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Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of the front end Happy Hour podcast. This is episode 31. And we will be talking about burnout. Burnout is not a rare phenomenon that amongst engineers that we have to deal with. In this episode, we'll talk about the ways we've been affected by burnout and how we've had to deal with it. Let's go around the table and give brief introductions of today's panelists. Brian, you always sit right next to me, you started off.

Brian Holt
I'm Brian Holt, and I'm one of three white guys from Netflix here.

Stacy London
Stacy London and front end dev from Atlassian.

Augustus Yuan
My guess is here in front end engineer at Evernote.

Ryan Anklam
I'm Ryan anklam, a senior software engineer at Netflix and I feel

Ryan Burgess
man, that's that's a hard one to follow now,

Augustus Yuan
and also no context.

Stacy London
You just say to NutriGrain bar.

Brian Holt
There you go.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. And each episode of the front end Happy Hour podcast, we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the podcast, we will all take a drink. So in spirit of burnout, what do we decide today's episode keyword is tired, tired, tired. So if anyone says the word tired, we will all take a drink. Alright, well, let's get started. How does burnout happen to each of you

Augustus Yuan
overwhelming amounts of work that needs to be done.

Brian Holt
I think that's that's a good way to put it. For me. I've had a couple pretty serious bouts with burnout. Throughout my career, almost all at Reddit actually entirely during my time at Reddit. Just like leading up to the holidays. We'd be crunching to get things ready for Black Friday getting ready for Cyber Monday. And we'd be to the point of sometimes sleeping in the office. sunup to sundown working, and it's just like that was the amount of work necessary to get things done. I don't know how to justify it. Like I don't think it is justifiable. But it was also just what had to be done. Right? It was either that or our product failed. So we we did it. But after like, what was it December 18, which was the shipping deadline for Christmas for the gifts marketplace, which is what I worked on. I was just crash red, it actually used to give me a month off every year to recover from the burnout. Because it was literally two months of just crunching.

Ryan Burgess
That's not good, though either to like have to like push for not because your head's not in it either. Like I know I've done at some agencies I've done like all nighters literally writing some like small, small thing in JavaScript, like I was killing myself trying to figure it out. Probably took me an hour to do just to figure it out, when in all reality, it probably should have taken like three or four minutes, but you kind of hit that point where it's just like starts to kill you and you can't write anymore. Yep,

Brian Holt
for sure.

Ryan Anklam
Yeah, and I usually know I'm starting to burn out a little bit when I stop being passionate about learning new things. Like I'll see a blog post. I'm like, Oh, this is cool. And I'll start it again. Two sentences. Like this hurts.

Brian Holt
Yeah, totally.

Ryan Anklam
I'll know that it's time to step away for a little bit and do something fun.

Ryan Burgess
I think for me to another thing, it's not even necessarily a company pushing me to overwork is sometimes I just take on too much like whether it be work and plus other side projects, or just even at work being like okay, I can do that and then it all like piles on and you're like oh shit, I've agreed to do all these things and they're all due at the same time. And yes, I'm sure you could talk to someone say like hey, I took on way too many things but I just kind of pushed myself to do it all

Stacy London
burnout for me it was a couple of jobs ago it was a site that needed you know 24 By seven support and I was kind of on a rotation to do that kind of support and it used with the team was originally fairly big and then people kept quitting because it was just like you get woken up every night and you'd have to like slog through and try and troubleshoot everything and get it working again there's all this pressure to get it working right because you know millions of dollars lost you know if the site's not up so eventually more and more people quit so it was like I was on this rotation like twice a month and then it was a new person on the team so then you were like a backup for them well they didn't know how to fix stuff so then you were basically on call at all times then so like I was not sleeping I was not getting good sleep at all and then like the whole site did a major upgrade and we were up for like 30 hours straight like and I remember driving home after the upgrade was kind of like done and the site was still stable. And we they had been like force feeding us Red Bulls to like stay up and like do all this work. And I remember like

Brian Holt
my knees right? Take your IV did you get your

Ryan Burgess
Red Bull Phil, you need more.

Stacy London
I was like my hands are shaking as I was driving home and I'm like this is so unsafe like I should not be driving home right now. I'm too tired and

Brian Holt
So I think Stacey brought up a salient point, which is if your work and your plus your extracurriculars are starting to affect your sleep schedule, like be aware you're you're on the train to burnout. I mean, it happens sometimes. Right? Like, that's part of the job of being an engineer. Right? But if it's, if you're always in emergency mode, you have a problem.

Ryan Burgess
I would question that company if they're always in emergency mode. I

Brian Holt
mean, every company has at some time, right? I think sometimes

Ryan Burgess
that's okay. But all the time, if you're like, constantly in that mode, that's no good.

Brian Holt
If you ask any engineer that's been in the field long enough, they're gonna say they had at least one job like that. Right? They that was constantly in emergency mode. So it's pretty, it's it is kind of a privilege perspective. So you have to question the company, because like, there's lots and lots of company out there. And I'm sure we have listeners out there dealing with that right now.

Ryan Burgess
I still think you need to question so Fuck you,

Brian Holt
Ryan.

Augustus Yuan
But I think it's a good point in that, like, I'm actually glad we talked about because I think it's a lot more prevalent for startups or Silicon Valley. Like, we're smaller companies, like they give so many responsibilities to like individuals, like, you know, like, a typical software engineer at a startup probably has way more responsibilities than maybe like at a bigger company. And so I think that also attributes soprano just like having a lot of context switching and like having to juggle so many responsibilities. So I think, depending on the company, it might be a lot more of this standard. But it definitely, I don't think that's necessarily an excuse. No,

Ryan Burgess
I think you're you're right to and I think especially in a startup time matters. Getting that product out the door, like as quick as possible to get something there can be really important. So you may actually have to be really pushing yourself to do that. And you're right. You don't necessarily do just your job, you're taking on other jobs, too, because you're don't have a full workforce necessary.

Brian Holt
I think that that is definitely everything you just said is true, but it's only a part of the picture, right? Like, there are large companies that consistently work that way. I have a friend that just moved here to the Bay Area. And she told me that when she got there the first days, like, yeah, we work like 60 hours a week, like everyone here works that much. I'm like, Holy shit, find a new job.

Ryan Burgess
And I guess that's what I'm getting at is I judge that company? Like, why do you have to consistently do that all the time? I have no problem working a 60 hour a week. But if it's consistently like that, that's not good.

Brian Holt
I have a problem working. This is a one on one with my manager. I know, I have a problem of working 60 hours a week,

Ryan Burgess
but I wouldn't make you work. 60 hour work weeks

Brian Holt
Exactly.

Stacy London
Was it a bait and switch for her? Like she asked during the interview? Like what's your work life balance, like? And they're like, it's great.

Brian Holt
I don't think so. Like it was her first developer job. So you just it's hard to say no to that, particularly to a big name company. So I mean, you can't fault her at all.

Stacy London
The work hard play hard. I was just gonna say that byline, whatever you want to call it makes me super apprehensive. Like, if I hear that

Brian Holt
everybody's waving a flag. Yeah, that gives me anxiety.

Augustus Yuan
That's a lot of work.

Brian Holt
For sure.

Ryan Burgess
But why is it in our industry? Like, why is it I know, there's other industries that do this, like investment banking, like I've definitely heard had friends that are like accountants, and they have obviously, certain time of year during tax time. It's really, really bad. Where's like, there's definitely jobs that are like that. But why is ours kind of it feels like why is that a thing?

Ryan Anklam
badge of honor. Sometimes people think

Brian Holt
you're a hero, like,

Ryan Burgess
I'm badass, because I worked all night and stayed up coding.

Brian Holt
Yeah, like, we've all done it. Like we've all had a conversation where like, he's like, Well, I did this last week, I worked 100 hours last week, and you're saying it out loud? And like, at least in my own head when I say that. It's like, I didn't want to do that. Like I don't want them to do it. So why we bragging about it

Ryan Burgess
true. Yeah, stop bragging. If you're bragging about those long hours, be like, fuck that. i Why did I work that long? Yeah.

Ryan Anklam
Well, if you look at even Quora, if you look at some of the intellectual tech leaders in this, you know, the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, a lot of the questions about them are, you know, how many hours a week does Elon Musk work? He must work 100 hours a week. And that's so awesome. Like, it's just worshiped. It's crazy.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, that's not good.

Augustus Yuan
And well, even going beyond that. There is like kind of this stigma of making your work like part of your life even how like offices like Google or Facebook, they make their offices so extravagant. Like, you could just live there. And I bet people do like, you know, obviously like there's

Ryan Burgess
like a showers you have food you have gyms like, yeah, it's which is

Augustus Yuan
actually pretty cool. Right? Exactly. But I guess it's like, it goes with this stigma of like, you know, almost your work is your life. You know, it's not even and if you can do that, then it's not even really working.

Brian Holt
But have you ever been on Facebook's campus? I was actually just there the other day one it's really cool. And I'm not sure if they do or do not do this on purpose. But like, it's like literally a city. Like if you go into there's like a laundromat there's like a Seuss there's a fucking Phil's coffee right? It to me I was walking around and I was like, it's this seems like it's designed to keep you here. Like, oh yeah, it's like a prison of luxury.

Ryan Burgess
I actually think some of it could be a good thing I look at it is maybe it's that play hard work hard thing is like, it makes my life more convenient that like, I can work a normal eight hour day, but also be able to like get some other shit done like my laundry or what else did you say there was Brian like Facebook has like Phil's off the bike shop bike shop, like if I can kind of get some of those chores done, and just kind of focus on work and not have to worry about going after work to go do all these things. That's kind of nice, but I don't know that that's necessarily the goal.

Brian Holt
Yeah, it's a it's a balance. Like, like I said, I'm not accusing Facebook of any sort of impropriety in this particular case. But it's it is curious for sure.

Ryan Burgess
I also find some of the companies out here will provide dinner, and they don't serve it till like eight o'clock. That's a red flag for me. Yeah, to me, too. I'm okay with like a company providing dinner. But when you're like, No, no, no, we serve it at eight o'clock, which is pretty late, in my mind for dinner to be served. It's like, well, no, we encourage people to stay that long. You have to wait till eight o'clock in order to get dinner. So you're working till eight o'clock. That's a problem. Yeah, that to me, I like that. Stacy said that's a red flag.

Stacy London
Like maybe if it was prefaced with like, hey, sometimes, you know, we've got a big release. And we've done a lot of work for it. We just need everybody around to make sure everything goes smoothly. You're like, cool. Otherwise, like,

Ryan Burgess
if I've been at actually I'll say like, at Evernote when I was there, there was a point where we are shipping something I can't remember what it was, we're doing something big. And the company decided they didn't normally do dinner, but they were like, hey, well, we'll start to provide dinner. Even if you get it and then go home. That's cool. Just like one less thing to think about, which I did appreciate. I just picked it up and went home. Yeah, I've done enough all day. I've been here all day long. Cool. Now I don't have to think about that

Brian Holt
I like Netflix's policy with it is that if you're working late enough to need dinner, just order it and expensive. So like, sometimes it is necessary. And sometimes like they will help you out in that particular situation. But obviously, it's not encouraged and they don't expect it to be normal enough. That it's a consistent thing.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, I think that's like the biggest thing, like it's one thing to like, provide dinner, but then it's one thing to like, encourage a specific time to have dinner because they expect you to.

Brian Holt
It's fun makes me tired.

Ryan Burgess
I'd be interested to know, how do you prevent burnout from happening? Are there ways that may have examples of ways to help it or ways that you've experienced preventing burnout

Stacy London
for me that you had mentioned earlier in the episode about like, being self driven, and like pushing yourself a little too hard sometimes and always feeling like, oh, I should probably do this tutorial, or I need to do some more self learning I need to get get my head around something. And it can never end right. Like there's always something new to learn. And there's always another topic and always another framework. It's so like, I can overwhelm myself constantly by like trying to know all the things. And so it's really important for me, like yesterday was a beautiful sunny day. And we went to the ocean. And we went into nature and not away from all of tech. And like that kind of stuff is incredibly important to like not get into that spiral of anxiety and spiral of like, self doubt and all those kinds of

Ryan Burgess
things. It's like you're saying it's okay to not do what you maybe had planned on doing. You're like, oh, yeah, we'd love to look into that latest tutorial. But you're like, Wow, it's beautiful. I'm going outside. Yeah,

Ryan Anklam
I think the more experience I've gotten, the better I am at leaving work at work. Now when I walk in the door, and I closed my door, I am focused on my family and my kids and having dinner with them and talking about what happened in their day. And I'm not, don't have this loop in the back of my head just thinking about work anymore. And I think that keeps me fresh. And every day when I wake up in the morning, I'm looking forward to going into work and hitting some code and writing some code instead of just being like, just keeps continuing right, it's a

Ryan Burgess
good way to look at it too is like just turn it off when you go home. It's not always that easy. But I think that's a good way to start.

Brian Holt
Otherwise I get tired. Cheers, cheers.

Augustus Yuan
Something I've always struggled with. But it definitely helps is asking for help. Like, especially like in times when there's just like so much that's on your plate. Like you can just ask your teammates. And also like bringing it up with your manager I've always found was really helpful, and then kind of liked it. And like I think the bigger picture is like how did you get in this situation that like ended up bringing you out and then like working with your manager in like a way that would kind of help that. Like they're like for actually very recently for us. There was a case where we had this big release and there's a huge thing that we just didn't really foresee and then just ended up being a couple of us like cranking down and working on it before the release night. It was just like really talking to him and being like, hey, like we totally forgot about this. Like, we need to like be better about like kind of specking out like what are the big things what are the things that we need that we think are good Really sight and stuff like that.

Ryan Burgess
I think that's a good point too, sometimes just speaking up, I think that's really important is sometimes your manager may not really understand how much work is on your plate. And it might need to be reprioritize. Like, what is the top priority? What happens if I drop this and like focus on one or the other? That can be really helpful. But also sometimes, like even in that case, maybe something didn't need to get released right away?

Augustus Yuan
That's true. No. So

Ryan Burgess
you're like, Oh, my God, we're like rushing to get this out the door. And at some times, that's not the best thing to do. Because it might deliver something that's half baked, or it's broken, because you rushed it, when they might just say, Oh, well, let's just spend an extra week on it. And I think So raising it is probably a really good idea. Yeah. And I think asking

Ryan Anklam
for help is probably some of the best advice you could that could possibly be dished out here. You know, in running, what I do is, there's a mantra saying, you know, today's run isn't the most important. It's tomorrow's run, that's more important. And I think that kind of goes along the same lines is, it's not the problem you're trying to solve. Right? Now it's having energy to solve the next problem. So if you sit there and just iterate on this problem so hard that you're just burnt out by the end of that problem, and you're not ready to solve the next thing, it's in the long run, it's going to hurt stuff. And I think as engineers, we really like to solve problems and fight to them, instead of asking someone that will help you solve it much quicker,

Stacy London
or go to sleep, right? Like the whole idea of taking a break from that problem. There's all these studies that show that your brain you know, solving problems while you're sleeping. So instead of pushing yourself so hard that you're way over tired, and you still can't solve it. Cheers, shoes,

Ryan Burgess
go to sleep, wait. So that's why sometimes I wake up and I've debugged something, and I'm like, Oh, shit. That was my dream. codeine or something. Yeah, that's,

Brian Holt
that's sciences. That's badass. I did not know that. But I've totally had that happen. But happens when you are burned out? Like how do you? How do you come back from that how that

Ryan Burgess
can be tough vacation is important. I think when you starting to feel like that taking time off, and really shutting off from work can be very, very powerful. And taking a vacation means not answering and responding to emails not working a little bit. It's like just shut off for a bit. And I think that's really important, or like

Stacy London
maybe taking time to like, why did you originally go into this industry? Like, why did you? Why did you find it fun to like, solve problems and do these things? Well, maybe instead of trying to stress yourself out by like learning the next framework or library that maybe isn't even applicable to anything that you're doing, because but you feel like you're falling behind, like scrap that and just do something fun. Like, oh, I want to learn how to animate something on the screen that proves it has no value other than it just being fun? Well, I

Ryan Burgess
think that's actually probably part of it, too. Like we kind of talked about, like, I was asking, like, why in our industry, is it so bad? I think part of it is because we all love to code. And I do that outside of work. And it is like even what Stacey you're saying there is like, well go animate something or try something new. But that's not a bad thing. I'm not disagreeing. It's like a good thing that you still enjoy doing it. But maybe it's just changing a gear and doing something that's maybe outside of your actual day to day work. But I think that can be the hard thing is there's no real barrier. You're not like, oh, I punch in my clock. And then I punch out. And I'm not going to touch code for the rest of the night. And I go back to work the next day. It's like, No, you're going home and you're like, wow, I'd love to create something or I want to learn some new technology.

Ryan Anklam
Or sometimes just step back and do something that you're actually you know, you're good at or you know, you can do it just get a little small victory in there and let that help improve your, your mental state and kind of let those small victories barrel into something that will help you be creative and solve the problem that's maybe creating some stress for you.

Ryan Burgess
Do you do that on projects if you had a long running project, because sometimes that can be stressful as you have like three month project? Do you find like sometimes just doing like a small bug or something and shipping it? It feels like yeah,

Ryan Anklam
that's what I do when I'm struggling with a big project. I'll take one morning I block it off the calendar and just fix a couple of bugs that I know I've had outstanding day nor easy fixes are simple wins. And then yeah, that helps me get back on track right writing some good code and right pushing something to prod makes you feel good. And yeah,

Brian Holt
what I do is I block off time and I go create bugs for Ryan

Ryan Burgess
you helped him with his productivity I did. So much better now.

Brian Holt
Go just make up JIRA as an aside.

Augustus Yuan
These regressions were from my project, but

Ryan Burgess
have you ever found any apps or software things that make your life easier, more manageable, that kind of helps prevent burnout

Brian Holt
I like not necessarily the Pomodoro Technique in and of itself, but I like the idea of doing a block of work and like not paying attention to anything else and then having a defined amount of time to just like okay, I have 30 minutes to just stick around on Twitter right or something like that. Or, you know, I have a 45 minute block to just go walk around the building or something like that. And so having like time where I have promised myself to not work, and I find that's been really helpful just in general, for my productivity,

Ryan Burgess
do you block off time specifically or just throughout the day just kind of like, oh, now's a good time? Or do you actually block off time, this is going to be my like, go for a walk time,

Brian Holt
I have an app called focus that I use on and off that it's, it is pretty much the Pomodoro Technique sort of thing. I think it's Focus app calm, if I remember correctly, and you can define like, I'm going to work for 40 minutes. And then I'm going to take a 15 minute and it just has timers, and it works on your iPhone. That's been helpful for me, but I think you can use it with any number of different apps that do it.

Ryan Anklam
You said something interesting there. And you said like, you know, you like to go on Twitter and kind of zoned out for a half hour. But for some sometimes I feel like social media can actually contribute to my burnout, because you go on Twitter, and you see all this shit people are building and you're like, oh, man, I'm not doing anything like these guys. I suck.

Brian Holt
Oh, I don't I don't care about them. That's, that's my secret.

Stacy London
Yeah, that idea of like, comparing yourself to like the, like, Who do you who I follow on Twitter, I'm sure that basically I follow like, the top 1% of people in this field that are vocal. Yeah. And so make that percentage, even smaller, or whatever. And so that's who I'm comparing myself to.

Brian Holt
I only follow Jem Yong. And it makes me feel better.

Ryan Burgess
Which he is presenting at South by Southwest. So no big deal. Like he's not accomplishing anything. throwing his life

Brian Holt
away.

Stacy London
But yeah, like scrolling through Twitter and seeing all these people doing all these amazing things. You're like,

Ryan Burgess
I have to speak up more conferences, I have pushed more open source code to make tutorials. There's so many things. Yeah,

Stacy London
all these people that are like superhuman, like, how do you possibly do all these things? And yeah, so maybe shutting off Twitter once in a while is probably good for your mental health.

Ryan Burgess
It'd be interesting asking them to is those people that you're calling is like examples, how do you do it, and I bet you they do have downtime, but you don't necessarily see it. Because on your downtime, you're reading all the work that they're doing. So I think it's a balance of that.

Brian Holt
They're just assholes. I think that's they're just making it up.

Stacy London
In terms of tools, for me, and this is not sponsored by Atlassian, sponsored by Atlassian. to I do, I've used Trello, for a very long time has really nothing to do with Atlassian, other than they bought them. But

Ryan Burgess
Trello is awesome. It's like really easy to digest, it's, I feel success moving something off of it. So I get that. So like

Stacy London
for me, I get really stressed out thinking about all the things I have to do, and I like queue them up in my brain. So Trello, to me has been very helpful to like, get that out. And then I feel less stressed because it's somewhere else and it stacked up somewhere else. But I'm not having to like, mentally obsess about it. So that's cool.

Brian Holt
That's it. It's

Ryan Burgess
the to do list or check. I think it's super powerful. You're not going through in your head, I have to do this, this, this and this. It's like, okay, cool. I'm gonna put that on a list.

Stacy London
And then I have a column of today. And that under that column of today is my card that says I'm going to do like one or two things on that's it.

Ryan Burgess
Do you feel guilty? If you don't finish one of those today? Yes.

Brian Holt
The straightforward answer. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
I also saw this one app. I've tried it once. Meditation to me is not something I've ever really tried. But I feel like just turning your head off. And like Brian said, like checking out Twitter and things like that is something like calming to him or a break. But sometimes it's just like no technology. Well, I'm saying that there's actually an app for it. There's I saw an app called Headspace where it helps you meditate. And you know just like tells you how to breathe and I take a break. I think it only takes like 10 or 15 minutes and I think that could be useful. I haven't really used it enough to say that is useful. Fitbit does

Brian Holt
it too. They have with their latest update that they have like lead meditation. I think the Apple Watch does it too. Right? Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
the Apple Watch tells you to breathe. I always say ignore.

Brian Holt
I was like I will do what I want Siri Goddamnit

Ryan Burgess
get up and you're like come on. I'm like sitting in a meeting. I can't just get up and walk. I'll look silly.

Brian Holt
Oh, sorry to see who told me to stand up.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I'm actually gonna try that in a meeting and just start walking it would work sir. He told me to stand up I'm listening to the technology it was

Stacy London
said a yoga instructor told me because I like we would do like inversions because that really does help clear your head literally. Yeah, and he's like, you know if if they're if you're in a meeting or you're very in the middle of your day, just you know, do that stand like to headstand.

Ryan Burgess
Please do that. I actually want to see that and then like get some one of your colleagues to take a photo. I would love to see that

Brian Holt
Stacy is now doing a headstand. Yes.

Stacy London
I've been doing it this whole episode. That's impressive.

Ryan Anklam
If we were still at a previous company, then your tie would get in your face. But you think that brings up a really Good point is have other hobbies outside of coding and computers.

Brian Holt
Yeah, get away from tech, like brew beer,

Ryan Burgess
which we're drinking Brian's brewed beer. It's really delicious. It's not too bad.

Brian Holt
This is the first batch, you're drinking the first batch. I'm drinking the second batch that I've done here. I've done it before I just hadn't done in a long time tired.

Augustus Yuan
Just want to use one.

Brian Holt
More I'm tired of this beer.

Ryan Burgess
We've talked about how we may combat burnout and help ourselves. How do you help an colleague who looks to be distressed? Or looks like they're burning out? How do you help them?

Brian Holt
I employed the Ryan anklam method, which is I just constantly told me looks like shit

Ryan Burgess
you're looking very tired today?

Augustus Yuan
Well, I think even just like inviting them out to lunch actually, actually, like one thing that I think is a, I see a problem with like, some people take their work to their, or take their lunch to their desk, I do it. And they work at it. And I and then like, there is a time where I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna eat downstairs like with other people. And that's like, it like made me so much happier. And if you see your co worker who's like, definitely doing a lot of work, like just say, hey, like, let's go grab lunch, just go grab

Brian Holt
their lunch. No, you don't get this

Ryan Anklam
on my desk. It's usually just to watch Netflix anyway, actually, I've

Ryan Burgess
seen you do that like real like watch an episode of something that's a good idea. This shows

Ryan Anklam
up my wife won't watch and lunchtime is a great time to watch those shows.

Brian Holt
You should watch more Netflix that's that's that's what the three white guys are saying.

Stacy London
On that topic of like checking in with your your teammates to be like, maybe if you see someone looking maybe a little agitated or stressed or whatever it is, like just ask them like, hey, is there anything I can help you with? Because sometimes people are afraid to ask for help. Or if especially if they're newer, maybe or more junior, they might be like self stressing, because they can't figure something out. But they don't ask for help. Because it looks bad. Blah, blah, blah, like, just be proactive and asking them if they need help.

Ryan Burgess
Great. So when I'm in too many meetings, I'm gonna start asking Brian Holt to attend all my meetings.

Brian Holt
Well, that's gonna go bad for both of us.

Ryan Anklam
Yeah, I do like to reach out people. And if I see them struggling, I'll just ask them to explain the problem to me. And a lot of times just explaining the problem has actually helped them come up with the solution just by thinking through it again.

Augustus Yuan
You were there. Rubber duck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
actually, you're really good at that. Definitely walking through and like you're pretty calm, and you take the time to really understand what the problem but

Ryan Anklam
after I tell them, You look like shit. Yeah.

Brian Holt
Fine. Well Shane them into a solution.

Ryan Anklam
I'm really tired of all this Ryan shaming here.

Stacy London
So I have an interesting maybe last thing to think about. So Sarah Mae posted something about burnout that I thought was kind of fascinating on Twitter. And she posted that when we pathologize the non involvement side of the cycle as burnout, we imply the involvement side is the positive natural state, meaning like, what you were doing should be natural and normal, aka overextension constant obsession about things, saying yes to everything. Like that's normal. No, now you're burned out.

Ryan Burgess
Oh, interesting is like it's like turning it on its head and flipping that around. Yeah. Interesting.

Stacy London
I don't know if there's anything to say about that. But I thought it was interesting. No, it's

Ryan Burgess
an interesting point that I wouldn't have thought of it like that. Yeah, like

Stacy London
maybe that's not normal. Maybe, you know, shouldn't

Ryan Burgess
we should just always be crazy busy or like,

Stacy London
that is not the norm. And we should stop being saying yes to everything and constantly obsessing about things and

Ryan Burgess
yeah, just do your one task. And don't worry about anyone else's tasks. Just do that one thing then go home and go to shut off and go to sleep. I feel like technology is hurt as well as like I love technology. I love you know that we have smartphones we have everything we need right in our pocket or not. We have watches we have laptops, we have all these great tools that help us do our job. But it also means we're like connected all the time, is I can get an email right now and be like, oh shit, I should probably respond to that. When sometimes it is useful to not check that I've had friends that will turn off emails or their work email all weekend. Or if they're on vacation, they just shut it off. And I think that's a great idea. Yeah, totally

Ryan Anklam
turn off notifications is huge for me when I leave work for the weekend, turn off slack notifications turn off email notifications, won't even

Ryan Burgess
like the MacBook has the Do Not Disturb I guess the iPhone does too but it will turn off all your text messages as well which of you may still want. But yeah, that's a good idea of just turning those off. I mean, it's pretty easy to turn off your work account. It's pretty easy to do. As a

Brian Holt
side rant if you use at Channel in Slack, willy nilly, I will fucking find you.

Augustus Yuan
Actually, you should you should explain what the difference between our channel versus out here because a lot of people don't know

Brian Holt
well they will no no because when you do add channels, Slack says like Are you super sure you want notify 2200 people.

Ryan Burgess
How many people are in the channel? It will tell you awesome. use that sparingly.

Brian Holt
Yeah, even at here, which will only notify people that are currently like a tat, like attached to a session with Slack. It's like if you if you really want everyone that's online to see it, and then go ahead, right? But if you don't want literally every person to see it, then then you need to not do that, because fuck that

Ryan Burgess
they add here doesn't bother me too much. Because like, that means I'm probably on the computer. But it bothers

Brian Holt
me even here causes me a lot.

Stacy London
It bothers me like, for timezones like we have, you know, multiple time zones, there's people in Sydney, and they might do like a hey, out here up, update the agenda for this meeting. I'm like,

Ryan Burgess
it's you are working on Monster. Yeah, and just to be almost be more aware of when you're using it, because even that, does that really need to be said, maybe maybe for the five people in the meeting, so then just type out their names and like, that's okay. Yeah.

Stacy London
Be cognizant of people like that. Are there work time? There? Actually,

Ryan Burgess
yeah, because more and more, we're have companies that are worldwide, their annual we have the internet, and we're like constantly able to work in all different time zones. But that doesn't mean the other person is necessarily working at the same time. Yeah. How can we have companies or employers or even managers, what are things that they can do to try and help prevent burnout for their employees.

Augustus Yuan
So one thing like that Evernote does is every year, there's like kind of a use it or lose it kind of thing where you get $1,000, for vacation, and you have to use it. And it its sole purpose is to like encourage people to take vacation, because they've seen people not take vacation. So I think that's like one thing that like employers can do like having like some sort of benefit, or like siphon to like, encourage people to take vacation, like it's an important thing to do.

Ryan Burgess
Well, I think that's really funny too, because Evernote has unlimited vacation. They're literally saying there's $1,000, to go fly somewhere or spend it on hotel or whatever you want to do.

Stacy London
I think like as a team leader, or manager, like a split moment in time, when I was those things, I would just make sure to like, stand up for the team. So if I ever saw someone like demanding that someone on the team work on a weekend, I would step in and be like, nope, like park that, for planning was that doesn't mean like, you can demand that my team, you know, comes in. So like standing up for them paying attention to that. And then also like, if you see someone who's like one of those, like, they're overly self motivated, they're trying really hard. They're like working on the weekend, constantly. You can see them like checking in code on the weekend. Just be like, hey, is there something I can help you with? You don't need to do that, like being proactive.

Ryan Burgess
It's almost actually just like making them feel aware that they don't have to do that. I think that like right there you saying that is like super important. It's like someone saying, Hey, I love that you're doing that. That's great. But you don't have to be doing

Brian Holt
Yes, stop it. Yeah.

Ryan Burgess
Are even watching for things like that. Whether someone is working hard and saying go home, like take an extra couple days, I think even Brian was talking about the Reddit point where you work super, super hard. And then they're like, take a month off. I think that's cool. At least recognizing like K you're doing way too much. And maybe it was warranted that they needed that done. But then saying take time off, go recharge.

Brian Holt
Well, and like I think this is a dance around a point, which is if you have like hard business deadlines, you have hard businesses deadlines, right? Like, if you miss Black Friday, you Miss Black Friday, there's only two there's just one, right. But if it's not like a hard business deadline, and people are more important than deadlines, I think, right? And so it's better to not burn your employees out and push something a week, right? So be willing to do that in the name of protecting your employees. Yeah, cuz

Ryan Burgess
I think there's always going to be those times where there's a Black Friday, where it really is like a hard deadline. Or at Netflix, sometimes there's partners, partners, or even content, there's a piece of content that's launching on a date that we have said, and I'm pretty sure people will be pissed if they didn't get that content on that day. But there's a lot of things that we do that we wish or hope that we have them for next Friday. But if it didn't go out that Friday, like a new feature, if it went out the next Friday, it's not the end of the world. And so I think it's like picking and choosing when something is really needed or not.

Stacy London
And then being like software enough with the team that if it there was busy was business curriculum had to go out in the state that you like, talk about it afterwards. Like, is there something we could have done to make this less horrible, like a post mortem? Like, make sure things are great and ask everybody what they think about how they could do things better

Ryan Burgess
to do those on every project? Even if one that was like perfect, like even if everything was perfect. There's always something because Nothing's ever perfect. There's always something that could be better and how do you learn from it?

Brian Holt
I also employ the Ryan anklam method on that too, called the blaming post mortem, where you just, there's no words you just point at people.

Ryan Burgess
All your fault, not mine, obviously,

Ryan Anklam
you're always points at writing. Myself,

Ryan Burgess
one even going back to like what managers can do is helping prioritize. Like I said earlier, when you're overwhelmed with things, go talk to them and say, I have like these five projects, what are the priority and like have them reorder them of like priority, because they may have more context of understanding what the deadlines are, or what could be pushed. And it's not as big of a deal to the business, but there might be one in your out of those five items, that is super important that if everything else fell, that's okay, but that one doesn't. So then at least you just got freed up, you don't have four other things to worry about until you're done that one thing

Stacy London
I think that's super important for new, like newer, junior devs. I think that's a scary thing to say to someone when you're first starting out. But like, it's the most important thing for you to learn is to be like, Hey, someone who's asked me to do 12 Things that are all super important and highest priority? Which one do you actually want done first? Because that's all I can do. I can do one thing at a time and have that conversation?

Ryan Burgess
Well, the thing is, is everyone that you work with their thing is the most important thing. It is like I'm sorry, but it always is, doesn't matter what it is. They're like, Ah, it's the most important thing it has to go out. But like you really have to better understand that and hopefully your manager or whoever you report to can really decipher that and say, No, I'll deal with that person. Like, that's not that important. Yeah,

Brian Holt
I had a manager, again, a Reddit that just came to me. He's like, Dude, you need to vacation. I was like, it wasn't like, official in any capacity is like I just like, I just clean out your schedule. And I just want you to not come to the office for two weeks. That's pretty cool, too. Yeah, that's awesome. That is,

Ryan Burgess
and so like, did you go on vacation or just like, literally just went hung out at

Brian Holt
home? No, I went somewhere. But I could have equally just hung out and played PlayStation or something like,

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, I think sometimes the staycation is okay. Yeah, totally. As we end the episode, what is some advice that you would give others affected by burnout? I know we've talked briefly about some advice and things like that. But what are some just quick advice that we can give our listeners

Brian Holt
with your estimates? Because like, a lot of this comes down to Aspen's, like we gave like a crappy estimate once because we all engineers are, we have proven scientifically, we are literally incapable of giving proper estimates. So take what you think the longest you could take and then triple it and then add like 10, right. And at that point, you're only about halfway there, which is close enough.

Ryan Anklam
Also stick to that. Do not be pressured into lowering your estimate.

Augustus Yuan
Yes. Yes, absolutely. You

Ryan Burgess
really know those. And I think it's okay to pad because there's always something that comes up. And I think it's also really good as an engineer that gives you a timeline, even for like a product manager, if you keep telling them Oh, yeah, you'll have it tomorrow. And then you don't deliver, oh, you know, not Well, tomorrow, I'll have it. Well, actually, the next day, I'll have it. That actually is way worse than just saying it will take me a week. That's okay. Like that's actually a way better solution, then they expect that it's going to be next day when you tell them that. But if it's a week, they expect it in a week. And that's okay. It's better having to come to you once rather than multiple times.

Brian Holt
Yeah, that's also just more stressful. I do well, and constantly remind people that are not in engineering and people that are in engineering, that's like, Hey, I, I foresee this taking me three weeks. That's a really rough estimate, it could probably take me the rest of the year fair. And well, I

Ryan Burgess
think at that point, too, is even to Ryan's point of sticking to it. I think that's really important. It's also like, if it's taking way longer than someone expected, then you can have that conversation of why what's the big holdup that in this new feature, or whatever you're building? What's the big holdup and it might just be something really, really small or in their mind and say like a product manager, I keep picking on them. But usually they're the ones driving product features. But they might realize oh shit, is there another way we could go? And you're like, Yeah, we could do this and it's only a day and they're like, well, let's just do that. And so I think sometimes having that conversation is really really important.

Augustus Yuan
One quick thing I want to add to that is especially when it comes to estimates make sure you're estimating doing the thing right people who always pressure you to do it fast and then maybe you'll do something that will create technical debt and then when you have to address that technical debt later that creates burnout you never have time for it you're gonna have to fix it or like you're just gonna have to hack around it and that just creates more burnout

Brian Holt
well I think a lot of times you slipped deadlines this extra pressure comes from someone else some external pressures like oh well we want to change this now like we saw originally told you this and now we want to double the scope and half the timeline is that obviously always no Ryan no Ryan income I will not do that. I don't know why he became the product manager and this

Ryan Anklam
starting to feel a little bit of that I do something Yeah,

Brian Holt
you did. You put some fingerprints on my screen.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, if you ever want to piss

Stacy London
me off. For as horrible as a bad offense, don't touch my screen.

Ryan Burgess
Alright,

Brian Holt
I'll do it right after you as I look, we're finger painting

Stacy London
stressing me out.

Augustus Yuan
In terms of advice for burnout actually just want a second with Ryan anklam said earlier we're like, you know, just like me, she's definitely something that's like, when when you get home, and like you find yourself working, like I understand their deadlines. And sometimes you need to get stuff done. But sometimes you just really just got to turn it off, and just work at it. Like, there have been so many nights where I was working on something because I needed to get it done. But I was just creating way more bugs. I was actually like, solving and then like a week, I would be like, You know what, I'm just gonna forget this. I'm just gonna do it. Tomorrow morning. I wake up tomorrow morning, I tell my coworker, and I was working on this bug. Yeah, last night. He's like, Oh, did you check this? Like? I didn't say yeah, don't kill yourself over it. It's just not worth it.

Ryan Burgess
We're not performing surgery, life changing surgery. It's, you know, it's software.

Brian Holt
I don't know, people get pretty upset about their Netflix.

Ryan Burgess
Exactly took us this point is like, you shouldn't rush something to do it right the first time. Don't be like, Well, I have to get meet this deadline and like, introduce all these bugs. Because guess what, people are going to be more pissed off at that.

Brian Holt
So that point, I actually get very happy when a JIRA goes down. Because the

Ryan Burgess
stash and when stash goes down like well, I can't I can't make anything. I can't write any code. If you want to help with burnout just start like shutting down systems at a last year just

Ryan Anklam
be the Chaos Monkey.

Augustus Yuan
Or when s3 went down our deployment, a deployment didn't work. So I was like, well, we can't ship anything yet.

Brian Holt
So we're gonna

Ryan Burgess
get drunk. All right, as we wrap up today's episode we like to share picks each episode of things that we like or have been enjoying. Brian, what do you have for picks this week?

Brian Holt
I have just one I picked up the ps4 game Horizon Zero Dawn, and I'm goddamn addicted. It has robot dinosaurs.

Ryan Burgess
You sold me just their robot dinosaurs.

Brian Holt
Yeah, no, it's it's, it's phenomenal. I'm addicted. And I have a problem. That's all.

Ryan Burgess
So does that cause burnout? No,

Brian Holt
it is actually the solution to burnout for me.

Ryan Burgess
Stacy, what do you have?

Stacy London
So my first pick is a song by Collins Stetson called spindrift. He's a saxophonist that and if you're good friends with me, you will know that I like have this like hatred of saxophones. I think they're terrible. I don't like most jazz music that a saxophone and like,

Brian Holt
worst instrument. So it's Yakety Sax, your favorite song?

Stacy London
No, you know what that is? sounds horrible. But this guy blows me away. He does things like I'm not a music major. So this is like from Wikipedia kind of thing. But advanced circular breathing, read vocalizations, percussive valve work, he does some really crazy things with with this instrument. And I really like it. So I'll post a link to that you can check it out. And my second pick is an article by Sarah, suede on I hope I pronounced your name, right. And it's on the topic of burnout. And she wrote an article called it's not how many hours of sleep you get. And one of the things that I thought was nice that she called out was to stop comparing yourself and your productivity to others, because that's kind of what can lead you down that path to burnout.

Ryan Burgess
So don't look on Twitter at what other people are doing. You might want to stop that a little bit.

Brian Holt
Just go look at we rate dogs.

Ryan Burgess
Dogs make me happy. That'd be great. It's a good dog brands are good friends. I got the study of

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, I have to. One is Periscope iq.com Not Periscope Periscope IQ, which is a data visualization firm that helps that promotes like information transparency and public awareness. They have like tons of really cool data visualizations on just a variety of things. Like I really look up to them and New York Times for a lot of the data visualization, stuff that they do on the web. So definitely check them out. And the other is this really popular GitHub repo called system design primer has like 7000 stars and it's basically like a study guide for system design interviews. Definitely something really, really important. If you're like looking to be like a senior software engineer, that's like definitely something that is always in like the interview. And it has like a really good stuff on like, system design, like what goes into it and what are some expect questions that you could expect from that kind of interview.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Ryan, what do you

Ryan Anklam
so my first one is a blog post called Hacking node serialize. And it's a really detailed post where he goes through putting a security flaw in a node module and actually using that to create a remote shell where you can just execute commands. So it was really fast It really good readable, it's really well written. So definitely check that out. And my second one is a app called Rocket. And it's one of the first apps that I've really found useful for the new Touch bar. And all it really does is kind of mimics your doc, but it's in the touch bar. And it's triggered by a keyboard shortcut. And it's helped me not have to use my mouse just a little bit less. So anything helps me use my mouse less is the big bonus for me.

Brian Holt
Hashtag Vim.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm stoked that there's actually something useful for that. touchbar Yes, is one of the first ones awesome. So the only thing I've ever used it for is display Nyan Cat.

Brian Holt
And now electron supports it. So we'll see more stuff with it.

Ryan Burgess
I have three picks one, I want to call out graffiti artists in Canada, by the name of Rove, he is actually sending me a little h-o train that he's painted and just sending it to me. I'm like really super stoked on it. Another tool that honestly I don't know how people live without or at least once I finally covered it. It's been super powerful is Charles Proxy. Oh, man, it's so helpful. Debugging on like a mobile device is amazing. You literally have your network connections, everything running and you can actually see what's happening on the mobile device.

Brian Holt
I will say that Charlie often bites me.

Ryan Burgess
And my third and final pick is React Native. It is awesome. So people should write React Native as we wrap up the episode. Where can people get in touch with you, Brian? You

Brian Holt
can start my repos on GitHub at BT Holt.

Ryan Burgess
Nice, Stacey.

Stacy London
You can find me on Twitter at Stacey

Augustus Yuan
Londoner. My Twitter is at OG Berto Aug bu R to

Ryan Anklam
and I'm bittersweet Ryan pretty much everywhere GitHub, Twitter.

Brian Holt
That's it that's

Ryan Anklam
like post anywhere else. But yeah,

Ryan Burgess
and you can find me on Twitter at @burgessdryan, and I'll change it up and also add in Instagram. My handle is Ryan Burgess. If you like photos of dogs, graffiti and tattoos. You can follow me on Instagram. Thank you all for listening today's episode, make sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at front end. Ah, any last words? I feel great.