For all intents and purposes, coding/software development is still a relatively new profession. Its effects on the mind have thusfar gone pretty much unstudied to any great degree.

Enter - my lame ass. I've gone through several professional iterations but all of them share one thread : a form of computer coding. Between those career reboots, writing bulletin boards as a teenager, and creating online games, I have been coding full-scale projects in some capacity for roughly 40 years. As such, my perspective is a bit more long-term than most folks.

One of my recent incarnations has me collaborating with younger coworkers who plan to "code as a career." But, after years of "coding is cool and I can't wait to learn" conversations, their enthusiasm toward coding has recently waned .. and I totes understand their unfortunate position. I, too, have hit varying levels of "coding burnout" over my lifetime. The spells have usually ranged from several months to upwards of a year.. and I'm not alone...

And, while I've opined on the weaponization of Scrum by shitty organizations, that's only part of the "burnout factor". I could ponticate on that ad nauseum, but here is a well-rounded article written by The Senior Dev instead that I (almost) wholeheartedly agree with that touches on the majority of issues better than I ever could. But my ass is old enough to at least add a unique postscript : I can confirm first-hand that even nearly-perfect work situations will usually lead to coding burnout as well. It may not be 5 years.. Or 10 years... but at some point when you put enough miles on your coding tires, you will almost assuredly need to deal with it regardless of how nice the roads you navigated were. Even creative+fulfilling coding requires long hours staring at a screen, hyper-focusing on the minutiae. All professionals are coalescing there, of course, but early coders were one of the first set of professionals trapped on that digital hamster wheel.

So what solutions can I offer? I'll tell ya, fug being a bootlicking mid-level manager unless you absolutely wanna be. I tried that once out of desperation to avoid another extended burnout and just added fuel to an already raging mental dumpster fire. So sadly, outside of anything more than having a temporary backup plan and a bit of savings, I'm still working this Rubik's Cube out mah damn self... I can tell I'm careening toward my fourth (or is it fifth?) coding burnout, and the causes are too complicated to solve via a Reddit thread full of know-it-alls. I'll keep you guys updated...