Yes, most people have heard the term burnout, what does burnout really mean? Burnout occurs when the reward that we get from our career or life is not enough to outweigh the effort that we put into it. In the tech industry, burnout is very common, according to Anonymous Professional Networking Platform Blind online website, 61% of professionals were burnout in February, and that number has significantly increased due to COVID-19. Knowing that it is very common to feel burnout in the tech industry, we will dive deep into why and how to deal with it!
We have discussed that burnout happens when the reward is not worth the effort that we put into it. Now let us take a look at what is the efforts that a software engineer needs to put in? Not only that we need to learn and master the newest technologies in the industry, such as JavaScript, React, Angular, HTML, CSS, Git, Node, Python, Java. We also need to use the knowledge that we learned and build something that perhaps never existed in this world before, spending hours and hours of head scratching and google searching and Stack Overflow scraping for answers to bugs. Not to mention, that most likely we will be working in a team with different software engineers, which requires a lot of communication and teamwork among each other.
While we are at this topic, there is something worth to be mentioned called software development life cycle. This is the life cycle process to which a software / app / website is built and maintained. Coding is only one part of this life cycle, and we have three steps before we can even reach to the implementation part. On the top level design, we need to also communicate between customers and project manager to make sure that the software / app that we are building fits the solution for the customers. Then we can start to communicate among each other to collaborate on different features for the project (sprint / scrum / agile). After the app is finished, we also need to figure out how to deliver the app to the users, and maintain the server and update the technologies after the app is running.
So knowing that the efforts of a software engineer can be tremendous, and things can go wrong at any stages of the software development life cycle, let us take a look at the reward side of the burnout equation. Rewards can be very subjective to each individual, but we can categorize them into four main categories for simplicity. A lot of rewards for us is based on our background and personality, as well as the values of different individuals. Some people might value the financial stability (making the big bucks); others might value the flexibility (work from home, ironically COVID-19 has really forced most office jobs to become WFH environment); some people value the social status and validations from other people (look at me, I work in FAANG, big tech company who pays me a lot and I get to take breaks and play games at work ^.^) ; others might value making a difference in this world (work in a small startup company where is solely mission driven to build the best software to help customers resolve their problems!) A lot of developers in the tech industry view success as working in a FAANG company, getting a big salary, getting the promotions, or work at a mission driven company to help others resolve their problems. While it is not wrong to look for those things, but sometimes we can see rewards beyond the surface level.
What do I mean by seeing rewards / success beyond its surface level? There are a lot of hypes when it comes to the tech industry, and the common misconception of these are the goals that we as software engineers should strive for. While it can be good to have a goal to look forward to and strive for, it is also important not to be fallen into the traps of these paths are the only paths for software engineers. It will limit our imagination and creativity, it might actually prevents us from discovering ourselves, what makes us happy as a software engineer, not just to live up to other people’s hype / fame. For example, if you are a person who loves to share and teach your coding knowledge and software engineering experiences, it might be a good choice to start your own company, blog / video about your knowledges and experiences, which doesn’t particularly belong to any of the “traditional software engineering paths”. The rewards doesn’t always match up to our expectations, when we don’t really think through to set our goals, or when we don’t examine the journey and the process that we are on as a software engineer. It can cause burnout if the rewards isn’t satisfying to the amount of efforts that was inputted in.
Therefore, what can we do to deal with the burnout? First of all, there is no doubt that becoming a software engineer takes a lot of efforts, therefore the effort side of the equation is fixed. On the other hand, what can we do to increase the reward side to make us not feel burnout as much? Obviously setting a goal for ourselves as software engineer is very important from the start, knowing what we want to be and what we want out of as a software engineer can be very challenging. But why not challenge ourselves through various different activities to figure out what is rewarding to us when we are coding, be imaginative and creative to learn and do things, and see what others are doing that is unique and creative that we might want to give it a try? Of course, there are more common ways to manage burnout, taking breaks from coding, taking a vacation, manage the work relationships with co-workers and managers. While it is not a bad idea to manage burnout in those ways, it is also very important to self reflect / evaluate to see what we truly want, is the rewards that we are getting worth the efforts that we put in? Rather than avoiding this conversation with ourselves, we need to identify what is the cause of the burnout, and then we can proceed to look for a solution and implement it.
Thanks for reading the article, and have a great day! Feel free to reach out and chat with me on LinkedIn!
