!rant

Has any of you ever felt like you were going straight towards a burnout if you keep doing your actual job but consequently don't have any energy left during spare time to learn something new, new skills you would need to land a better job? Think changing programming "branch".

How/what did you do? I'm thinking of trying to get my boss to let me work less hours... But I honestly don't know if it would be enough.

Any advice?

Sorry for the downer post, I'll be back with shit my colleagues say soon enough ;)

I'm continuously heading for burnout.

But what I think keeps from flaming out is that my work is meaningful. Not just commercially - but to the people I work for and their customers.

Perhaps the answer is not fewer hours in general. But fewer hours of work of less meaningful work.

@kunashe Makes sense! Honestly, I try keeping myself from thinking about how not meaningful this all is.

I don't feel like I'm making a software as much as I feel I'm making people make more money, while not getting that much raise $$/recognition.

And I mean, I know in the grand scheme of things, the result is pretty much always making someone more money, but still. Finding meaningful projects/causes or plain and simple enjoyable projects would cheer up the moral a whole lot. Tx.

Yup. I totally get you. I don't know how much actual work you have to do during work hours, but, for me usually it's 5 hours of actual work tops and 3 hours just idling. During that time I try to learn new stuff or specialize on things I'm already familiar with. You can try that if it suits your situation. Otherwise, take one hour out of your spare time at home to learn and go turbo on the weekends :D

@telephantasm I won't go into too much details, but our team's situation requires me to be all over the place and wear many many hats, so not that much idling.

And since I kinda want to branch out from the programming I'm doing "by trade", I would have a hard time explaining this other work to my boss... "What, those .cpp files? Well, they're for backend web stuff. Nginx. They're nginx modules. Yes. Nginx opengl modules. Shut up. It's real. Don't look it up!"

But yeah, taking some hours off "for myself" (god that sounds millennial as f*), and dedicate those hours to learning goes along what I was thinking. Plus it would let me some time in the weekend for the gf, etc. Tx bud.