The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]
Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout:<p>1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom.  After decades in the industry, I&#x27;m super bored with the things I know, and not in the least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same.  The things I&#x27;m still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure, so I&#x27;m unlikely to ever get to work with them.  I hate all the mainstream tech stacks, but that&#x27;s where the overwhelming majority of work is.<p>2 - I don&#x27;t care about what the company does. 99.9% of the time, the real goal is to make some extremely rich people even richer.  Couldn&#x27;t care less.  I&#x27;m not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate to my own job being something I wanted to do.<p>3 - Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources.  This is endemic in the tech field.  Count yourself incredibly lucky if you don&#x27;t have to face this day in and day out for years on end.  It&#x27;s even worse when you know the company you&#x27;re working for is making money hand over fist and they could easily afford to hire more people, treat them better, and get more resources, but you know they&#x27;d rather funnel that money in to the pockets of those at the top.<p>4 - Lies and corporate BS.  From bullshit cheerleading and pep talks from upper management that a child would be stupid to believe, to time wasting, useless policies, to outright lying and two-facedness that&#x27;s super common in the industry.  Who wants to deal with this?<p>5 - Depression.  This doesn&#x27;t help.<p>The best job I ever had was working part time in a tiny company where it was just me and the owner.  He was a super nice guy, we got along great and just did what needed to be done.  No corporate BS, no policies, no lies, and back then I wasn&#x27;t burnt out yet, so working on tech stuff still seemed interesting.<p>After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career (completely outside of tech)... or even tried management, but I never did, and my skills have atrophied so I&#x27;m super rusty and out of it regarding the newer buzzword technologies.. though I&#x27;d like to think that I still have good troubleshooting skills and can learn anything.. if I cared.. but I don&#x27;t.