Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Taking it personally

Something occurred to me today that might be a very good indicator of burnout: taking technical challenges personally.

As programmers, we are supposed to love a good technical challenge. Of course, virtually noone likes dealing with obscure, tedious, hard-to-reproduce bugs. But what I'm talking about are issues in the next few notches up - technical issues which are challenging, but relatively expected and interesting problems. Issues which "come with the territory" constantly, and are so much a part of programming that we would never have even become programmers in the first place if such things were fundamentally against our flow.

When these things start to look really obnoxious, and you start to take them more and more personally, I think it's time to consider that you might be sliding into burnout.

I realised this today when it occurred to me that anything more finicky than a straight forward, coding-from-scratch task has started to just look outright painful. And internally, I've started to blame other parties for making it my problem. The thought process goes something like this:

"Oh God! I don't want to touch this. I don't even want to see it! I'm a Programmer, not a Debugger. Damn the Test department and users for even coming back to us with this shit. I just don't want to know. It's so damn easy to work around it too. Who cares?! Why are they bothering me with this??!!"

...and a related followup thing is just wanting to work on things which are fully under your control:

"Give me a clean, well specced task, I'll come up with an algorithm. Leave me alone while I do it. I don't want to know or care how it integrates with anything else, don't change anything in the meantime, and don't come back to me with any side-effects or external issues later."

Of course, programming doesn't work that way. Maybe 1% of the time in the real world is spent dealing with that sort of academic purity. So when that other 99% of the work is starting to look utterly miserable and like a personal attack most of the time, you know that you've stepped into end stage Burnout.

Friday, December 10, 2010

The Resignation

So I handed in my resignation today...

I was going to wait until early in the New Year, but then I was "cornered" into it in a meeting when it was mentioned that it seems like I've been "struggling" at work lately. Of course, I have been struggling. But I felt like it was mostly an internal issue and that it didn't outwardly affect my work all that much. Now I feel bad for having been noticably flaky at work lately - but since I haven't been outright fired, I can't have been that bad. So I'll try and put that out of mind.

Feeling good. :)