By Someone Who’s Been Very Close
Let me begin with a public service announcement: JavaScript will not love you back. You can give it your weekends, your sanity, your one good vertebra, and it will still throw a null is not a function at you at 2:43 a.m. on a Sunday, just as your last ounce of will to live is curling up in the corner sobbing.
Burnout, you see, is not a slow descent. It’s a bungee jump into the abyss where the cord has been lovingly crafted out of legacy PHP.
And yet, the tech world talks about “self-care” like it’s some sort of magic variable you can just setTrue() once and all your problems disappear. So here, developers, is a more realistic survival guide—written by someone who once tried to merge two branches and ended up merging with a rum bottle instead.
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1. Recognise the Warning Signs (or at least the flames around your desk)
If you find yourself arguing with ChatGPT, hallucinating Tailwind utility classes on your bedsheets, or replying “LGTM” to your partner when they ask if the dinner looks okay—congratulations, you’re halfway to becoming a cautionary tale at your next company offsite.
Don’t wait for your manager to notice. Managers only detect burnout when you physically collapse during a stand-up. And even then, they’ll wonder if they can assign the rest of your tickets to your corpse.
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2. Say No. Or at least say “Maybe later” with dead eyes
There comes a point when you have to stop volunteering to “just quickly fix the deployment script” or “jump on a tiny ticket that turned out to be refactoring a decade of spaghetti code written by someone with a clear vendetta against logic.”
You are not a hero. Heroes die. Usually in Greek tragedies and Jira.
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3. Stop trying to be the Stack Overflow Messiah
You do not need to answer every question in Slack within 0.3 seconds. You do not need to be the go-to person for Kubernetes, Vim macros, and coffee machine diagnostics. If someone asks, “Can you just take a quick look at this?”—simply reply, “I’d love to, but I’ve recently taken a vow of silence and mild indifference.”
It works wonders. And you’ll find yourself invited to fewer meetings.
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4. Take Breaks. Real Ones. Not the “check X and cry” kind
A break does not mean switching from React to Vue for fun. That’s like switching from heroin to methadone and calling it a detox.
Leave the house. Touch some grass. Talk to a pigeon. They’re better conversationalists than most clients, and they don’t expect you to implement a full redesign by Monday.
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5. Have a Hobby That Doesn’t Involve Semicolons
Knitting. Gardening. Taxidermy. Whatever it is, make sure it doesn’t require unit tests or merge conflicts. Your brain needs to remember what it’s like to finish something and not have a pull request destroy it minutes later.
Bonus points if the hobby involves mild danger. Rock climbing, axe throwing, or just arguing with a goose. It puts debugging into perspective.
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6. Remember: The Codebase Will Still Be Awful Tomorrow
This is key. The tech world thrives on delusion. You will not fix it all. You will not make the system perfect. You will die eventually, and someone will rewrite your lovingly crafted code in raw Perl because “it’s what they’re used to.”
So stop trying to be immortal through clean architecture. Write decent code, take a walk, eat a biscuit.
And if all else fails—set your Slack status to “OOO due to existential crisis” and take a nap.
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Final Words of Wisdom:
Burnout is real. But so are sandwiches. Choose wisely.
And if anyone tells you to “just push through it,” gently remind them that so did Napoleon. It ended with exile, gout, and a lot of yelling.
Now go take a break. The internet will still be broken when you get back.