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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Occupational burnout is a well-known problem within the computer programming industry. While many programmers have experienced it themselves, or at least witnessed it happen to others, few have experienced it as intensely as reddit user Max-P has.

In a comment at reddit, Max-P wrote:

Let his tale be one of caution; let it be a lesson to learn from!

NC added: /r/technology at reddit briefly went private. I'm copying the original post here as as an extended message in case it goes down again.

Another part of the problem is that people frequently deliver on unrealistic expectations at the expense of their own health, sanity, and social lives. This reinforces the mindset that sets these expectations in the first place, and sends the message that anyone who objected to the deadlines was just whining.

So. Much. That. I'm currently in a state where I litterally just can't write code. At all. I get dizzy, headaches, I've even cried a few times just at the sight of my text editor. And it's all my fault, because I've set myself the requirements way too high. Producing quality code at a very high speed was my pride. I started working on a project I had a lot of motivation in, and it was a rewrite of an old software. So I knew the requirements, what didn't work and what did. It worked very well, we had a whole webapp ready for beta in 3-4 months, and my boss already had started to sell it. Clients were happy. Even if it wasn't the best code at all, it was pretty solid compared to the old spaguetti we had. I was happy, because the other developers said it was impossible to rewrite the whole thing in any reasonable time to be worth the money. I totally won my bet, delivering new features almost weekly. There was only one problem. I had set absolutely insane expectations, at a ridiculous price while at it because I was 18 and was barely out of school, so it was a great opportunity for me. Developement speed slowed down considerably. Projects piled up, but it was fine, I didn't have much pressure anyway, just a pile of work for the next 5 years. Eventually I requested to have a second developer to help me: but of course, at both that price tag and the requirements, they all got fired right away because management felt it was ripped off. Which at the time didn't realize and agreed with: they indeed seemed slow to me, and the code quality was terrible. I ended up being the sysadmin of two servers and several VMs, the network between them, manage all the monitoring/configuration/backups, work on two webapps (both desktop and mobile) + their backend + the matching mobile apps. I also had to QA the whole thing myself because the boss would only test once it was pushed to production to ensure there were no bugs at this point (despite me setting up several staging areas specifically for that, with a fresh copy of the live data). All in all, that's over a dozen programming languages and 3 different databases. I also did tech support once in a while (and add specific workarounds to bypass work proxies for some of our clients, because our app had to work everywhere according to management). And I was the only one that could understand and manage all of that. We didn't have any backup resources in case I wasn't reachable. A little over a month ago, only 3 years into the project, I blew up. One day I woke up, sat in front of my computer and broke up in tears. Called the boss to tell him I couldn't work for a few days. To this day I still can't code. I'm not even sure I will ever be able to code again either. For now I'm looking at applying for Walmart for an undetermined amount of time. Burnout is serious matter.