It’s weird I’ve probably been “burned out” for 10 years but I’ve never had the option to not to put in 100%, if not every day, by the end of every week.
When I get up and don’t feel like working I just start working until I’m having fun and the hours start flying by.
I hate what I’m doing most days, but, it has to be done. Just last month I had to, finally, really learn regular expressions, read the Scrapy docs start to finish, figure out how to scrape/merge a 1M+ document site where none the metadata for the docs live in the docs themselves, learn to use Falcon to fix a project only to find out that Falcon has some issues that make fix the project impossible, requiring me to figure out how to make a raw ASGI app.
That was just April. On top of my other work!
Over the past two years I’ve learned, in depth, Bash, Make, Helm, Kustomize, CSS, Sass, HTML, JaveScript/TypeScript, Angular, RxJS, half a dozen testing platforms, Kafka, Cassandra, color theory, Style Dictionary (design systems), and a few dozen other little things. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of books and documentation, taken extensive notes, and written demo code as I’ve worked my way through them.
It’s been like this since 2002 and I think it’s going to continue until 2042. There’s no reward, it’s what’s expected.
It doesn’t matter how senior I am, how many people I manage, or what my title is. I’m 38 and I feel like a junior dev with 22 years of experience. I don’t know if this level of flexibility is required to be a good developer, but, I’ve never worked on a successful project where it wasn’t.
At night I watch videos on CSS to keep up, read books about tech we may need to adopt in the future, read about changes to Kubernetes/TypeScript/Angular/Django, do UX+product design for the next version for our app, and read resumes.
For me learning new things is something that I have to do to move forward and get paid. It’s an investment that has a huge opportunity cost associated with it.
You’re getting paid multiple six-figures to learn new stuff? Sounds great. If you don’t like what you’re doing, why not quit and take a few weeks or months off to figure out what you want.
When I get up and don’t feel like working I just start working until I’m having fun and the hours start flying by.
I hate what I’m doing most days, but, it has to be done. Just last month I had to, finally, really learn regular expressions, read the Scrapy docs start to finish, figure out how to scrape/merge a 1M+ document site where none the metadata for the docs live in the docs themselves, learn to use Falcon to fix a project only to find out that Falcon has some issues that make fix the project impossible, requiring me to figure out how to make a raw ASGI app.
That was just April. On top of my other work!
Over the past two years I’ve learned, in depth, Bash, Make, Helm, Kustomize, CSS, Sass, HTML, JaveScript/TypeScript, Angular, RxJS, half a dozen testing platforms, Kafka, Cassandra, color theory, Style Dictionary (design systems), and a few dozen other little things. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of books and documentation, taken extensive notes, and written demo code as I’ve worked my way through them.
It’s been like this since 2002 and I think it’s going to continue until 2042. There’s no reward, it’s what’s expected.
It doesn’t matter how senior I am, how many people I manage, or what my title is. I’m 38 and I feel like a junior dev with 22 years of experience. I don’t know if this level of flexibility is required to be a good developer, but, I’ve never worked on a successful project where it wasn’t.
At night I watch videos on CSS to keep up, read books about tech we may need to adopt in the future, read about changes to Kubernetes/TypeScript/Angular/Django, do UX+product design for the next version for our app, and read resumes.
For me learning new things is something that I have to do to move forward and get paid. It’s an investment that has a huge opportunity cost associated with it.
You’re getting paid multiple six-figures to learn new stuff? Sounds great. If you don’t like what you’re doing, why not quit and take a few weeks or months off to figure out what you want.