Burnout in Tech

In this blog, I want to share with you about Burnout in Tech, What is it? Why does it happen?

To help you understand what burnout is, let me share a personal experience from working in a startup. I experienced burnout for the first time when I worked for this startup which was later acquired by a big tech company. So, back when I was working, we had a team of 15-20 employees in tech, and including others from marketing and sales, we had around 100 employees or so in this startup.

In the beginning, I had a good experience working there as we were like one happy family, the CTO was hanging out with us and everyone was working together. So, I tried to fit in with this environment. But later, I started to notice that people were coming in late, leaving late, and having lunch for more than 2 hours. Then, I started receiving emails at midnight or even later. And then there were work meetings scheduled at weekends.

I felt like “Oh my god!”, “These guys are working all the time”. And the funny and contradictory thing was that the startup advertised that we can have unlimited vacations. Yet again, these guys were not taking vacations because they were always working. So, when I wanted to take a vacation, I felt guilty and thought “Should I take these days off?” but as you can see nobody else took vacations. So, this environment eventually made me work more as well. 

This inability to turn off my mind thinking about my job was the main cause of burnout. And this is true for everyone! You see, coding does not cause burnout, but our inability to get out of our work does. You can also see the same trend in work-from-home setups as well.

Why does Burnout happen?

Now, why does burnout happen? You see the startup company in which I was working, had these facilities like a game room, nap lounge, gym, and even a shower. And you can see the same pattern at big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. The reason they have these facilities is that they don’t want their employees to leave the campus. So, people start to sleep on campus and shower in many cases. Now, this is a contributing factor to causing burnout too.

This is what I had fallen into as well. I tried to fit in with my coworkers at the startup by joining them at happy hours, having lunch and sometimes dinner with them for around 2 hours, chit-chatting, talking about my personal life, and just gossiping. Then we would have weekend getaways, where we were renting out cabins, even CTO was there sometimes as it was a startup. 

This was all so stressful for me! Because I am a family-oriented person, I have a wife, kids, and friends. But over here, I had to adopt this new family at this startup and spend time with them. This resulted in losing time in my personal life. So, I observed this problem and realized that I’m not in the same situation as compared to these guys. Most of them who worked were younger than me and were just five minutes away from work. Whereas I had to commute 40 minutes for work. You see, the mistake I committed was to show some discipline in my work.

Show Discipline

So, here’s what I did once I observed myself and others. 

I started coming in early than everybody else to work. I would spend only half an hour for lunch, then socialize with my colleagues and I'd be the first one to leave the table and go back to my desk and continue to work. So that by the time it was six o'clock, I can leave. In this way, I was able to increase my level of discipline. 

And the funny thing is, in the beginning, when it was my time to leave the campus at six, seven, or eight o’clock in the evening and I looked at everyone else who was still working. And I’d feel guilty for leaving earlier than them and that is also a situation that could cause burnout! As I mentioned before, it's not always about the code that causes burnout, it's about your inability to create discipline in your environment and your life. These are the ultimate culprits for the burnout that you might experience. 

So I started to work more disciplined because I had certain things to do as part of my personal life. I spend quality time with my family and friends. I work out, I take singing classes, I take acting classes and I read books, I research new technologies and do my own thing, build my apps and stuff on the weekends. I started to learn how to teach coding through courses. I developed several such courses over the years and I continued to update them, re-record them, scratch them, and build new ones.

So here's my advice to you. Anytime you join a company you have to set a certain standard for everyone else's expectations of you. So you come on time, earlier than everybody else which is great. And you can socialize for half an hour with lunch. But you don't spend too much time wasted just chit-chatting. Be a go-getter, and work very hard. 

Once you start building this discipline, this is how everyone will start to see in you: “Okay, this guy's a rock star programmer! He works hard but he has a turn-off switch”. And don't send emails after 6 pm or later than that. You have to set free time for yourself. So your coworkers shouldn't expect those emails to come from you. 

Now, that’s exactly how my coworkers started to see in me. While I’m at work, I’m a rock star. I work very hard. I was very effective in my job and everyone saw that. They saw discipline in me. But they knew that I had a turn-off switch! And they knew after that I’m not available. Unless there's a big release or there's a big bug in production or testing that needs to be addressed. I understood that and I was available for those times.

Eventually, I left the startup culture and migrated to fintech on Wall Street which had a much more disciplined environment. Employees at fintech come at a certain time, and leave at a certain time. So, at the end of the day, it depends on your personality. As I’ve worked in both environments like hot tech startups as well as fintech companies, I was able to find a job that was better in tune with my personality and I like that discipline structured approach.

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About the Author

Imtiaz Ahmad is an award-winning Udemy Instructor who is highly experienced in big data technologies and enterprise software architectures. Imtiaz has spent a considerable amount of time building financial software on Wall St. and worked with companies like S&P, Goldman Sachs, AOL and JP Morgan along with helping various startups solve mission-critical software problems. In his 13+ years of experience, Imtiaz has also taught software development in programming languages like Java, C++, Python, PL/SQL, Ruby and JavaScript. He’s the founder of Job Ready Programmer — an online programming school that prepares students of all backgrounds to become professional job-ready software developers through real-world programming courses.