1:10 - Do you feel burnt out? How do you know? Listen for signs before it's too late!

How many days in the past 30 days do you feel lethargic? You wake up with a list of things to complete and end up doing none of it. Or you dread waking up and wish today is magically over. Perhaps yesterday at times you feel great, but it lasts only a few hours at most. As seen you have that sinking or nagging feeling that something is just off. It has happened to many of us, me included in my 15 plus years as software engineer, manager and architect. This episode's guest Karthik Vishwanathan is taking an extended break from work. He's living through this now. So he's perfectly positioned to identify burnout. Look for ways to reduce the likelihood of burnout happening to you and what to do when you feel burnt out.

You are listening to diverse software engineers podcast which inspires engineers to serve clients better break glass ceilings and enjoy lucrative work. Your hosts are Eric Lau, Chief consultant at Brittany Butler solutions and Fatima galley up and coming engineer. We focus on the soft essential skills which engineers, managers and clients need to upgrade their software projects.

Hi, listeners. We are back this week with Fatima. And I'm sure all the Fatima fans out there are wondering last week what happened to Fatima Well, the courses can be tough and labs can be long. So Fatimah I guess last week you had a quite a heart lab or lengthy one. Tell me what happened.

Yeah, last week, I'm sorry again about that. But I was I just had like a really long lab. And then when the night came, I was so exhausted. And I lost track of time honestly due to the minor assignments. This has been like one of the busiest weeks of my degree so far actually.

It can be tough, right? It the mental stress. It takes its toll - I get it, I've been there. So I get that. Certainly the guests I'm going to do surgery knows a bit about stress and working under tight deadlines. But before I introduce him though, I wanted to let you know Fatima in case you will not aware that there has been great response to the episode with Matt Catallier with regards to culture of discovering company culture. In fact, last week there was I did a snippet episode which by the time you hear this is or we already be out for all your listeners to listen. And actually, I respond to feedback from one of our listeners to address the very issue of discovering the culture the real culture of a prospective employer. So definitely check that out Fatima and everybody because these are the things that can save you from a shitty boss like person S that I mentioned that last in the last episode. Now enough about me though, and frankly also enough about you Fatima because we have a guessing waiting and I can't wait to bring him his name is Karthik Vishwanathan I hope I pronounced that right Karthik can yell at me when he gets on correct or not, but Karthik is someone that I know for about a few months maybe close to a year and I think that Karthik is one of those guys who is actually really good my opinion at knowing you know what's important to him and is not work I can tell you that because you know there's certainly you think more important things than life then your work. And recently we I reconnected with Karthik and I found out that Karthik has is taking currently taking a sabbatical break from work. And I applaud him for that because not everyone can see that and make that decision and is is a brave one. I don't think a lot of us understand how much pressure it is to keep working or to keep chugging along. When if you listen to your body and your mind deep down that may not be the best for you. So Karthik, welcome and Welcome to the show.

Hello, everybody. And thank you, Eric. I'm just so happy that we go got to meet and also to talk about, about me when I've decided to go about my well sabbatical. So

let's talk a little bit about that. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background? What the context is behind the sabbatical? I think it's important people understand that.

Yeah, absolutely. So, for me, well, I've been working, like for a really long time. And, you know, this is a really, this is quite subjective. And everyone can have a different idea of what it means to work for, like a long time or on, but I'm going to, like, talk about that later. But I've had a engineering background, where he's, like, pretty much started off building things for like, the operating systems, and like things like very low down, low level data stack, like storage, and, like PCI fibers, and things like that, and decided to do a bunch of different things, you know, including things like, you know, software, publishing, bit of video games, and VIP, things like that. And until very recently, where I've been only focusing on my work revolves around like cloud, and like, infrastructure, performance, and things like that. And recently, I've just been, like, consulting, mostly on like, infrastructure, and cloud and everything. And I decided that I've done like, a lot of things, and I just wasn't able to give, like 100%, I thought that the best thing to do is to be true to yourself, understand what's happening, give yourself like some time to heal, like a, you know, like a break, just like, try not to work, try to, like, you know, like focus on like the mental health. And, you know, and general well be, especially after like, are in the end stages of like the pandemic, which is also as our baited some sort of these problems that are quite easy to get to when you're working like this. And so yeah, it was a combination of general tiredness and general burnout. And the pandemic that prompted me to take like a break from work.

I must say, I am very proud and a bit in awe of you actually Karthik because to admit, even the notion of saying, I need a break, I am not able to give 100% I don't know how many people would, on their own, come to that conclusion. And not feel guilty about? Maybe, oh, I'm being lazy, right? Oh, I'm just complaining about things when I have it pretty good. I'm really very grateful. And I can say in a bit of in awe just to have you come and be upfront about that. I really appreciate that.

Yeah, I like, usually there's times where we as engineers trying to evaluate things about like how computers work, how our systems work, we try to measure how software works, how customers, like, you know, like to use it and whatnot. But sometimes, you know, if you're being analytical about yourself, you might find that often, there are times where you need to look at yourself, see what's going on, see what you're trying to do, you know, you take like a yardstick to measure your life. Let me say this, that, you know, like, every year that passes with you working in a specific job or career is like, usually around anywhere between one to maybe 1.5% of your life that you're spending, you know, doing something. And I, at this point, thought that, you know, it did this, like, the time that I give myself to evaluate what I'm trying to do. And like, you know, evaluate myself on what, what it can do what I shouldn't do, what and and I can say that this is like the perfect opportunity for me to evaluate on that and That's that's how I, you know, it, there is absolutely nothing wrong in taking time to evaluate yourself. And this is complete the away from work and everything. And that's why I decided to do it.

So let me ask you this, when you know, like, do you label a specific time? Or a specific event that when it happened, you say to yourself, oh, my God, I need to do something different. I needed to take a break. Okay.

Yeah. So, um, there'll be times where, if you're working, you might know

I'm talking about specific to you...

Yeah. So, um, yeah. And when I was working, I, there were times where I would feel like, Oh, yeah, this needs to get done. And also this one, and then this one, and then that one, and all of that material. Oh, man, should I be doing all of that right now. And this isn't, generally means you would be aware of the methodology that you need to, like, you know, actually, you know, like, the time and everything, you'll be really aware of things like that. And it will be stuff that you would enjoy doing normally, when you're really well. But once in a while, when a lot of things pile up, you did not want to do that at all. That is appealing what some people call as burnout. And it was for me a really, really long time to realize that that is what I was going through. And like, honestly, it looks like something that isn't common. But it is apparently it happens to people when they've been through life cycles. And for me, it took me like a while to figure out. But I realized that at that point, I knew what I had to do if I had to continue the status quo. But I also realized that that wouldn't be like my most productive setting, or I wouldn't feel happy doing that thing, that one thing that tasks or whatever it is that I was, like supposed to be doing. And I struggled to go through it because it was like this feeling of Oh, there's more to be done, or this more to be done are this a grind. And I'm not interested in this grind, even though I'm perfectly capable of doing it. Okay, when that feeling hit me, I knew that I really wasn't at 100% of my self. And I thought that okay, this is definitely something I decided to read about it, I decided to like figure out what was happening and going on. And at the end of the day, a simple lack of, I thought it was like a simple lack of motivation, or I was just being like, lazy or things like that. But then, like, my body gave me all these other signs that at that point as well. And then I knew that this wasn't me. This wasn't

to elaborate on that, because I think a lot of people struggle to tell the difference.

Okay. Sure. Yeah, yeah. So some of the body signs would be general fatigue, okay, there are things that you enjoy working on. But you ain't seen anything of that sort in the last few weeks or days or months. Depending on the things that would give you joy at one point in time, we wouldn't be the same anymore. Where when you get to do that, like right now. And if you can, like tell that by like doing something that you used to do before, and you really enjoyed it. And now you can find that that there definitely is something where you can tell it, okay, now, this is a cause of burnout, likely because it's there. And then this is maybe it's like today, right? You feel that you're tired. Or maybe you feel that today is not a great day, but you could do it tomorrow. And if you did it tomorrow or any other day, around like right now, and you're like feeling the exact same sensation, then this is not about the day it is about you. That's how you can like tell the difference that I was able to tell that I was experiencing burnout.

Yeah, that's a good point that you mentioned it to summarize what you said is really about stuff that you used to enjoy and you longer do and or something that you use to not procrastinate you should just want to do it. And you find yourself procrastinating on things that you don't normally procrastinate on. I felt that I'm looking back. I think I have burned up probably a couple times in my life, and then actually took a sabbatical, per se. But I definitely felt that. Now I'm looking back, when would you set it? Yeah, there are times where I would be more procrastinating on, for example, going don't go into work like I there are there days, I just didn't want to go to work that has less that's less to do with the work itself or the or commitments to do with the fact that maybe your body's telling me that I'm burned out well, not not now that you mentioned, I'm already going wow, I probably experienced this for that. I actually think I do. So I'm glad you you're sharing this with us, Karthik. So for us, he said he's been brewing for a while, like, how long? How long we were in industry, how long? Like I think I think our listeners could never use some context with regard to the length that you're talking about.

Um, yeah, I think that I've probably been burnt out for a really long time. And the earliest time I probably detected that I was on a burner was maybe in 20, year 18, or 2019. That's when I really believe that I started experiencing, like symptoms of burnout. And I had been through a lot of other things around the time, but I never really was able to understand what it was nor was I able to associate it with burnout, or just like, call it a name I didn't have I couldn't even explain that phenomenon until, like, very recently. And when I started analyzing, getting into it, I definitely could now put a word on what I've been experiencing. And I think that I've been burned out for the last maybe two or three years. And like, I decided to do something about it. Like, now,

that's, that's significant. That's a pandemic, we accelerated this burnout even more, how has that affected you?

I would think so, the, like the pandemic to some extent, as had a, an effect on on me, but it really, actually has been, like more to do with me than to do with a pandemic, because at the end of the day, you know, like, the pandemic does buy you for some good opportunities to spend time away from when you're not like on a commute or you're not like hustling to get into the, you know, like to go out there to get into office or any of those things that I realized that with the pandemic, it could crystallize. You not having to say take the call mute or go into like an office building is no more there because you're working remote. And if you do not feel like working, it definitely most certainly has nothing to do with all these like commute or your office setting or things like that. It almost always reflects on you, the individual not looking to do what you would, like otherwise have enjoyed doing. And in some way, I think the pandemic just crystallized by Bernard for me, other than, you know, like, trying to cause it, and I was, and by the time I really got to realizing it. I wish I had done that sooner.

Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people have that sentiment, like I think you're the second or third person I know who is taking a sabbatical in the last two, two weeks that I know of. Yeah, it I think it's certainly become a bigger and bigger issue. And a lot of people suffer in silence. Remember bill number nine, you said 20 in 2019. I read I was working with you at 2019. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't know. And he is one of those things where you people suffer in silence, or invisible ness. And I have a real issue when people say things like, all suck it up and whatnot. yada tell someone who has real burnout or depression to say those words Come on, like, the one personality I've heard was like, imagine you're in scuba gear with your friend, you go scuba diving. But something's wrong with your tube and you're not getting enough oxygen from the tank. And your friends have no problem is telling you, hey, just went lack so good. But you are about to suffocate. Oh, yeah, but they can see it they don't see the back of your tube is leaking or whatever. And they just give you silly stupid advice like just relax, man, you know, you smell, breathe the fresh air and just learn to be grateful.

Yeah, it's like, that's the that's the same kind of feeling. It comes from a lot more ignorance than, like from say, you know, like, people just not like caring enough. But like the other guy, I guess. Yeah, but that's the right analogy that I would put to this is that, you know, like, a lot of people don't realize, like, what they could and how they should be going about this. But at the same time, a lot of people, you know, want to think that it's probably a temporary one. And they don't realize that they're actually like, significant long term effects of running through something like that. And, and yeah, and it is like, like a bad tube, and it probably is going to you're going to try doing the same thing that like the other scuba divers are going to do, you're going to still have a hard time doing it. That's not going away. And not not until you spend time fixing.

Yeah, exactly. Not only is it hard, but it's like life threatening. Right? Yeah, you don't see it. But it's absolutely front into your boat to drown. Like this is this is serious shit. There's there's nothing a trivial or second rate of power, the whole body body minds connected, right. So your entire essence is under threat. And that's one of the things that's really hard to express. And I really appreciate you Carfrae coming on here discuss this important topic because I don't think there are enough people brave enough talk about that. We will talk a little bit more about the bravery aspect. And why is it so difficult to talk about mental health? We will do that after these messages.

Celebrate your software projects or software careers by requesting a free 30 minute consultation. For details, go to DSC podcast.com.

Welcome back listeners. Mental health is a subject that is not easy to talk about. And I want to thank everyone for listening and sticking to this topic so far, because it's one that we need to hear. And industry don't always acknowledge it. And this ignorance is really hurting a lot of people. Because not everyone I know. does what Karthik did some turn to drugs, some turn to alcohol, others to gambling, and more destructive means of coping.

Yeah, sticking to the theme of burnout. And overworking yourself. I'm curious on your opinion on the average University schedule, because in in my degree, at least, the standard schedule had that so every semester you're taking about four to five classes. And that pretty much means at most, you can get two weeks to about a month off usually two weeks between each semester. And as for me personally, I've been struggling even keeping up with just the standard schedule. And sometimes I feel like it might be my fault. Like maybe I'm being lazy or just not working hard enough. But after two years with having about two weeks of breaks between three to four months of studying, I want to ask your opinion like what do you think a student should do in this guy's situation like do you think like, what's your opinion on this schedule?

And so for you for for university, like going through like a ton of repetitive tasks, often leads to the exact same settings that you would experience when you do those things at work level as well. And so yeah, to just get back to like it, what should be something that a student is supposed to do is? Well, I think what I would do is basically just take courses where, you know, some of it is stuff that, you know, they got to throw at you, you got to do some discipline related courses that hopefully, you know, teach you like the basics or whatever. But give yourself adequate time to do the things that you care about, like project type courses, maybe the those internships that you wanted, are just to work on a thesis all by yourself, I think, when you give yourself options to take on courses that suit you, really your style of working, that is the only way to take time, and like, you know, enjoy this yourself. And the only other way to do this is to like take out take a break from college and then like complete, come back and graduate now. I'm not so sure how practical it is to the to the last one. But yeah, but in some universities, I think that they should just be allowing people to take a mental health break, you know, because this definitely will get to students if they've been doing this, like, you know, month after month, you know, and year after year.

Yeah, yeah, I would certainly agree with Karthik that, essentially, where of the pandemic and whatnot. Universities need to do a better job of understanding that not every student can do a full year hardcore 12 credit every semester, no breaks, and bam, bam, bam. This is not visible, some can do it. And some cannot. There are extenuating circumstances that sometimes make it impossible. I would certainly say that, don't talk to her counselor, talk to somebody in the university that user student services and see and reinforce you need to bring it up is suffering in silence is never the solution. Because you're not pulling any of the support that's available, you got to know what the support is available. If you're told that you have to suck it up too bad. So sad. I hope they don't say that. But even even if they do say that at least you know that you've went through your options and know that that's the best you can do. The chances are that's not true. It really is true, that you have no options at all. University, you want to enjoy that period of hanging out with peers and whatnot, his thing that people don't tell you, once you're out of university and into the workplace, your chances of making lasting friendships and long term relationships drops dramatically. Because at work, a lot of politics and competition comes into play more so than in university or high school. To most people, there are longest lasting relationships are the ones that have the most value tend to be in their university years. So do you really need to graduate as soon as possible? I say, No, you're only young one, you're only 21 or 22. Once. It's not just learning. It's like selling academically. That's important. As we talked about all previous guests and whatnot, that communication skills is very important. able to establish a network and establish relationships is very important. Those are very hard to do when you are stressed out.

It's something that I would definitely tie down to. I don't know if people want to hear about like imposter syndrome, and its applicability to, you know, doing the thing that everyone's trying to do, you know, because I think both of those are inherently

currently one Why don't you explain to your audience what imposter syndrome is, I'm pretty sure a lot of people don't know that term.

Yeah, sure. I think the easiest way to describe it is like you go through hoops and like loops to go to university maybe well, this is like the best university for XYZ stream. Or, you know, like, this has like the best people who, who can like comment about this or write academic papers or things like that on that or More importantly, it is like the thing to do. And you would most certainly have a FOMO to not get in into an elite institution or something like that. And then what happens is you come in, and then you see that a lot of other people have jumped through hoops and loops to get in where they are. And all of a sudden, you're seeing a ton of people who are extremely good at what they do. And you're not feeling adequate about yourself, and you feel like, Oh, I think I'm an imposter here. Here is how I would say this is that if you took all those smart people that you've worked with, and put all of them in a room, and you're asked to random people to question and answer each other, you realize that not everybody knows everything. It is extremely rare for someone to be like, very good at everything, and know everything, okay? And people often think that they work in like this world with miraculous people around them every day. But that is like far from the truth.

Oh, tell me about it. No, I had to buy I was asked to invited to give a conference, a lecture on using react and Redux saga and how to work on using the front end best practices. And after the presentation, I actually got heckled and I thought being a stand up comedian was hard. He actually got heckled someone actually typed in on chat is a virtual thing saying that I can't believe you suggesters this using Redux saga is a is a no self respecting developer, we use it you suck. Like it was like, holy shit. Like, I've done this for 15 plus years, and I'm pretty good idea what I'm doing at library, the heat transfer so much, has over a million downloads, like in a week. The top library and he's just no self respecting developer ever do this. And I'm like, holy shit, myself, some who's done this a long time, who has seen evidence time and time again, trained 20 plus members in four different teams, and being paid a good contract rate on doing this, if I can get heckled and being bulldozed. Like that. Imagine if you're just out of school.

That's right. You know, and it happens around us. And, you know, people are encouraged to do that. You know, they're, it's often like, you know, like, just like this popularity contest, and people feel that they have to sort of get into it because it seems so natural to get into it and come out as like, you know, looking Nuala didn't look so bad, no, at the end of the whole thing. But now here I am trying to do things to impress people who would absolutely not care are our, you know, the biggest even for themselves at the end of the day. These are things that are made up standards. Nobody really needs to go through things like this. And and surely not get heckled for what they are what they're naturally good at. Yeah. Which, which is like, obviously goes back

to the mental health thing. Right? Yeah, exactly. Dirt, there's just toxic compensation, toxic. People that would say these things, I'm sure that they're good people in some other ways. I'm not saying that, that they're just bad people. But these kinds of behavior are shockingly common in our industry, and people

are afraid, you know, they're like, if I do not do this, I will not look cool. As often why sometimes I think people are driven to do all these things, to, you know, make up like an error around them that they're probably more important than, you know, anyone else around them or to kind of look competative Yeah, it's something that people go through. And often as a result, they're both the same reasons why it's all of this made up stuff that really

absolutely he's running, like you mentioned, usually was made up like, like, like, like, emotionally, these are all emotional responses. Think about that. No thesis ative logic or rationale or zeros and ones. Computer some give a shit. semicolon. Alright. This library is better than the other one. No, it's but that's it. The industry and I feel that there are so many people that I've seen enough of them that would gloat about how they're above all that stuff that they are rational people, and that they would take or use the best tools because it's just rationally better because the end Yep. So many times I've seen decisions being made about what tools to use what, what are the format, call formats, all that sort of stuff. But it's nothing to do with rationality. It's, it's logical fallacies. It's emotional, who, who's talked all who, who gets to say anything, and all these kind of pressures really aren't me a big part of the mental fatigue that people are harming. I

know, right. And it's often like, you know, someone might have said something about, like, oh, give me an example, like, what I feel is that it's happening, or there is someone recognized, Oh, how I achieved like super low latency computers or something like that. And then, you know, you could never have taken that kind of an approach when you're not controlling all the hardware, or all the little companies that you can, and then you're trying to, you know, generalize that to a very, two very different setting where it wouldn't make sense. And often, you know, these kind of practices get picked up as best practices, just because nobody took time to, you know, figure out if it would be applicable in a setting that they were more working with. And at the end of the day, what you have are like people who, you know, try to apply some concepts. And they figured out that failed miserably for them, and made their lives and everyone else around them unhappy. And finally getting back to things that they should have been taking in right from the start. So like, and this happens a lot more than you think, because I've seen enough of this being like, Oh, this is the way to do things, because someone said, so it's really not, it has never been the case, what really works is how something interacts with your setting. And, you know, you should pay attention to yourself first as a human being. And whether you're capable of, you know, letting dad avoid with your system or not, as opposed to that being like a law set by a popular guy, and hence must be universally true, which isn't at all,

I share my story about some of the crazy stuff that you've heard, I want to hear from you, from you, what's the most ridiculous things like the just just mentally, like WTF moment for you?

So I was working with this specific company? I'm not going to name it. And for people who want to know, like, no, but the reality is that, you know, how, like, we use, like, some people say that they want to use like MySQL or not, and are any acid based database, and they want to compare it to why, you know, something, that eventual consistency is much better scale.

Yeah, you talk about database design. And, and,

and people end up using these anti patterns, like as part of a sequel. So like, there's the pattern called a blob, where you can like, basically, use it as a key value store. And even before the Jason data came in, you could like use it to load and save a bunch of stuff on and you could like use this for storing, like any big file is how like, people want to talk about it. Now guess what happened was this company, they were trying to set up a database, with blobs holding for more than so they eventually initially said this will be like a key value database where people do not use values that are greater than a certain size. And at the end of the day, it so happened, the person who said these rules, ended up leaving that company, the people who came and then took that framework on later abused the heck out of it, because they did not have what he called, like, go through all the things that were said. And even the best practices got lost. And turns out, they were trying to store like 15 kB files in like a database. And so your database, you would expect to scan a few 1000 rows a second, you know, like when it comes to like regular database stuff. So in this database, they figured that to do a scan, it took them like a few seconds to scan every row in the database. Yeah, and, and the reason is that like the keys in the database to identify all that information were so small, but the blog values essentially you were like reading the entire damn row into memory and you were trying to like Like read for every four KB for every four by key reading, like the 15 kB, you know, something that really didn't make sense. And you know, this was like the pattern all across and you had roughly like 15 to 20 tables, which were like a few terabytes each store all sorts of crap in it like profile pictures and stuff like that

Well, sorry for pictures like

people are like, you know this, you know, this framework says that this is the right way to do it because you know also when I'm like no your framework or

Oh, you hurt oh my god that hurts me. It's not real. Yeah. I physically feel ill, right.

And the reality is that there's these things are nowhere close to the real hardware where things run on, there is no mechanical sympathy for you know, and your high level framework does not solve a problem and things like that. But often it this is considered to be the pattern in the industry. Okay. It's popular because other people are doing it not necessarily because it is like,

who left you to court was doing so therefore, we must be correct. Oh, boy, the lemmings is walking because they're got in front of you walked in towards a cliff.

Oh, yeah. And then imagine this girl going by a bus. Hey, are you done with a job? Yeah, boss, except I'm just like, I think it will probably finish in another two months or so because they're scanning one row at a time.

Imagine trying to look up stuff on that web application log of that. Oh, my God. Yeah. Like, well, you have a hammer, everything's a nail. There's not just a hammer doesn't mean that I was used on everything. Exactly.

Right. Yeah, it will never work for a scenario where maybe maybe the original use case was the guy only wanted it for, like maybe 20 rows or 30 rows or something. These systems are just like, according to be nothing but made up popularity contests that are out there.

Speaking of popularity contest, this podcast is getting more popular week by week, and I thank you for all your listeners for sticking around. We'll be right back after these messages.

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At this segment, Karthik and for Timo I want to shift towards how do we help our listeners? Right? If they are going through their work or gain to gain the work and go through some stress? What are the things they can do to not necessarily alleviate because I think sometimes you just have to walk away but besides just fall out walking away, and, and quit. You know, I think sabbatical like you covered mentioned you Yeah, yeah. How long have you been on sabbatical right now?

I am planning to be on sabbatical all the way until fall, which is for me, it'll be about four months for sure.

Yeah. And you have an extenuating circumstance. It's not just because you you burn out years or something else.

Hey, for me, I'm planning to like, just lay on the couch and play video games.

Whoa, no, you don't just do you also have your first child? We don't go gratulations. Right. You thank you and raising a child is a lot of work the other way anybody tell you otherwise. Okay.

Yeah. So that's actually been one of the reasons why I, well, you know, it really added on to the end of the day. me taking, like, you know, turn to do this had to come with a few things, okay. It wasn't exactly easy to do. But I would recommend this that if someone wants to do this, you got to buffer up. Okay. That's one of the things that's often not said a lot about the only real way you can like do this without and when you want it and when you need it, and you get to do it as well. Well, when you have a buffer that can last you a few months, and when you want to take a break and you want to do that.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. And that sets up a lot of other things, for example, is harder to ask for vacation. If you're afraid your boss is going to just dump you and you can't pay your bills.

You know, you can Prepare yourself like 100% for all the things that can go wrong around you. But you can certainly use give yourself some time to think to heal, to get better when when, when things like this happen. So that's one of the primary things that don't tell everyone is that buffer up for a rainy day, it'll help you. Especially when you want to take a break for mental health or something like that. Do it away, you are worth it. Yeah. No,

it gets pretty bad Actually, no. This product manager that I work with he project manager. He's a very capable guy. He was one of the best ones I've worked with, actually. And he was working on a particular game. And they've got so stressful for him. Were one point he caught himself going into bed sleeping in bed with two cell phones held to his hand. Because one of those cell phones can ring a 2am, a ring at 2am, twice while you're sleeping. He was expected to answer the phone call and get to work. You told me that story. He was to me. And I thought he was joking. I've wondered like, Oh, that was exaggerating. He just looked at me dead in the eye. He goes, I kid you not. He enjoyed the time working there brace, there was a lot of really smart people when the project was really fun for him. But yet walk away. Like we realize that he didn't even recognize his own daughter. She was like 778 years old time. One day, you just look at his daughter, he goes, I didn't even realize you look like that. Like he saw his daughter's so little that she grew up in fear. for five months, he has some changes to her facial and here. He will notice any of it that was like that. You want them on sign your bird out? Holy shit.

Yeah. Yeah, like imagine, right? I do not have time to, you know, like, let's say I have to do my work. And then on top of that, the constant emails, and then oh, that zoom meeting to discuss x, y, z, or you know, something like that, that could be on an email or on a wiki or documentation, whatever it is. But reality is that, you know, we could all be doing, like so much less and still be productive than, you know, sticking around all these things all the time. You don't need like the constant flurry of, oh, there's an email about it does it also come as a slack notification, oh, you also got a page paste for it on pages up. I think sometimes, like having a very few systems that do this. And then you should be completely disconnected when you're not working with things like this. Because contrary to what people believe you are at the end of the day, the person or the weakest link in the chain of communication, because you're all this all of this information around you. And it is likely that at some point you will break down when all of this gets to you. And this is a really important reason why you shouldn't be disconnecting from email, slack phone, Zoo, calendar, right? Just turn the damn phone off and sleep if you're even. Yeah, just turn it off. You want to like miss it, somebody if it's that important? Either you better be in a hospital if it's that important.

My wife told me one of the funniest things that her mom said to her, you better be somebody better be dead or dying. Somebody better but

that is really good advice that I can tell people that um, yeah. Because otherwise he would never ever, you know, there is no need to please anybody about like about things like this. And like and I think that turning the phone off or but setting a culture where it is expected that people do not answer between time one and time two is actually okay. And that is the way to do it. Because in companies where you're expected to like be there online all the time and get things like this or that and you know, if not this would like escalate to you know, XYZ person. And if not, then they will it will not look favorably on you if you did not do this. But I think systems like this are basically set up to set employees up for failure. And, and honestly these are just terrible systems and

I Don't say think that these things necessarily done intentionally? I think sometimes pressure comes from top down. Right deadlines and

yeah, but leaders should be a good leader as someone who would expect people to disconnect when there isn't like an adequate time to work. I wouldn't want to fly a plane. Yeah. Well, I

hate to break it to you. The good good leaders are like, for you lately, I think sometimes what I want to say is like, if your boss is in one of those who knows these things, what can you do? Right, different boss? Nobody can say that. No, no, I have dealt with these things before. And there are a number of ways you can you can do it right. For me, what I like to do is if a boss says, you know, here's something I can feel Chad says, oh, what was going on? I think you can respond and say, Oh, yeah, I, I heard you. I don't know, sometimes when a boss like messages, they sometimes just want you to know that you're hearing them. And I find that all times if I respond, I say, Yeah, I hear you. I can this Wait, how important is this? Like, is this fire fire alarm or whatnot? And all times you just ask that can can we? Do? I need to? I need an hour or two hour only tomorrow, the next day or two to give you a the answer that you really need. Is that okay? Right. And sometimes even just bringing that question back will get them to go, Oh, okay. Yeah, we can do this. The next day, there's not Oh, but not that many events are truly like five alarm type of situations. And I think just gently reminding them of that. There might be a boss of that will help. So you want to respond, but you don't need to respond before answer. You can respond by asking for time. And I actually encourage anyone do that. Even if you are half the time, it is almost never a good idea to respond quickly to your boss. Yeah, like I mean, like you want to acknowledge your boss quickly, but you don't want to give meaningful answers or answers that could affect your career without thinking. By no knee jerk, you want to avoid knee jerk emotional responses. So the best way to do that is to develop a habit of asking for time. How, when do you need this information back? And how important is it? Right? So once you do that, then you can write a response. And I found this helpful that you write a response, but don't send it you write a response, you save it, you read it and you walk away. So even if you can respond within the hour, I wouldn't. So you write it let's say he took like 30 1015 minutes to write your email and then the response will you save it, you walk away you come you take about like 1520 minutes, you you come back and you read again. And if it looks good, then you send and if the subject is sensitive or you feel in yourself emotionally attached to something you do even more time before you respond and I found that very very helpful because it really prevents you from saying things you regret right once you click that send Well guess what? You can't take it back. Okay, there's a saying right disease comes in the mouth disaster comes out of the mouth. So how you want to communicate especially if you're five years

30pm and and whatnot, you definitely do not want to be writing a quick email and and try to go to sleep afterwards because you want to quit quit responding just get it done like that. Those have found that all times those like emails are the ones that you really regret that you really wish you didn't send it and then you have to spend maybe next week or month or even like a year and a performance review trying to undo the damage if you have to do damage you're already behind the eight ball right it's best to just not go there and commit that error in the first

yeah but like often there you know there's like a time between someone actually gets to learn and implementers but there you know like for all practical purposes that damage already done if you don't know you're getting into something like this. Like so but here is something I would like to add on to this like is that now Like systems fail often not because the people implementing or directly involved with them are tasked to do so. But because the systems have not been set up for people to not feel rather, okay, and that is a very important thing that people need to understand that often when systems fail around them, it isn't just that they're doing or lack of, you know, as as causing it, it's because a series of things were left unchecked before it got to that state. And, and those responsible for a series of things may or may not be, like just one person really, that often has to do with the way like things were set up in the past, or trying to, you know, be aggressive about things that a company should normally not be doing or trying to get into. And finally, like the, you know, the the guy at the end of the day tasks to do something, you know, realizes that all of this, you know, has just been like set up in like, possibly the worst possible way, and has to take and how to, and how to take flak for, for things that aren't necessarily problems that they should be, you know, handling at all, this realization, one cycle of it is enough to like, wake people up to what they should and shouldn't be looking. And I think the, the best thing that people can do when they get started on something is to start calling out the current problems around something. And honestly, if a company or an organization is not going to listen to issues like this, then I would say it is time for like people to realize that this is not the ideal setup that they should be working.

I have a colleague, like I don't know who doesn't Well, I pretty much met with him at a meet up or something. But he said that when he was relatively Junior like this is less than a year in the business. He started work at a company where within the first week, he was trying to impress his boss, and God know gung ho and made a change. He was well do you might have to change the thought. But that change made it all the way to production of out any sort of unit test, any sort of QA, any sort of check, and he took down the production. It took down production for almost a whole day, 24 hours. And people are scrambling to know what happened. And when we figure out there was a new guy who did it, the CEO lost his crap, essentially, and publicly fired my colleague, just to get get the fuck out. And I remember him telling the story he was he was still bit distraught. But he finally got the job. And there's a little bit later, but he was a little bit distraught about that. And he felt bad about it. And I said, Why are you feeling bad about it? You started the week, you are a junior developer? How the fuck would they set up a system that you could bring down a production with one? One change that you just commit to? A branch? No, no, no pull requests, no change control, no queue, it just you make one commit, pushed it and took down the entire production system. Whoever the senior people were the CTO, whatever that set up that that allowed that allowed this to happen that easily. They should be ashamed of themselves. I felt like you I'm I'm glad you got canned from that job. Because if you stick around our police would have would want you to Yeah, yeah. It's six ways to Sunday.

Yeah, and the deal is, is like out there. Nobody would have asked like if you're say you're out of college, and you join a nuclear power plant, nobody will ask you to put your hands into the nuclear corps or

you get your hands on all the nuclear launch codes for Russia.

You don't want to do things like that on day zero. There's probably someone else who looks like a bunch of other things to ensure that you're not putting your hands and you know, melting it like on day zero. Why would you do that in software though, that's that's the one thing I don't understand that.

No, it's just like, oh, human error really like the fact that he that's even possible like that should not be possible. What the

Yeah, I think most companies should like spend their first few days just getting things like this right? And then starting to build, like whatever you want after you know that there's like some fail safes available.

And the way the world sees a system needs to be able to account for human error. Yeah, you cannot be some guy accidentally pushed something blows of thing out that's

know what to do when you blow the reactor out. I think there should be a document on it before you, you know, like get people to work on a reactor for sure.

See that show, by the way, amazing. Amazing. sent me a series holy you out. I wasn't good. Good show. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, it

tells you how so many things were wrong all the way at the leadership level, you know, yeah, which cost series of misgivings to happen. You know, and it's so much so true that it even happens, like when it can happen at a nuclear power plant. And people have died millions.

Absolutely. And like this one guy, Diablo, I've got all the blade out a little spoiler alert, if you even watch a show, but I forget when those will happen to Chernobyl. So it's really not that much of a spoiler.

Yeah, if you've got a bad boss, you should be calling out the problems as

they put the blame on the outline of the guy who will make that call. But the reality is that there was a lot of failure and and you're blaming a cover up of things that would cover ups? Yeah, that would have made the whole scenario possible in the first place. The ama was only one of a whole bunch of series of of errors. Right?

And it's usually the last guy who gets to push that button, you know, like, sets the incident off, but honestly, that was already set up for failure.

Exactly, there's somebody would have done it, they want him some somebody would would have done it at some point. Right? It's, you know, he was under a complete context that this is a complete failsafe is not going to let you recover from and he was he was told wrong, recover. So that's, you know, the software that happens, and sometimes that's why I feel like as, as more and more things are under software control, you have to take more care, like what was it like like, this is more than like six or seven cyber attacks ransomware attacks on our on the US pipelines, or the oil and, and their infrastructure. In a month. There's all software is becoming everywhere, and the consequences of bad software or bugs. It's it's it can be tremendous. So we really our to ourselves to have systems in place that protect not just the systems but also the people. I think that a lot of times that that stress that all you make one change blowing up and now you have to spend the next you know, how many days and weeks repairing things. I remember like going to learn things I talked about like cultures I you don't want to see a culture where people reward or have a lot of firefighting, so not real

famous should not be rewarded for how many fires they put out. People should be rewarded for how many fires they have saved.

Firefighters do not build skyscrapers. Assault software, you do not want to be in a firefighter business. You want to be in the skyscraper building? Oh, yes.

Yeah. And you want to like build stuff that wouldn't like lean on necessarily flaked on on fall on with like the, you know, yeah. Like imagine, like things like this, right? You have like xR Would you rather be like spending those hours, you know, like building more flaky stuff like things that you will have to constantly keep putting, spend time on trying to put out because like, it is the cool thing to do? Or would you rather spend time, you know, taking those days off, getting a nice vacation and getting your mind all sorted out,

or no. And then there's even more insidious scenario where people will see software developers chilling and not being stressed and they go, Oh, there must be something wrong. We can like get rid of some people. And I've seen that mentality where our CEO walks by sees like a couple of software developers may be playing a ping pong table paper. So the CEO allows us people on people will be there. But then he gets pissed when when the software developers play ping pong, not realizing that they actually spend the last three or four days working 10 plus hours. They just need Chill out that day gets upset things that they do with there's too many developers and give them save money. And because the software runs fine, okay, we don't need them out the software developers, you know, lay off a bunch, I've seen that happen. But that kind of analogies, the top dogs, our mentality is absolutely terrible. It's like saying, he looked he was a walking around floor, a building and go, Wow, that the floor is clean, and spotless, and is unsanitary and go, Oh, we don't need janitors to get us get rid of our janitors. But,

I mean, it's hard to tell. Like, when people, you know, I think companies have gone long from let's do this to, let's ensure that people are doing something so that they look like they're busy. You know, that. That's, that's the worst kind of an analogy, you know, like, and then suddenly wondering, oh, hey, where are all these people gotten? Why am I in such a mess? Oh, that's right. I removed all the janitors last week.

You remove the very people that make your software spot will clean and swamp in the first place. Right. Yeah. And that. So that's that. And there's also the mentality that, oh, you know, if we want to build more things in software, we must keep adding features, right, keep adding any features or features. And humans are very good at solving problems. By addition, we're not very good at all. All oftentimes, we don't even consider solving problems by subtraction. Now, it turns out, argue that a software does not meet more features. Actually, sometimes it's better to have less features and make your current features work better.

Yeah, often, like having a few good core features is better than having like, tons of tiny little features where you don't have time to

they don't sync up well on the trend. I've seen a lot of times, features don't get built because the they want to satisfy this, this client and his conscience, they want it. And then once you build a feature, the carnivals are the one I don't care what

I'm eating anyway. And then you're like, Yeah, what happens to the person who worked on that feature for XYZ amount of time? Right? Yeah, it gets to that person for sure.

And that that causes stress you want about mental fatigue being worked your butt off and then just have a switch says oh, you know the content we want to anyway didn't matter. While you heal told me Tony Award doesn't matter. You busted your butt doesn't matter, whatever. Move on. And and then you are thrown to the next thing. Yeah, it happens a lot. I definitely think it does. Oh, that's that's some of the stuff that I've stuffing seen. And yeah, that then that's another one of those yet. That's why I talk about being company culture, why the company culture is so important because you land on some of these and you can be deflated. That's that causes mental stress and lack of satisfaction, your jobs and all that stuff. comes into play. Oh, boy having covered you know, I taught them very bad. I Fatimah. What do you what do you think?

Um, yeah, I think that was a very interesting discussion about just like the mental health and I

think I learned a lot today. It's one of these is hard to quantify. It's hard to. It's so hard to give people any advice. Even even they asked me what advice is very hard to give one because it's extremely context context dependent. It depends on what is in your person's particular case. What's giving was the source of stress. And sometimes stress may not be something in the workplace, it could be a family could be a relationship. I those things have a big right. And one of the things I want to end with before we end this chat and is that humans tend to overvalue sunk costs.

Well, yeah, I think it's like, when you decide to start on something like there's usually like an initial cost that's not varying or all the time but it's something that you like poor and then it's like, you can assume you just put it into the water. So it's sunk.

Yeah, exactly. It's cost that you've already put in once you make that decision, and you don't recover that back right. So example if I decided to work for Company A and I put my heart in, well, that last few months is a sunk cost. You committed the company a you you make do all this work, you're not going to get that Time back or the energy back. That's a sunk costs. And the thing about human nature is that when you have a sunk costs, we overvalue that sunk costs. Another way of saying is that when you have a crappy boyfriend or girlfriend, you tend to stick with them and not want to leave. And in fact, get this. human psychology has shown that the worse your boyfriend or girlfriend or your the worse Your job is, the worst that mistake is, the more you actually stick stick with that we overvalue that sunk costs, the more dramatic that sunk cost hurts you, the more likely you're going to stick with that, because that perception that have already sung orders in Iran for all this crap, it can't get any worse. And they're slightly in the tunnel. And that's just not true. So, in in psychology and scientific literature, you got to look up sunk cost fallacy of sunk costs, and essentially boils down to is ditch that shitty boyfriend. It literally boils down to that, if you suspect that your job, or your your boyfriend is not up to snuff, and you only have that nagging feeling about it. Chances are, you're correct, and you need to ditch that ditch that piece of shit. As soon as possible.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, a lot of times people think that if they've already spent some time working with like, you know, like a specific setup or something that they're used to, they're likely chances that they'll that holding on to the sunk cost is definitely like holding on to your burnout as well. And that's, like, one of the real reasons why, you know, like, it is okay to perfectly sit and, you know, like, reconsider, you know, like, all all of the time that you already stuck on on something, and instead, decide that, okay. But at this point, I think that, given the setup, this is how the variable cost is. And you're paying that every moment of your life in your when you're evaluating.

Yeah, absolutely. We're Catholic. When we met last you told me that wasn't like one year is he told me that this is a great thing you told me about the sunk cost, like one year in is like, how many percent of your life?

I know it'll be anywhere between a one to 1.5% of your

Yeah, you're dreaming that right? year after year? Yeah, you don't get it back. So. So is that sunk cost right? Now, imagine I'm gonna hate mail. Now, you know that right? We're gonna get hate mail. I'm gonna get a whole bunch of people. Like, how do you tell my girlfriend to ditch me?

You know, it's like, the point is that you do want to have the time where you can reevaluate your life and forget about that sunk cost. Yeah.

People often over value the sunk costs Yeah, that's really the thing about it. So for Tina, you don't want a boyfriend? Yeah. What do I have to do now? Like explain that again?

It's a very guys do have any good emails were like something. It's okay. That is

Oh, Eb voice because in our website, you can leave voicemail so if I get like some angry person won't finally kill me like

I'm glad to still take time and enjoy my life. Yeah, like for sure. Yeah. I'm happy Yeah. But, but like, this is one thing that I would ask people to do is if they get the time I don't know if you're on YouTube, but I don't know if I'm saying this right. But there's this channel called kurz gears that in a nutshell, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing it but and it's like this beautiful video that got released three weeks ago, saying what are you doing with your life? the tail end and out highly encourage everyone to take some time off and watch that video. And

yeah, well, why don't you like I think it's kind of hard to get a website from like audio. So if you can like send me an email about if you want to look up the YouTube videos of our I'll put it in the show notes. Oh, yeah. Perfect so that people can get it that way. That's the best way to do it is these are much easier if you just see it in text as opposed to like, Yeah, exactly.

Right. Yeah. And definitely and that that's the thing, it's your life. And, you know, you definitely have to, like take to take time for yourself, that that's the most important thing.

Yeah, take time for yourself, enjoy your life, because is one life, you get to live at once. And that's

make the best out of it,

make the best out of it. And, you know, and I think there are a lot of problems and things that we go through. And I always say that to people that problems are the privilege of the living, the people, only people who do not have problems, or that it he wants to be grateful that you have 1000 problems. Because when you're healthy, you have 1000 problems. When you're sick, you have one problem to get the get better, because once you're sick, you know, every other problem that becomes secondary. So you're gonna end on, on a nose and by, as all listeners out there, take care of yourself. Take care of your physical and mental health. And by the way, I actually don't like the separation of physical and mental health, reality is just health, it brings a physical thing, right? Like people forget that your brain is a physical thing. There are oftentimes a physical problems that affect your brain and your mentally can affect you physically. So it's one interconnected thing. So you don't have a separation, mental health, or physical health. If you have a health problem, you need to take care of it. You have one body, one mind, one life. So all of you out there, take care of yourself. And if you can take care of others, because your family, your connections and relationships are what's really important. This is your industry. It's a means to an end, not an end to it to itself. I think we all can be mindful of that and take care of ourselves and our loved ones and our colleagues

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