Recently, I made a big career change by moving from being an Engineering Manager (EM) back to being an Individual Contributor (IC). Although not a decision that I made lightly, this post won't go into too much depth about the various contributing factors. Instead, I intend to write about the positives because the change already seems to be helping. The purpose of this post is partly to mark the improvements that I'm seeing, partly to document how I'm reinforcing the change and partly to help others spot potential warning signs of burnout. Context My Pseudo-Blog My pseudo-blog is a crutch that I've leaned on particularly heavily this year, so it probably makes sense to start by explaining what it is. My pseudo-blog is a small, private site where I blog for an audience of one: me. Although only meant for my eyes, I go through much the same drafting process as for www.bentasker.co.uk. I've found that writing things as if I'm explaining to someone else can be incredibly beneficial: not only does it help to order my thoughts, but it can prompt other reflections or ideas. More importantly, repeated proof-reads help to reduce the risk of making one-sided arguments and self-reinforcing a "wrong" conclusion. I've always been pretty good at introspection and the pseudo-blogging process helps amplify that. I Was Further In Than I Knew When trying to find a path forward, I wrote out a long list of bullet points, including the following: I've now hit the edge of burnout in 3 successive quarters With the benefit of hindsight, this is incorrect: I never actually fully backed away from burn-out. I thought that I had, but I was too far in to see the wood for the trees. What felt like relief was really just things regressing to the mean (which, whilst better, was still not good). That will probably become evident when I talk about signs that things have improved, but if you're concerned about burn-out, it's quite possible that you're much closer than you realise. Go Somewhere Else? I don't want to get into work specifics, but this deserves calling out. For many, the most obvious solution would have been to seek greener pastures via a change in employer. It is something that I strongly considered. Ultimately, though, the people on my team are absolutely fucking amazing and I really didn't want to leave them. Making The Change In mid-August, I told my boss that I wanted to go back to being an IC. She was amazing, understanding and quickly got the ball rolling. I had expected that there might be a bit of a lead time while they recruited a replacement. But the stars aligned and another manager within the business was also ready for a change. He moved over and I joined the team that I'd previously led. After spending a week handing things over, I took a couple of weeks leave to rest1 and have since completed my first fortnight as an IC. Tracking Improvements Over The Long Term Every job has a mix of good and bad days. Humans are quite prone to negativity bias, so I wanted to make it harder for the bad days to unfairly dominate my overall sentiment. I've previously written about using a local LLM to capture TODO list metrics. I decided that I could extend my TODO list template to help record more about my working days: what I enjoyed, what I didn't, sources of friction etc. There's nothing particularly special about the format, it's literally just a place to jot down thoughts: ## Reflections * Github's been down _again_, urggg * The foobar meeting today didn't feel like it delivered much value, half of it was spent on ice-breakers * There might be room to improve X, we should check metrics to see I expect this to prove particularly useful for me because I've always struggled with answering questions of the form "name something you really enjoyed/didn't enjoy doing this quarter". Obviously, it's not that I don't enjoy things. It's more that my memory isn't really indexed that way - if I remember doing x, I'll know whether I enjoyed it, but I can't "just" give you a list of things that I enjoyed doing without first doing a full-table scan. This has made generic retrospection quite difficult for me2. Noting something down while I'm enjoying (or hating) it should quite neatly solve that issue and make writing my performance review easier. Improvements Home-Life Although work is important, it pales in comparison to having a meaningful and rewarding home life. So, let's start at home. Since my change in role, I've noticed that I'm back to actually getting things done at home: I installed AC in my office I improved connectivity to our summer house I ran ethernet from my office to the living room, removing the need for the powerline bridge that it was relying on I've largely sorted my office out: not just tidying, but getting pegboard up etc I've made a start on sorting the garden out The kitchen's had a blitz I've replaced the headlight bulb that my car's been warning about for months I'm back to making meals rather than ordering in I've suffered from depression at various points in my life. Some bouts have been deep, others shallow enough that I didn't recognise them at the time. One of the common characteristics of these has been an inability to find the energy or motivation to get various tasks done around the house. You know that they need doing, you want to do them, but just can't seem to bring yourself to actually do so. Over time, the list of things that need doing grows until it starts to feel insurmountable, becoming it's own source of stress in the process. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that I've been stuck in a shallow rut for much of the year. I think that I'm also getting less tetchy and irritable. Work-Life My day-to-day at work has also improved meaningfully. Some of those improvements, of course, have come from me consciously making and self-enforcing change (for example: hard-stop at 17:30), but others are a natural result of backing away from management duties. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, my Reflections section has included the following positive notes: I got to spend Friday afternoon with the team: NO MANAGERS MEETING!!!! I've noticed that I no longer need to keep/carry much context overnight: I can clear out my browser tabs each morning/evening rather than needing to continue on in >50% of them I think music choices have helped quite a lot this week too - upbeat sounding stuff like Blink-182 or proper sing along metal like Spiritbox helps keep things moving Although I've had some bad days/moments this week (and it's been a bad pain week too), overall this week has felt pretty good - most of it's been spent successfully fixing shit In my mind, that last point is where the secret lies: I've moved back to working on things that are actually tractable, allowing the "bad" to be outweighed by the dopamine reward of actually getting shit done. So far, most of the "bad" in my notes ties back to frustration at tooling like claude3. The upside of that is that I probably now have more time/opportunity to improve things in that area. Energy I'm back to feeling like I've got some energy and, generally, being in quite a happy mood. However, it's not perfect and I haven't yet built up any reserves - if I get frustrated (or, worse, annoyed), my energy sweeps out from under me and I'm back to feeling exhausted and unable to move forward. Over time, that can exacerbate issues: It's a cycle that has perpetuated through most of this year. But, those instances are now much more transient and the signs of recovery are there, I just need to continue to build my reserves back up. Stress Reduction Mechanisms Although I knew that the change in role should deliver relief, I didn't want to take that for granted, so while I was on leave I pseudo-blogged a burn-out avoidance plan. This is a more developed version of something that I did while flirting with burn-out back in 2018. The plan suggests behavioural techniques: Continue going shooting, it focuses the mind on something else Taking the dogs for a walk/run: the exercise and fresh air are an important stress break, so protect them Read more Sit and watch films more often Buy a gaming console: be sat outside my office, not having to think Have a long bath or shower with music and a drink at least once a week Note: I did also try some stress-relieving bath salts, but they brought me out in a rash - not quite the stress-relieving process that I was hoping for. There's also a section dedicated to work-specific changes, including observing a fixed end-of-day: Stop being a manager (Done ✅) Be strict about end of day: hard stop at 17:30 Push back on work that would drive me to overload, or that could better be done by someone else Celebrate wins a bit more Book some leave The third section of the document details signals which might indicate that I'm heading back towards burn-out: The active protections (end of day, taking the dogs for a run) defined in this doc are no longer being adhered to Lack of enthusiasm for writing/blogging Lack of enthusiasm for tinkering with tech Regularly disturbed sleep, thinking about work Spending weekends at my desk, getting nothing done (e.g. just doomscrolling etc) Unwarranted tetchiness (requires outside input, obvs) Now, it's not as if I've spent the year oblivious to feeling burnt out. I knew that things weren't right, but lacked the spoons to navigate my way back out. That's a mistake that I definitely don't want to repeat, so the document prescribes the actions to take if any of the warning signals do fire: Re-read the doc Write down current perceived stressors Take action (e.g. go shooting, speak to boss etc) Update a dated log so that patterns can surface It's not perfect, but it should mean that I don't need to burn much energy figuring out what to do (or even whether I need to do something). Conclusion I'm definitely on a better path than I was a couple of months ago. However, I won't make the same mistake that I made earlier this year by assuming that I'm out of the woods: there are both good and bad days yet to come. Although it's not quite that simple in practice, I'm trying to view things in terms of residual stress: whether or not I'm feeling better, there's still a "debt" which needs to be paid down via self-care. The more that I stick to that, the greater my energy reserves (and therefore my ability to handle bad days) should become. If things do take a turn, I've documented signals to help me catch and react sooner. That didn't go particularly well, we had a brief health scare with one of the dogs in the first week. But, I did get a few days of peace. ↩ And is one of many reasons that I hate performance review season. ↩ At this point, I think I could probably write an entire series of posts on how/why LLMs are fundamentally flawed. Ultimately though, their USP is supposed to be that you can use natural language, but in practice they often need language so precise you may as well just use a programming language. I suspect this may be less of an issue if you're neurotypical and talk like an American. Which is unfortunate, really, given that the industry is full of neurodivergents and non-Americans. ↩