Well, here goes a brief version of my story for giving some background and some advice:
I’ve been a Devops engineer for almost 7 years now. I genuinely love my profession and I am very passionate for what I do.
The burn out came a couple of years ago: I worked in a project with tons of technical debt. The company had a plan of moving the project into a different cloud. Their plan was “lift and shift” but I insisted on the fact that this was a perfect opportunity for doing things well. I presented my plan and they allowed me so I commited to refactor it from top to bottom. I worked for many more hours than agreed by contract and even weekends. Those months feelt like one giant day of work. I did all that not because I wanted to gain more money or respect. I did it because I take the “doing things right if I have the knowledge” as some kind of moral obligation.
It was a huge success. Everyone in the team and in the company was impressed and happy with the results and they saw the benefit. But, despite all the good outcome, I started to feel that something was not right on me. I felt intellectually and even physically exhausted. My mind was cloudy all the time. I started to have insomnia. I struggled to focus and I developed a very low tolerance to stress reacting to it with anxiety and frustration. I lost my good memorisation capacity. I went down into a hole where everything in my life started to be blurry: my technical knowledge, my personal decisions, my plans for the future etc. I felt insecure. I hated myself for not being able to cope with stuff anymore and I hid it for not looking “weak” in front of coworkers, family and friends.
My advice from the lessons learned is:
1 - Communicate your status to your superiors (and she/he will give you advice on how to comunicate it to your team), family and friends. Be open, realistic and clear. What you are feeling is normal so there’s no reason for dramas from anybody.
2 - Be honest with yourself.
3 - Have mercy for yourself.
4 - Accept your limitations. This doesn’t mean you accept you’re weak. This means you are potentially taking the first step to develop a strategy to overcome those limitations.
5 - Break the pattern by moving to a different project/department or even move into a different company.
6 - Take at least a minimum of one month of time off and allow yourself to be plain lazy. Forget about your company and duties during that time off. Enjoy yourself even if that implies to be for 5 hours in a row watching garbage on Netflix eating buckets of popcorn.
7 - Find a hobby: I’ve done from lockpicking, to learn an instrument, to electronics (arduino stuff), to videogames, sport, yoga, reading novels etc. Is gonna be good in the middle/long run not only for resting your mind but also for improving as a computer engineer even if the hobby is not directly related.
I’ve been a Devops engineer for almost 7 years now. I genuinely love my profession and I am very passionate for what I do.
The burn out came a couple of years ago: I worked in a project with tons of technical debt. The company had a plan of moving the project into a different cloud. Their plan was “lift and shift” but I insisted on the fact that this was a perfect opportunity for doing things well. I presented my plan and they allowed me so I commited to refactor it from top to bottom. I worked for many more hours than agreed by contract and even weekends. Those months feelt like one giant day of work. I did all that not because I wanted to gain more money or respect. I did it because I take the “doing things right if I have the knowledge” as some kind of moral obligation.
It was a huge success. Everyone in the team and in the company was impressed and happy with the results and they saw the benefit. But, despite all the good outcome, I started to feel that something was not right on me. I felt intellectually and even physically exhausted. My mind was cloudy all the time. I started to have insomnia. I struggled to focus and I developed a very low tolerance to stress reacting to it with anxiety and frustration. I lost my good memorisation capacity. I went down into a hole where everything in my life started to be blurry: my technical knowledge, my personal decisions, my plans for the future etc. I felt insecure. I hated myself for not being able to cope with stuff anymore and I hid it for not looking “weak” in front of coworkers, family and friends.
My advice from the lessons learned is:
1 - Communicate your status to your superiors (and she/he will give you advice on how to comunicate it to your team), family and friends. Be open, realistic and clear. What you are feeling is normal so there’s no reason for dramas from anybody.
2 - Be honest with yourself.
3 - Have mercy for yourself.
4 - Accept your limitations. This doesn’t mean you accept you’re weak. This means you are potentially taking the first step to develop a strategy to overcome those limitations.
5 - Break the pattern by moving to a different project/department or even move into a different company.
6 - Take at least a minimum of one month of time off and allow yourself to be plain lazy. Forget about your company and duties during that time off. Enjoy yourself even if that implies to be for 5 hours in a row watching garbage on Netflix eating buckets of popcorn.
7 - Find a hobby: I’ve done from lockpicking, to learn an instrument, to electronics (arduino stuff), to videogames, sport, yoga, reading novels etc. Is gonna be good in the middle/long run not only for resting your mind but also for improving as a computer engineer even if the hobby is not directly related.
And that’s it. I hope you find it useful.