Balancing On The Tech Rope
You’ve been staring at the same four lines of code for two straight hours, trying to bang out why you are dereferencing empty variables. You started this particular chunk of code this morning, and now it’s the next morning and you are still here.
You run through all of the branching scenarios your code is doing just before these god-forsaken lines and you still can’t decrypt the mystery. You head to the kitchen, warm up some old coffee, still unable to shake your current losing stance. Code doesn’t care if you think it should work. It does what it does, and nothing more. So this is solidly your problem.
Still, you stare, and you really wish you had another pair of fresh eyes. If you are lucky to have a coding buddy that also obsesses over the finer details, you can ping them late at night and clang out a pairing session.
Still, you don’t and you can’t presume anyone is as freaking obsessed as you are at 2:30 in the morning.
So you call it a night. You slump out of your worn chair, defeated and exhausted, picking up half a dozen cups of old coffee in various states of emptiness and coldness. You have worn down your body more than you can possibly know and braille walk yourself into your bed, only to keep thinking about the same four infuriatingly stubborn, hell-sent lines of code. And then everything goes dark, and the next thing you know, you hear the annoying signs of life that urge you to get up again; your neighbor’s loud truck, a boisterously amorous mocking bird trying to find a mate, the leaf blower guys across the street.
But your problem is still there. You are sleep deprived and at the precipice of burn out, and you are behind on everything.
Rinse and repeat.
Rinse and Repeat ad Infinitum
I’m obsessed about the quality of my code just as much as the next code monkey. More importantly, as the night wears, I’m just desperate to get it to work. But the repeated wear on the same neural paths of your brain eventually lead to what we all know of as burn-out.
Burn-out is insidious. It creeps up on you like drunk and stupid does when chug one after another sweet margarita. You are firmly in its grasp and have yet to know you are there.
Burn-out isn’t a moment in time, but a mood, a state of mind. A state where looking at new code and understanding it becomes as insurmountable as climbing up a slippery cliff. In your prime you know you can do it, and you can still sorta grasp bits and pieces of it here and there. But threads of thought don’t form constructive paths. They branch like the split ends of a bad hair day. You just can’t keep it all in your head. The pressure mounts as deadlines loom and you know that you need to understand it. I causes you to procrastinate, to become flustered and increasingly frustrated with everyone and everything around you.
Burn-out doesn’t go away on itself. It loves to mess you up as long as it can. You start to doubt yourself. Your capabilities and worth suddenly come into question. You wonder if someone will eventually catch on, just as you have, that you can’t mount any significant offensive line.
Do Something Else
There is a better place to be. There is a symbiotic sweet spot between your physical well-being and what you do to keep the lights on. You can do what you love while not being burned out by it.
You need to do other, non-codey stuff!
Find something else to do. Not as a replacement, but complementary to what you do. Do something else that isn’t staring into a computer screen, clacking away at your keyboard. Do something that requires your hands and strength, and gives your eyes a chance to see past two feet in front of you.
I found out that I loved to do woodworking. Woodworking is a discipline where you can express both your creativity and technical skills, without deploying a single line of code.
To be sure, there are some very talented, very technical woodworkers out there that would shame my pathetic cadre of skills into nothingness. And if I had another lifetime to live, I’d start off as a woodworker. But it’s never too late to start something new.
Within the discipline of woodworking, there is a world of information to which mere mortals have only given a shallow thought. If you think about it, woodworking is probably a solid contender for the oldest profession in the world. The profession’s been around since pharaohs needed containers to put stuff in for the afterlife. Jesus was a carpenter.
I find that sharpening my chisels (metaphorically as well) is one of the most rewarding exercises I can do for my mind. It strikes the right balance of technical observation and study of metals coupled with lots of physical and precise manual work. There’s a repetitive nature to it as well that lets my mind wander, while still actively working toward that goal of a hair splitting edge.
Lose Yourself
Lose yourself in something other than the same damned four lines of code.
Be it gardening or rock collecting, there’s a world within every discipline we enjoy as humans, that we have just barely allowed ourselves to scrape. Take a deep dive into it. You may realize you can make a living from it. You may realize you are never going to give it another moment of thought.
Go somewhere to do that thing if you need to. I have friends that will take a vacation to learn how to build guitars. They’ll go learn how to make wine. I used to go to pigeon conventions. Yep. Fancy pigeons. It’s a thing.
If you have vacation time, use it. You’ll emerge refreshed and reinvigorated on the other end and your boss, or your own business, will thank you for it in the long run. Use every moment of your vacation time you can. You earned it. And don’t make the mistake, as I have in the past, of using it to do more of the same stuff that’s burning you out.
Ticking
There’s one life we know for sure we have to live. That’s this one. If you’re waiting for another lifetime to try new things, well, let’s just say you’ll need a lot of faith. But if you take advantage of your curiosity, you’ll always have an outlet for your mind. Discover the hidden worlds of disciplines you’ve only previously arm-chaired your way past. Dig in. Let your mind follow its fractal contours until you deeply know it.
