And I think even though that was years ago at this point, even now, I have to make sure that I'm sort of in some ways it can be a little bit tricky to have the same level of enthusiasm as I have at certain parts of my life in terms of technology.
That actually happened to coincide partly with when I started playing a little bit with sort of like Dragon Ruby as well.
And that's very expressive and kind of helped me rediscover what's fun about programming, about development.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I had kind of this exact same experience when I got into Dragon Ruby. It was nice to use Ruby completely differently than what I did for web apps.
And so it kind of helped me fall in love with it again and see different ways to do things and kind of freshen it up for me. And I think that's part of it too, is as human beings, I think we tend to not like things to get stale and if there's not something new coming along once in a while, we tend to just get bored with the drudgery.
I will say that I think a lot of burnout has or what leads to burnout has to do with different temperaments. Some people love I do the same thing every day and that's how that works for me. I'm not like that. I get like creston. I think I get really bored with stuff after a while. I like to constantly be getting into new things and learning new things.
I'm very bad at finishing, but I'm really good at starting.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Well, no, I'm not quite that.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: No, not like that, but not to that extreme. You will bulldog things for a while. You've got a lot more discipline than I do for following things through.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I have a longer runway before things impact me as much. But I think an also component to it is what am I doing? Because when I'm thinking about some of the scaling postgres stuff, the thing that I hate doing more than anything else was editing the episodes. So for example, I'll call it a podcast or this show. We don't do any editing or just record it, throw it up there.
However, scaling postgres is highly edited. Like there are probably 200 cuts per episode just based on how I record it. It's pretty atrocious shocking. And I would record the episode and I'm like, I got to do the edit and that was just a bear. But what I've done is I'm now using some external help to say someone says, hey, I like doing some video editing. It's like, okay, great, here.
So I think it's also a little bit what that helps prevent burnt point I'm getting to what helps prevent burnout is, for lack of better term, what lights you up or what do you enjoy during doing versus what you don't do. Because the more your day is spent doing things that don't light you up or you're kind of like, I can do it, I don't necessarily want to do it. The more you do that, the more burned out you're going to get and faster is my feeling on that.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
So Coda, what kind of things do you mean? Because you've been through burnout, I'm going to assume more than maybe once in your career, but what kind of things do you do have you learned to do to kind of keep that at bay?
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the big things is to I think, like, managing customers is actually, in my case, it's a little bit of a you know I think one of my cases of Burnout was a situation where we have customers overseas in East Asia, and I would get phone calls at random times if something wasn't going well. So it's basically on call every day from basically 07:00 P.m. Till around eleven or twelve is when I up till then, when they would get a call, right? Yeah. And then that would be when the call would start. And I don't know, it could potentially lead to diving into some support thing that would be several hours long from there and this could happen at any point. So essentially I felt like I was stuck right here because if I ever left home in the evenings or anything, then I might get a call and then get pulled right back. So I couldn't schedule anything. I felt like I was always stuck here.
It was like I was frankly getting a little bit scared of my phone.
So there's kind of a lot of things like that that was tricky. And I think we started allocating essentially basically saying we have like a fixed number of support hours and anything beyond that there would be an additional charge, and we made the charge a little bit higher, and that drastically reduced the calls.
That alone. And then I think also the big thing was that we kind of went back and looked at how part of the issue is that all of our systems run in these environments where they're actually not connected to the Internet. So these are on premise installations.
And so if something goes wrong, then this was early on, so we didn't quite have all the infrastructure that we do now.
So I think for that, really making sure that we had kind of the infrastructure to and when something unexpected happens, how do we handle that? Is sort of that whole pipeline is something that we didn't really have to the same degree that we have now, and that really made a big difference.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I've kind of been in those situations before. So I hear that not being tied to your phone 24/7 because something might ping. That's never fun.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: So out of curiosity, you being on call, I mean, it essentially sounds like you're the help desk.
Are there others that could have helped take that burden, at least for part of the day or something?
[00:23:01] Speaker C: We sort of tried to and we actually had a schedule for who would be on call when and things like that. And eventually we also have kind of a team now, I guess, in Japan and Korea in terms of helping us with these things. So that obviously makes a big difference, too.
But I think at the I'm I'm half Japanese. That's my name's, japanese name, and I also speak Japanese. And so turns out our customers in Japan prefer to speak to someone understandably who speak the same language as them. And it's hard to find engineers here who can be as involved with the technical side. When you have limited resources in terms of financial resources, then you have to be pretty careful with each hire. And so kind of that mixed with this situation made it pretty difficult. And I felt like I was kind of in a little bit stuck in that kind of position because of that.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I see the difficulty with it. Imagine hiring someone, hiring an engineer and say, okay, day one. All right, let's have you join a Japanese class to start.
[00:24:28] Speaker C: Right? Yeah, it doesn't exactly work.
Definitely the hiring was pretty tricky back then.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
One of the things, too, I think it's important to kind of do some self reflection and understand your temperament and what it is that actually would lead you to burnout. Because it's going to be different for different people. Right. And the solutions are going to be different.
For instance, me, one of the things I learned about me is learning that I like to get involved in different things. Often.
What ended up helping me kind of stave off Burnout is that I actually picked up a number of different hobbies so that I can kind of jump to this thing that's very different from my day job. And then do that for a while and then jump to a different one. And then jump to a different one. And then come back to the first one. So I get that big variety in my life.
I'll spend some time doing some painting, then I'll spend some time doing some modeling, then I'll spend a bunch of time on gaming as breaks to work.
And that kind of helps keep work fresh too, because since I don't spend all my time doing programming outside of work, when I'm at work, I don't feel so burnt out anymore because my brain is in a completely different direction when I'm not working.
But that works for me. There are other people who they like programming, so they program all day and what they like to do is just program something different at night, but they still just want to always be programming, right, or whatever it is they do. So I think it's important to kind of understand your own temperament and do some reflection.
[00:26:34] Speaker C: Yeah, that's interesting. It's kind of interesting because I think part of the reason I went into robotics is because you have your mechanical engineering parts, you have your electrical engineering, you have your software, and these are even within software, you have your embedded work and your computer vision and all sorts of different things.
And then you have a bunch of math in the background that you have to kind of worry about as well. And so there's actually a lot of variety in that.
That's actually a big reason why I gravitate towards robotics in the first place. And then I think starting a know, startups kind of do work well for someone like Think, because, you know, you end up having to wear all the eventually, you know, as Creston pointed out, I was also help desk, right? So it's not that I really want that know, but in my day to day, I still do some project management things. I do some low level development, I do driver development, I do sort of like robotics algorithms kinds of things. I do some usually higher level things with our UI and our web systems. And then also I'm also the only person on the team who really knows how to do a lot of sort of more of the 3D modeling and animation kinds of things. So when we have a customer with a lot of the marketing materials for specific customers or sort of proposals, I usually do a lot of that kind of thing.
And then also I do a lot of marketing and sort of sales kinds of things with some customers.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: So really.
[00:28:27] Speaker C: I think, Chris, what you did was you said, okay, well, I like variance, so I'll keep work kind of the way it is, but I'll find ways to kind of fulfill that need elsewhere. In my own time. And then I said, well, why don't I just make everything as varied as I can? And that was kind of a different approach to solve the same problem, I think.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
And something else I've noticed about myself too, that keeps me happy at work is that there are some people that like to deep dive into an area and be I am just the specialist of that area. I'm the master of that thing.
That's not how my brain likes to work. I like to know a bit about this and a bit about that and be the jack of all trades. And I can kind of shift departments and focuses as people need me to.
But I don't want to say I'm not a master of it. Well, I'm not really a master of anything. I'm just good at a number of things so that I can shift my focus. And I found that for me, that's the way to avoid the burnout.
So even at work I do that a bit. Not to the extent that you've kind of described for yourself, I don't think, because I do still kind of crave that variety outside of work that has just no technology involved at all.
But I think it's a matter of temperament. And one of the things that I would advise to kind of keep yourself from burning out during your career is to really look at yourself and self examine and understand what it is that you need to keep from getting bored in your career.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: I'll mention something on the tail of that because as I was thinking about my thinking about burnout. And for me, I think if it's doing something that I'm not jazzed to do, it doesn't light me up. I don't feel like I'm really good at it, having to do those things. Which of course, as Coda's mentioned, you have to wear a lot of hats, particularly if you're an entrepreneur. It's like, okay, got to do the marketing, got to do the sales, got to do the product, got to do everything, got to do the security, got to do the legal and everything.
There's a book I read that kind of put some of this in focus. There are other books that cover it as so Michael Hyatt's book, Free to Focus, he talks about really it's about focusing on what you're really good at and want to do and kind of outsourcing everything else. Not that basically try to take control and focus on what you're good at so you can be the best at it, but all those things that kind of burden you down and may cause more burnout if you're doing stuff you don't enjoy, finding ways to get rid of those. And that's kind of what I've done in terms of the people I have hired thus far. It's kind of like I don't like doing documentation. Okay, let me get someone to do this. I don't like writing blog posts. Let me get someone to do this. I don't like doing video editing. Okay, let me get someone to do so at every point I'm like, I don't like doing this. Let me find something else to do it so I'm free to focus on the other things that I'm really good at.
Anyway. That book just I remember it, and it's kind of I don't know if it's a playbook I'm following, but it's kind of something I'm following to help me not be as burned out. I'll say it that way.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: So one of the things that I want to touch on, too, is why do you think it's important for us to be having this discussion in this show?
I get burnt out. So what what are the dangers? What are the ramifications? Why do we need to talk about this in the first place?
[00:32:36] Speaker B: You explode.
Not literally, but potentially. I'll throw my two cent potentially, figuratively. I mean, you may lash out at your kids or your significant other or heaven forbid, other work related areas, I don't know. And also physical manifestations.
I'm sure this may be contributing to hair loss or weight gain or other things. If you're constantly in know, stressed or burned out state, that can cause a whole host of issues. I mean, that's what I see. I don't know what coda or you.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: I mean, I think that's very true.
Also know if it's a rubber duck dev show, right? I mean, it's burnout's a big part of development, kind of the real world of development, right? And something that a lot of people hit at some point in their career.
So in that sense, it's probably a relatable experience for a lot of people who've had that or who have had peers who have had that. And then also it's probably good to express since probably younger engineers who don't necessarily know better might end up doing things that can pretty heavily, especially when you have a new job, first job out of school or something, you're really excited about it. And we had an employee who I kind of checked in with him about a month in and asked him how he was doing, how he was feeling. And he said he was really excited and that he really likes the team and that he was working till around two or three every morning because he just wanted to learn more things and be able to contribute more. And I was like, let's hold off and let's not do that.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Appreciate the enthusiasm.
And one of the things that I will bring up, one of the reasons that I really wanted to have this conversation is because I think that burnout can lead to very dangerous things. Primarily, it can lead to depression.
Some people are obviously going to be more prone to that than others, but burnout is a path to depression. And if you get to that point, that can be. Extremely dangerous.
At points in my career, I struggled with depression because I let the burnout get out of control. And then it kind of got to be a negative spiral, and I don't want people to go through that. I want to bring this to light so that people can start recognizing, hey, I'm getting towards burnout. Let me do something about it before I get to more dangerous places.
Because if you get to those dangerous places, it's scary. It's scary for you, it's scary for your family, it's scary for your friends, and then you're not doing anybody any good by getting there. So I'm hoping that kind of bringing this up will help people start thinking about ways to kind of control that and be cognizant of if they're getting towards those things, to step back and take care of themselves so that they don't get burnt out. Because we all want to enjoy our jobs. We all want to love getting up every morning and going to work, right.
Nobody's going to do that 100% of every day. There's going to be days where you're like, oh, God, I don't want to go do this today. But you should be overall happy with your job. And if you're getting to a burnout state, you need to do something to take care of yourself.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Out of curiosity, the thing you say about Coda said about engineers experiencing a fair amount of burnout, potentially.
What is the reason why? I mean, I know I've read something similar, but I can't recall why that is. I don't know if it's more prevalent than other positions.
Do either of you know?
[00:37:02] Speaker A: My guess would be that because development is such a mentally strenuous job that it can tend more towards burnout because burnout is really a mental thing.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: Coda, did you have something you were.
[00:37:19] Speaker C: Going to yeah, but Chris, on the flip side, you also hear a lot about people who like assembly line workers and things like that experiencing burnout. True in some ways, kind of the physical labor, same thing every day, sort of the opposite of development in a lot of ways.
Probably a lot of it also just comes from the stressors and the relationships with your colleagues and things like that. I think even, for example, even something as benign as a team where maybe the code reviews are pretty slow or don't really happen and you're just kind of a little bit frustrated by that. And every day you get a little bit more frustrated, eventually that's going to kind of boil over.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: I have heard of that at super big companies where someone joins and they've been there for two years and every line of code they have produced, nothing has reached production or some insane comment like that was made. And I can understand that wearing you down or potentially burning you out, because it's like, well, what am I doing here?
You might be thinking, I serve no purpose et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, but I didn't know if anything particular about software engineering made it more stressful or not. I mean, frankly, I'm not stressed about when I do development.
What's the most stressful thing that I do is, hey, we want to migrate this multi terabyte database and have zero downtime and do this upgrade and not lose any bit of data. That is stressful.
And do it in the migration as short as you can. Seconds, ideally, if not minutes.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: No pressure part.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Writing code that even other people are reviewing. I'm like that has less stress for me.
Yeah.
[00:39:33] Speaker A: Here's a Huffy bicycle. We'd like this to be on Mars in about a month. Go.
[00:39:40] Speaker C: Kind of going back to something you said earlier, Chris.
You mentioned that you took a couple of years off and did something totally different. Right.
We actually have an employee who actually, funnily enough, started as an artist or went to graphic design, I think, for that school, and then worked as a ski resort, basically maintaining the snow, and then went into software and was in software for maybe five to ten years and then burnt out pretty badly and quit software and then started a brewery and did that for like, eight years and then came back into software.
He's a very solid engineer.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Now with him. Do you know what caused the software engineering burnout?
Do you happen to know?
[00:40:44] Speaker C: No, I actually haven't asked him. Maybe that's something I don't know if that's something that I should have asked him or maybe I shouldn't.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: No, that's fine.
Just interesting because I think there's some aspects of burnout that are just maybe just someone gets bored of kind of what they do and they just want to change.
And I think it's also important if that happens, then maybe accept it.
Don't beat yourself up about it too much if it's something you need to do, if you feel you have another calling for.
[00:41:28] Speaker C: You know, we're kind of lucky in know, software in general tends to know often, at least in the US. Tends to be a fairly high paying job. Right.
And it's in demand enough that there is some mobility there if that's something that you need. And so I think we're lucky in that sense to to be in an industry where we have that kind of flexibility.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: Well, yeah. And the kind of situation where if you can dream it, you can make it. We're not limited to we can only make this one widget with software, you can make anything, even entire new worlds. So we are absolutely blessed to have a calling like that, to have that kind of opportunity.
But it can also be very daunting because it's so wide open and so big and so much to learn, and it can get overwhelming sometimes.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Sorry, go ahead.
[00:42:38] Speaker C: Oh, no. I'm sure there's like a classification, too, of different main causes of burnout. Right. Whether it's we've talked a little bit about feeling like you're just doing the same kinds of things and not doing enough sort of variance. But there's also the wow, there's just so much that's overwhelming and it's never ending.
Or there's the burnout that comes from having maybe just colleagues that are unpleasant to work with and then having to do that every day.
Although in some ways that's kind of the same thing.
And then there's also the burnout of why am I doing this when there's no purpose if I'm at a big company and the thing never gets released. And so it seems like there's all sorts of different types of burnouts and in some ways it seems like they manifest themselves in somewhat similar ways.
I guess as people, there aren't that many things we can do. And shutting down is a pretty easy one. Right?
[00:43:35] Speaker A: I mean, take a regular vacation. That's helpful.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say kind of what you were saying is kind of like being on the hamster wheel. So as fast as everything moves in technology for this particular career path, doing software engineering, you need to keep up to speed a lot. Like imagine, I don't know why blacksmithing came to mind, but if you were a blacksmith, there's certain defined number of things you need to learn and then you can just master those few things. Whereas software engineering, there's new crap being thrown at you on a daily basis.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Right. The number of JavaScript frameworks that have come out in the past decade is insane.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: I see how that fitting in under one of your categories causes stress and burnout.
[00:44:32] Speaker C: Yeah, and actually I think for me, one of the things that's really helped is just kind of I think I tend to get prone to a few of these different things.
We at any point in time have a lot of different things going on and of course we dealt now we have different teams doing different things. But when you're kind of looking at all these different things and you're like, well, all this come together on time, there's a lot kind of to. And I think one of the big causes for burnout is feeling like you're not really making any real progress. So I have this notebook where every day I write down what I've been doing, or I guess what I did the day before, what I'm going to do that day. And then also sort of what I'm grateful for, like just a few different things. And then sort of a couple of things about what I'm good at. And then kind of just a couple big goals of like, okay, these are the things I'm really trying to accomplish. And then at the end of the day, I kind of look back and I review it and I write the tasks for the next day.
And it's actually really nice because I have this record now where kind of years worth of notebooks where I can just kind of look back and say, wow, when I think back at it, I can't really think of that many things that I've done. But there's kind of these stacks of books that tell me otherwise. And that actually, I think really helps in terms of keeping the motivation and feeling like I'm moving forward and also just it's a good motivator as well.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Right, well, I like one of the things that you said you did, I liked all of that, but one of the things you said you did specifically that really stuck out to me is that you write down a few things every day that you're thankful for.
And I think that's extraordinarily helpful because it gets your brain to focus on good things instead of languishing in bad things.
So I'm going to steal that from you, thanks very much, and try that myself because I think positive attitudes go a long way to driving off things like burnout and depression and stuff like that.
[00:47:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I had actually a few different bouts of pretty bad depression. So a lot of my habits at this point have come from how do I mitigate, how do I avoid getting depression? And if I'm starting to feel a little bit about of it, then if I start to feel like I'm moving in that direction, then I kind of try to take a step back and try to figure out what's going on there and try to have more of a positive mindset as well. So I think those things actually in the long run can help a lot. Not that I've had very long continued success in terms of just last time I had Burnett was not that long ago. Right?
[00:47:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
I need to get back on the wagon, as it were, because I was doing some of that. There was another book I read called The Gap and the Gain.
That kind of iterated that basically focus on the gain you have, not the gap for where you want to be. So it's basically they kind of do something similar, what you're mentioning, they advocate writing down. I think it's three things that you accomplished that day. You've presumably accomplished something and then what do you intend to accomplish tomorrow? And don't necessarily beat yourself up if you don't accomplish those things, but just still recognize that you at least accomplish something.
[00:48:41] Speaker A: Well, I think having a day to get rest is an accomplishment. You got to do that for yourself once in a while.
[00:48:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I read something about there was like, I don't remember which atomic habits maybe, I think is that James Clear book? I think. Yeah, james clear. That's right.
And in that book he talks about how there's this I think the British cycling team, men's cycling team used to be very weak and then they hired someone, a new coach, and his goal basically was to just improve the team like 1%, but do that every day, right? So in the course of a couple of years, they actually became the top team in the world.
Now they dominate apparently almost every year.
And kind of the way they did this was they looked at, even with the bikes, they looked at, okay, how can we shave off just even if it's a tiny bit of weight, how can you shave that off? Let's look at the suits with the training, let's try to optimize everything and do, like, video analysis of what people are doing and essentially every single thing they did, each thing only gave, like, a very small improvement. But when you combine everything together, that's going to make a big difference.
And I think kind of thinking positively and kind of moving forward also fit under that same category where it's not really about, hey, we need these big accomplishments, but just kind of keeping that mindset and just doing a little bit to move forward in that way as well and to improve your work life balance or to reduce the amount of stress you have and everything. Really, it's the trajectories that's important.
Not exactly like where you are, but where you're going to end up and how you get there.
[00:50:44] Speaker A: I think, yeah, absolutely.
This is a fun conversation, but we're running up on time here, so just to kind of wrap things up a little, the big takeaways I'm kind of getting from this conversation, which has been really enjoyable, actually, is that burnout happens to almost all of us. It's not a bad thing. It's not something to be ashamed of. Everybody goes through it, but it's something you want to pay attention to because it can lead to more dangerous mental states.
And at least two of us from personal experience can tell you that those mental states are not good. They're not fun, they're not a good place to be. And we hope that maybe this will help you to pay attention to this so that you don't also get to those places.
But keep yourself healthy. Keep yourself mentally focused on what you need to focus on to make sure that you're not burning yourself out and deal with those things. Because that's just as important as getting the code right.
You have to take care of yourself.
So I'm hopeful that this conversation will help somebody try to look at yourself, understand yourself, and take care of yourself, please, because we need more developers, not a bunch of burnout.
So anyway, Coda, thank you very much for coming and joining us today. It's always so fun to have conversations with you. I love talking to you, man.
[00:52:35] Speaker C: Thanks so much for having me, as always.
Really fun.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So, friends, if you haven't already, please do consider giving us a thumbs up, like this video subscribe and ding the notification bell so you know when these videos drop, now that we're pre recording them. Also, you can reach out to us
[email protected], or you can hit me up on Twitter, X, whatever it is now at Duckydev show.
We will be back next week. We haven't decided on the topic. You know, if you've got suggestions, throw them in the comments. If you've got things that you do for yourself that help you stave off burnout, please also throw those in the comments because we'd love to learn from you.
And you can listen to this as a podcast. Anywhere that podcasts live. You pick your favorite provider, we're probably there. So we will see you next week. And until then, happy coding.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: Happy coding.
[00:53:40] Speaker C: Happy coding.
