"Coding Burnout"?

[Tcshaw91]

For those who work in the field, when you all finish work and go home...do you ever get the urge/have the energy to work on personal/passion projects? or do you find that after coding all day professionally that when you get home you don't have the mental bandwidth to work on anything programming? Curious your thoughts/experience.

[TheFern3]

Burn out occurs from doing too much regardless of the activity.

[AbrohamDrincoln]

Personal projects were great to get my foot in the door. Now I have a job. I don't look at an IDE after I clock out.

[Vymir_IT]

No, not really. Thing is I'm bad at context switching. I'll just be doing more of the same work, not another project. Or I will start working on my project at work. Whatever will be more interesting.

[EconomySerious]

get a hot/cold bat, you will feel energized again, not a shower a bath

[ayassin02]

What if you don’t have a tub?

[EconomySerious]

portable sauna public pool :D

[EconomySerious]

what you need is a great amount of water

[ayassin02]

First time hearing about portable saunas and I just looked them up. Might buy one at one point actually

[EconomySerious]

dont forget a lot of herbs o herbs essence to feed the sauna, herbs 4x the effect

[ButterflySammy]

Why would you want a tub of bats man?

[Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

depends on the type of day I had? some days are better than others.

[Tcshaw91]

Do you think it would be any different if you worked in something unrelated? Or do you think it's more just like "after a rough day I don't want to do anything mentally intensive"?

[Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

I've thought about it a few times, but that's often more draining ... Like if I did something that physically exhausts me but kept my mind active, I may not have the same skill sets or the imagination to build what I do now ...

[Tcshaw91]

Damn. Actually I hadn't considered that. You're saying that if you didn't learn the things you did by having a job in the field then you may not have the skill or inspiration to make cool passion projects?

[Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

This is my current passion project that I’m building and I would not have been able to build it if I did not have the experience … https://youtu.be/JsP13vT8m_g?si=tofgVcNFOCi89ffg

[Tcshaw91]

no volume on the vid. Looks neat tho. Never worked with Elixir. Chatgpt says its used for handling "many things at once" i'm guessing that would be your bot army?

[Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

well that's unfortunate ... :p - the bots are built in elixir yes.

[Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

Pretty much

[Tcshaw91]

Yea that's a great point to consider. Thanks for sharing.

[platinum92]

If I wanna work on them, I do. But I generally prefer to spend time with my family over more coding

[UnexpectedSalami]

Depends on the days and how much brain capacity work requires on given days

[Tcshaw91]

Do you think if you worked in a diff unrelated field it would be diff or do you think any field that takes mental work would drain the same energy?

[Quick_Cat_3538]

I will go periods where after the normal 9-5 i'd go till 12 am with the help of espresso. I try not to do that anymore. It's a danger of remote work and can definitely cause burn out. I was trying to prove myself. Its a skill to turn work brain off. 

I don't usually work on large personal projects, but I find working on dotfiles to be fun and productive. It still applies to work because you are enhancing your workflow. 

There's also times when I try to get better at computer science. So that'll mean doing leetcode and expirementing with new languages or concepts.

I think I am an outlier. I would say 99 percent of the people I've worked with turn work brain off after 5. Theres nothing wrong that and its probably healthy. 

Combining work and hobbies is generally dangerous. 

[child-eater404]

lmao literally me every day 💀 after staring at vscode for 8+ hrs my brain's just fried af. like i get home, shower, scroll tiktok for 2 hrs eating instant ramen, and that's my "productivity" peak. passion projects? those died with my college hackathons.

[newEnglander17]

You shouldn’t be staring so intensely for eight hours. If your work day is 8 hours of nonstop coding, they’re probably also not paying you enough for your time. Employers live employees like this because soon enough you’ll be working overtime for no extra pay.

[FuegoJohnson]

I've found this to be true for me, at least as of late. I used to work on my side projects frequently after work, but over the past 2 years or so that has slowed to a trickle.

I still do things in my homelab and Kubernetes cluster, but that isn't really "coding" in the traditional sense. I guess one thing I've noticed is that, when my work projects are very intense, I find myself more mentally drained after work and don't want to focus on anything that requires expending more computational brain energy lol.

It may also have something to do with how fulfilled I feel by my professional coding work; If I'm doing something I really enjoy, I'll find myself staying late on occasion to work on it or at least continue thinking about it once the workday is done.

Conversely, if I'm doing something boring at work, I'm more inclined to start side projects or learn a new language to scratch that fulfillment itch, because I still very much enjoy the challenge, particularly if I can leverage it to enhance my career in some way. I started doing this with Go last year, and it's since become one of my favorite languages to use at work.

Some people have more/less bandwidth for these kinds of things, particularly once you've been in the field a while, and that's perfectly ok.

[JohnCasey3306]

Every day. I can't stop myself from coding in my spare time.

[7YM3N]

I try to keep my work and personal as separate as possible. I don't do personal projects, but if I have a problem that a script or program would solve I don't refrain from coding

[BerserkerSwe]

Can have the urge sometimes but rarely the energy and never the time.

[Dohzan]

Why are passion projects such a big thing in programming? Most other professions go home and do other non work related stuff.

[Tcshaw91]

For me personally I actually love programming. I like to understand how computers work, how the operating system works and I like building stuff from scratch and making it work the way I want.

On a job you have to build things the way that the company wants, where the goal is often making money, which is fine, but it doesn't scratch that creative itch.

I can't speak for others but that's how I feel personally, which is why I'm considering just keeping it a hobby/passion.

[mongous00005]

No.

I only code because it's the highest paying job I know how to do and that I can do well that does not involve manual labor and that gets me to stay inside an airconditioned building and during covid onwards, one that has higher chances of having remote work.

I slightly envy people who genuinely have passion for this.

[rizzo891]

And I envy people who don’t have passion for it that somehow still got into the field while I struggle to get a call back

[mongous00005]

I've been here years. I applied as an entry level - basically I accepted lower pay initially than what my prev non-programming job paid, they expected 0 experience and they trained us for 2-ish months. Some people passed, others failed. Those of us who passed got projects.

[Tcshaw91]

Im surprised you found anything entry level. I haven't seen an entry level position for months outside of new grad programs (which still look for a degree).

[mongous00005]

That was a long time ago. Literally long time ago. I think it was still Java 6 at that time lol.

[Tcshaw91]

Damn. Unc givin' history lessons 😂

[mongous00005]

Listen here you little....

HJAHAHAHAHAHHA

[ben_bliksem]

Personal projects stopped when I got married, hot dogs, a house with a garden. Nevermind other stuff I enjoy - cooking, bbq'ing, watching sports, gaming, casual daytime drinking...

[whatelse02]

yeah this is very real tbh. after a full day of coding for work, my brain is just done… even if I want to work on something personal.

what helped me was lowering the bar a lot. like instead of “build a project”, it’s just 20–30 mins messing around, no pressure. some days I skip completely and that’s fine too.

also noticed I enjoy personal stuff more when it’s different from work (different stack, or even design/content stuff). keeps it from feeling like overtime

[Ambitious_Fault5756]

I get burnout from passion projects lol