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A Burnt Out Programmer

Well, here we go. I guess this is my story. If there were one thing worthwhile that was going to come out of this blogging thing, this would be it. So listen up. Also, disclaimer: chances are, if you’re reading this, you probably know at least a few people from this story. I do not mean to insult or belittle or judge anyone in the story. It is purely as I perceived them, and how I felt AT THE TIME.

About three years ago, I was working for this company ‘A’. I had been working for this company for more than 4 years by then, which was also my first full-time employer.

At first, I really enjoyed it. Colleagues were good, the boss was really good, the work was interesting, and I got recognition for the work I did. Also, the money was good. I really had very little to complain about.

Then slowly but surely, I got sick of maintaining the same software month after month. Who wouldn’t? So I asked the boss-man that I be given something new to work on. He was most accommodating, and I was given a new product to develop and a whole new team (which I quickly populated with my close friends) to build something completely new, from scratch. I was ecstatic. It was tremendous amount of fun, while it lasted.

After a while, though, things started to go sour in the company ‘A’. We had a new CEO, whom I felt really didn’t fit into the company culture. We also relocated, and the new working environment did not allow my ‘team’ to work effectively as we did previously. The upper management (the new CEO and the boss-man) felt that we were not delivering our product on time, we had marketing woes, and so on.

The new product lacked a clear direction, either technical or otherwise. No one in the company exactly knew what it did and whom we intended to sell it. The management changed direction whenever there was a potential customer. It went like this:

A potential customer would require a customised demo, but the suggested sample would cause some performance issues on our pre-alpha version. So we were told to improve the performance across the board, and we made some strange technical decisions to make it go fast. Then the next week, another potential customer would come along and tell us that they’d like to run it on .NET rather than Java, so we spent a week porting all of our code, like maniacs.

At this stage, it was impossible to keep the development team focused. We got frustrated. None of the customised demos were spectacular. We didn’t win any of those contracts, and the upper management got frustrated as well.

Feeling that our team was not performing, they ordered a feature-freeze on our product. The team was effectively disbanded, save about one and a half FTE (full time equivalent) for the maintenance and even more demo-building. I was taken off the product team, and put to something else.

That position is what I recall as the least fun time I had in the industry. I was not able to touch any of the code for our core products, I was on maintenance of a side project, and I spent my days answering calls from our clients. I felt that I was in tech-support.

Frustrations piled up, and so did the personal friction between various colleagues. My ex-team members left  the company almost all at the same time – within a window of a couple of months. I really couldn’t get along with the CEO. Although at the time I attributed all my problems to other people, now it’s clear to me that I was the morose bastard who was being difficult.

Then I got into a discussion with a friend, who also has been in the I.T. industry for a few years. She told me that she intended to leave the industry for once and for all, because it wasn’t right for her. She was going to pursue a whole new career, starting over. Encouraged by her actions, I decided to leave the industry as well. I didn’t set any concrete targets. I thought may be about three months before I started looking for a new job.

I went travelling. After about a month of not working, I stopped thinking about work completely. I stopped touching computers at ALL. I read books, climbed, cooked, ate, drank, played with friends, and so on. My perception of time became.. strangely real. I started counting time with the passage of the moon and the length of the day, instead of working weeks.

This state of mind lasted, more or less, for about eight months. I say again: for the eight months, I did not sit in front of a computer for more than an hour at a time. In a typical month, my computer-time would be around 30 minutes a week.

I stopped thinking in terms of problem solving, modelling, structuring, simulating, all the mental tools that I used for ‘work’ went out the door. I got to the point where, when I was making a cup of tea, I was able to concentrate all my effort in making that one cup of tea, and drinking it.

I became single-minded. If I wished to do something, I did it with a complete focus. Mind you, I was not managing difficult problems. I was trying to get things done such as ‘eat something’ and ‘drive to the next village, where I can eat something’. Occasionally I had to convert longitude-latitude into map grids, but that was a simple task with a calculator.

Then all of a sudden, when I was driving to the next village so I could eat something, in the expanse of the Mongolian desert, I had an epiphany. A part of my brain that was turned off eight months ago, spontaneously rebooted. Wherever I saw, I saw patterns. They arranged themselves into problems, which I’d try and solve. Mole-rat holes on the ground would become 8-Queens. Longitudes and latitudes were prime numbers – or were they?

And I liked it. It was like finding an old friend. Even though I loved the simple, clear thought process devoid of any background threads analysing everything, I realised, in the end, that I did those things for living because I Liked It. I went to a university to study it because I Liked It.

From there, returning to the industry was a brain-dead decision. I may have lost a year or so in my career, but I regained something that so few people in this industry seem to retain, especially when they become worldly and wise after a few years out of the university – the knowledge that I do what I do for no other reason than that I Like It.