The Tangled Tale of My Career (by alaric)
Burnout
These days, I struggle to get out of bed in the mornings. I used to feel I could contribute towards something great - but the software industry doesn't seem to want that. People who claim to be able to design software are viewed with suspicion. Everyone hates the resulting products, but that's OK - they just need to attract another round of investment with vague promises and ticking the right buzzword boxes, not actually be useful. I don't feel like my skills are actually in demand any more; I used to be able to walk into a room of people with technical problems and help them work out how to solve them, but I rarely find people trying to do anything that challenging these days (it always just seems to be building yet another Web-based user interface to some database), and the solutions they want are just "which off-the-shelf solution to drop in" (even if none of the off-the-shelf solutions actually do the job: building your own infrastructure is taboo). I fondly remember feeling like I was part of a community of people with great ideas, figuring out how to make them practical so the world could benefit from them; but now I feel the software engineering community has slipped into a comfortable rut of churning out Web apps for startups, with real innovation pushed to the fringes; people posting idealistic manifestos to mailing lists has been replaced by people slagging things off on Hacker News.
Ok, it's not all bad - part of the "problem" is that a lot of the stuff I wanted to work on has been done, by others, while I was distracted. These days, we actually use fairly decent programming languages, and we're slowly, falteringly, moving towards a world where software can scale across fault-tolerant clusters without too much drama.
People seem to want to hire me to write code, but... I'm not actually good at writing code. I get by; I'm popular in teams because I can lead all the design discussions when we're working out what to do, and figure out solutions to all the thorny problems that scare the team, but that's rarely officially recognised by making me responsible for it - all I'm usually hired to do is sit in a corner and write code.
I want to lead a team again; only once have I actually officially done that. But since then, I have ended up working for no less than three of the people who worked for me back then. Maybe that means something good about my skills as a mentor... but most likely it means I'm just terrible at "doing career". I really don't know what I'm doing wrong or what to do about it, and I feel trapped. My confidence has started to crumble, and I'm finding it harder and harder to summon the energy to stand up in meetings and take charge of stuff.
And I'm not getting the time and energy to work on personal projects to keep my spirits up; I'm glad if I get the time and energy to have regular showers. It's hard to feel good about working on something for fun when I know I should be tidying the house, so my occasional free hours here and there are usually spent trying to push the tide of housework back a bit. It's hard to concentrate on work when I struggle to find the value in what I'm doing, it doesn't stretch me creatively, and I'm distracted by worrying about all the domestic work I need to do.
Things like this blog post simmer in draft form for months; the only time I get to work on personal projects is the odd half hour here and there. In order to force myself to concentrate on work, I bribe myself with getting to do creative stuff in breaks. And then feel guilty about how many breaks I'm taking, but it's the only way I've found to remain productive. I still seem to be productive enough for my colleagues to be happy, but I know I could do more!
My domestic workload has actually reduced lately - I no longer have to do school runs, although the number of extra-curricular things I need to drive to has risen to fill the gap. Sarah is slowly getting stronger and can sometimes walk to her events and meetings herself, and has a network of friends who often give her lifts, too; although she's involved in an increasing number of weekend events that I have to drive her to/from and support her at. But things aren't as bad as they were when she was sicker, and we were looking after her mother, and I was having to drive kids to/from school twice a day.
So I'm frequently getting several hours a week free in total, but I'm just so exhausted in them, and most of the things I really want to do with my life require a few hours to really get up to speed at: so I try to spend those hours doing something relaxing like playing computer games or watching TV with Sarah. I struggle to sleep at night because that's when my mind really starts engaging with interesting thoughts, and then struggle to get out of bed in the morning because I'm exhausted and I know that as soon as I get up I'm going to be stuck doing-what-I'm-supposed-to-be-doing-now until it's time I should be going to bed again.
I have two confounding problems: I'm still under a lot of stress from external domestic pressures, but I'm also trapped from within - my own emotions aren't cooperating with me, and it takes exhausting levels of willpower to make myself do stuff because my heart isn't in it. There are things I could do to improve my external situation, but I'm not doing them. Some tasks I inexplicably dread and struggle to start, and I don't know why - at the moment, I really need to take the van in for servicing, but I've been trying to force myself to pick up the phone and book it in for weeks. (UPDATE: I finally managed it, about 160 days after the van was due a service!)
I need to start with internal change, but I'm having a hard time with that.
What to do about it
I need to be productive at work, because I need to remain useful to my employers so I can be paid and thus support my family. And I need to be productive at home, to look after my family. (My family, in case you hadn't gathered, is very important to me). But I'm getting worse at both of those things, because my own needs aren't being met, and I can only get by with sheer willpower for so long.
In order to be productive, I need to be less burnt out so I can concentrate properly: both so I'm not wasting working-time worrying about other things, and so I actually bring my full mind to bear when I am concentrating on work.
In order to be less burnt out, I need to regain my self-confidence and my enthusiasm.
Take a break from work?
I feel like I need a break - but a few months off work each of the two times I've been made redundant haven't been enough, as there's no way to take a break from looking after my family: there is nobody else who can do the things that I need to do. So I struggle to relax and unwind enough to undo the burnout, which is what needs to happen before I even think about being productive on personal projects again, and starting to rebuild myself. And then I'll need to stop it all and go back to work again so I can pay the bills.
So, although tempting, just another break from work isn't what I need: I need to make my normal life work properly. Once I've done that, perhaps a break will help slough off lingering burnout, and I definitely need to take breaks to tackle domestic re-organisation projects that won't fit nicely into the odd bit of free time here and there. But a break alone won't fix anything.
Delegate housework and driving?
I can't see a way to hire somebody to help with the housework and driving; taxis won't help because I would still need to organise them in advance (too often I turn up to a dance class and find nobody there and then check my phone and find that in one of the myriad WhatsApp groups, there's an announcement it's starting half an hour later or is in a different building to usual - and I don't usually have time between finishing work and making dinner then bundling everyone in the car to sit and check all my WhatsApp groups in advance), and there's complications with sending a taxi to pick up a young child from something in the evening.
(Talking of turning up to a dance class that's been cancelled - I really need to find time in my day to just read messages and think and plan my day; I know I'm operating inefficiently because I'm not really planning things properly)
And when I drive Sarah to an event there's usually a load of cargo that needs to be brought out of the house and loaded into the van and then carried into a venue and set up, which is beyond what a taxi driver would do; and I'm often needed throughout the event, too. It would be very difficult to hire an external person to do the kind of stuff I do for my family.
Maybe I can find one of those "virtual PA" type folks who could take over a bunch of the household administration and diary management? Setting such a thing up would require a whole load of work to work out what points to delegate things at, though, and to work out how to integrate it all; and having browsed a few of their web sites, I think they'll be far out of my price range.
Spend more time on personal projects?
The main limiting factor for spending more time on personal projects is the number of hours in the day. I tend to get the odd half hour to an hour free here and there, but I don't find that's enough time to get back into the really good projects, so I busy myself with little ones.
I try to focus my creative efforts on DIY. These tend to be smaller projects than the kinds of things I really want to do, but I can spend more time and energy on them because they're also solving domestic problems, and they tend to fit better into the kind of free time I have. This means things I've done like building the shelving and battery charging gear for the van to make it better as a mobile base for Sarah's events work and family outings, building the chicken run and roofing it, improving my working environment (furniture and heating), building paths and steps and gates and fences in the woods. I get to learn new skills and solve problems, so it scratches my creative itch to a certain extent, but it doesn't tend to involve much deep thought.
I still yearn to work on my big projects; and, in particular, I want to work on things I can share with the world by publishing them as open-source projects. DIY things can be shared with people who visit me, and might make for some nice blog posts about how I did it that others might learn from, but it's not the same as doing something like writing open-source software, that can directly help anybody who needs it.
Before our children started school, when I didn't need to do anything other than get ready before starting work (from home), I had a wonderful phase where I'd get up for 8am and do an hour of personal-project work before switching to the job at 9am. If I can get back into that routine, I'd have five hours a week, which could mean starting on the big projects again. Perhaps I can build up and maintain inertia on a big project if I have regular hour chunks rather than unpredictable half hour to hour chunks? Having been away from them for so long, though, I think I might need to spend a couple of days overcoming the initial fear I've built up of getting excited about something I then need to drop, and get back into such a project, and build up inertia that can carry me into an hour-a-day cycle. A bit like starting an internal combustion engine, where you need to drive it externally until it's heated up the innards and running at full power and can sustain itself.
Make work fun?
So, if I'm not going to get enough time to work on personal projects, I need to make work be fun. I need to wake up excited to get back to work, and to do that, I need to work on the things I'm good at, and feel appreciated for that, and feel my contribution is recognised.
I've been feeling despondent about being far from my career goal of leading a development team to make something cool.
I want to be surrounded by people who are excited about making a quality product, and who will join me in exciting discussions about software design - because although I love leading those discussions, they're not really discussions unless everyone who wants to can join in. I don't want to be the "smartest person in the room"; I want to be able to focus on what I'm good at, and have people around me who are better than me at the stuff I'm bad at; I want to be able to stretch my big-picture-thinking muscles by leading the design.
And to get excited about the product, I need to feel that somebody will actually use the damned thing so I can make their day better in the end. If it's a new product, we need a market gap we can have confidence we'll nail, and somebody willing to pay for the development until we break even. Sure, I can go through the cycle of making a prototype and putting it out there again, but I'll want to be given some confidence that there is a market and we can actually sell the thing, because making stuff based on guesswork and then seeing it thrown away - again - is heartbreaking.
I need juicy technical problems I can be creative in solving, and I need enough people around me to write code fast enough that the combination of juicy design/architecture work and guiding them through the design process of building it is enough to keep me busy. I want to be free to create an environment where everyone can share ideas freely and defend them openly through discussion, rather than having personal axes to grind.
And the good thing is, that might not be too much to ask. My current job could evolve into that, but I need to drive it in that direction. I don't need to have the perfect "unicorn" job to be happy, but I do need to feel I'm moving towards it - much of my ennui is about feeling stuck and unable to make progress.
Somebody suggested I should take an evening course in management, so I had something on my CV I could use to argue for management positions. I at first dismissed this idea, because very few people look at my CV; almost every job I've had has been through word of mouth, which is probably part of the problem, as people think "Let's get Alaric in to do Alaric things like they did when we worked together before" and don't really know what I'm capable of. And I've got a bunch of good things on my CV already, such as software project management qualifications (a place I worked put anybody who was interested on a course, so I went for it), and having been a Scout leader (leading groups of kids, AND adults when we go on camps) for fifteen years) - but they never helped.
But, I couldn't stop thinking about the idea. I mean, I love learning things, so doing an online course could be fun in its own right. And I realised that perhaps it would give me more confidence, and enthusiasm to fight harder for leadership roles when they come up. CMI Level 5, aimed at "middle managers", looks a bit too easy, although it might be good to go over the basics; but CMI Level 7 for "senior managers" looks like I'd actually learn something in it. Prices for doing it as an online course look quite affordable; the real challenge would be finding regular time to do it!
Get therapy?
I did this! And antidepressants. The therapist said that the pressures I'm under are too much to bear, though, so they could teach me some coping strategies, but I really needed to improve my situation; there's only so far you can get with positive thinking and willpower.
The coping strategies, for the benefit of anybody following along at home, were:
Stop hiding from it all by dissociating. When I'm forcing myself to do stuff because I must rather than because I want to, I tend to get bored and "zone out" and slip into my thoughts, generally worrying about the future. This is a coping strategy to get me through the tedium, but it makes things worse in the long run as I just feel more and more distant and disengaged from the world, which inhibits recapturing my enthusiasm. I spot when I'm starting to do this and make myself pay attention to my surroundings: the sounds, feelings, smells, visual details, etc of where I'm at.
Remind myself why I do stuff. All the things I do are indirectly part of what I want in life, but because it's so indirect, it's easy to forget that. I'm driving my kid to dance classes not because I have to, but because I want her to have the opportunities to develop the skills that excite her, so she can make the best of her life. I'm figuring out how to parse a slightly mangled CSV file full of data in a government department, but I'm doing it to help build a system that will change the world for the better. Rather than thinking "Ah crap I need to go and drive the kid around...", I should think more "Excellent, here's a chance to get the kid some more dance training, that she loves so much!". This also lets me take some pride in the stuff I do.
When I'm struggling to get out of bed, give myself something to look forward to. There might be something in the coming day that I'll be happy about, so focus on that, imagine doing it, think about how I could make it better, and try to bootstrap some enthusiasm about it. And if the day is genuinely all chores - then tell myself "Actually, I'm going to make half an hour for myself to do something fun today, even if it means I'm going to be late for something else."
Try to cultivate my own inner voice to care for myself. In a world where everyone around me comes to me with their needs, it's easy to get overwhelmed and depressed. I need to get into the habit of thinking "What do I want? What do I need?" and be gentle, caring, and compassionate with myself.
The antidepressants maybe helped a bit, but the side-effects were annoying. For a start, every packet had written on it - right no the front, not buried in the little paper sheet inside - that I had to avoid grapefruit. How can life be worth living without delicious grapefruit? So I'm off those. And the other stuff is helping me avoid sliding into a vicious circle of doing less because I'm feeling bad, and then feeling bad that I'm doing less, so at least I can divert my remaining energy to improving the underlying situation.
Sun 26th May 2024 4:17 pm 
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By andyjpb, Wed 29th May 2024 @ 11:04 am
Good luck! It sounds like you're on the right path in the right direction so just keep on trucking!