Friday, August 12, 2011

Looking for work!

It's been a while since I've posted...

In the last couple of months the burnout feeling has somewhat subsided. I went on another little trip to Perth for a week, pottered around some more with Java/JEE, and then realised that not working is starting to feel a bit empty. So I refurbished the ol' resume last week, did some reading of Programming Interviews Exposed and started applying for work yesterday.

I think the main lesson learned from my entire burnout experience is essentially summed up by Drive. Although this book isn't about burnout specifically, the main point it makes is that separating intrinsic interest from extrinsic reward is psychologically very bad - almost guaranteed badness as a paradigm for motivating and rewarding knowledge workers. In many cases it just leads to low motivation and poor performance - in other cases (especially if it goes unchecked for too long) it can lead to burnout.

Another very important lesson I learned about burnout is how very very different individual people and their motivations are. Some thrive in situations which very quickly burn others out. So everything has to be taken with a big shake of salt.


MOVING FORWARD

When preparing for job seeking, I primarily thought about looking for contracting. The idea was to not get tied down into a routine which will make me feel stale eventually. Now that I've started looking and getting a taste of what's out there, I don't think the contracting vs permanent distinction is necessarily what makes it or breaks it.

The real trick is to find something that you'll have an intrinsic interest in. Either from the point of view of what the product is (feeling that you're working on a worthy cause), or an environment and technology stack that you just love working with.

Finally, it's important to know when to stop. This varies by personality type, but some (like myself) are quite prone to burnout once they get too comfortable and start going stale. NEVER EVER feel that you need to stay at a job once the signs of burnout hit. There is nothing short of outright starvation that makes it worthwhile.

(Note: This may be the final post of Burned Out Programmer for now. But I'll come back with more input if anything comes up! :))