I’m chuckling at your advice because I tried those things! Went part-time, wrote, lots of local volunteering. (Didnt try picking up trash; that’s a good one!) Unfortunately, didn’t work for me. In fact, the more I cut back my hours and did other things, the less I wanted to be working the work hours I had left.
I still think it’s great advice, and probably something that’ll help many people! I just reached a point where I needed something more drastic, and I have the financial security to take a big swing.
Thanks for your perspective. It’s a very real concern I have — am I trading one kind of burnout for another?
I do think there’s a difference between approaching EMS as a first career, and coming to it later in life (I’m 43) as a second career. I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve done what I’m doing and a higher percentage of them are happy with the decision vs those who started younger.
I’m also not going in with rosy glasses. I’ve been thinking about this for at least seven years, and have had plenty of time to talk to folks at all levels of emergency healthcare, including right here where I’d be working. I think I have a pretty realistic view of what I’m signing up for.
Only time will tell, though. Maybe I’m making a terrible decision; only one way to find out.
I'm curious: if you hired a contractor to, I dunno, paint your walls, would you accept "I don't know" as a time frame or price quote? If not, what's different about software development that makes "I don't know" a reasonable answer in our profession?
Software development isn't (universally) a painting type task. In painting a room, the painter can estimate (by measuring) the amount of paint needed, they know from experience the time to acquire a particular color (if it needs to be mixed or can be bought readymade) in a particular volume, they know how long it takes to paint (they've done it many times before), how long to dry, and how many coats are needed for the type of surface.
Now, ask them to paint a mural instead. The estimates will change, they'll probably give you a broader range instead of being able to estimate almost down to the minute (and being off by no more than an hour or two) like someone just painting walls (with a known environment, surface type, and paint material).
Does the mural need to be designed? Are the desired qualities of the mural well-specified or will there be a series of back and forths? Maybe a set of prototypes (sketches) so that you can refine your requirements. At that point, the estimate for the total task (design and paint a mural, or design and develop a software application) becomes far less clear.
There are certainly programming tasks which are closer to the paint-a-wall task which are much easier to estimate reliably, but they're far from the only thing people in this field work on.
This kind of thing destroys freelance devs who don't have context.
Customer: "Hi we need this small change."
Dev: "No problem! Here's a quote for 4 hours"
Ignoring that 4 hours is probably less than the effort to consult, estimate, generate and process contracts, bill, do taxes... Then the customer comes back and asks for a revision which will at least require a Change-Order or a separate PO.
To some extent the overhead should be covered under labor burden but the reality is that in a sole proprietorship YOU are also the person doing the labor that is within the definition of "labor burden". It adds up extremely fast.
A million dollars would be a windfall if it landed in my checking account. On a development project with hardware and more than one dev it might as well be dust in the wind.
> what's different about software development that makes "I don't know" a reasonable answer in our profession?
The seemingly infinite amount of variations in software tasks and the ambiguity of the requirements? If my job involved only putting up or modifying API endpoints that involved querying a single SQL database, I'd get quite good at that and be able to tell you with very good accuracy how long an endpoint would take to put up.
Just as if I painted many walls before, I could reasonably tell you how long painting a wall would take based on the surface area, height, and amount of non-wall obstructions. Also, contractors tend to be their own salesmen, so just because they speak confidently, doesn't mean they are. It's not like contractors are universally famous for being on-time and underbudget.
If your job involved _only_ putting up or modifying API endpoints that involved querying a single SQL database, you could automate at least a good chunk of that. Maybe all of it.
How long would it take to build a system to automate API endpoints that query a single SQL database? It depends.
Contractor horror stories are actually very common. They may not actually say to you "I don't know", but big delays in contractor jobs happen all the time. I would argue that software engineers are at least trying to be more honest about the unknowns of the work unlike some sleazy contractors.
My answer to this is that software engineering is a lot more like creating a blueprint than creating an artifact based on that blueprint. Or put another way, it's usually more of a design process than a manufacturing process. (I've switched analogies on you, but "painting walls" in your analogy is akin to "manufacturing artifacts" in mine.)
The "manufacturing the artifact" step in software is done automatically by the computer, when given the "blueprint" (code).
I guess to try to go back to your painting walls analogy. In my view, creating software is more like if someone asked you to create a wall-painting machine that will work for any room that fits a certain specification. They could contract you to paint just one room in this way, but that would certainly be harder than just painting the room! But more likely, they have a million rooms they want you to paint. Either way, the hard part is creating the room-painting machine. And it would indeed be quite difficult to give an accurate estimate of how long it will take to do that. But once that exists, you can easily estimate how long it will take to paint any individual room.
And real engineers, indeed, have this same issue with the design phase of projects, for the same reasons. Just like us, they try to break apart and estimate how long it will take to do that part, but just like us, my impression is that it is known to be fraught to accurately estimate that part of a project.
But also just like us, this is a continuum based on how novel the thing they are engineering is to them. On the one end of the spectrum, there is the equivalent of off-the-shelf software, like using a blueprint for a standard single-family home that's been built a million times already. And on the other end of the spectrum are things like designing the motor for the first model of a new electric vehicle manufacturer, where it's all brand new. But then there's a whole spectrum between those two, where it is fairly easy to break down and estimate the design process for things you've done a bunch of times, and nearly impossible for things you've never done.
This is a very long-winded way of saying that the difference comes down to how novel the project you're working on is! This is why freelance / contractor shops do best when they find a particular niche of a kind of thing to build, and then find clients who want them to build essentially the same thing over and over again. It really is possible to get very good at estimating this kind of nearly-cookie-cutter work. (I did this a bit for awhile back in the day, with multi-page Rails CRUD apps, and it was indeed easy to break things up and estimate.) But this is also why it can be frustrating to work with freelance / contract shops, because it behooves them to figure out how to fit your project into their cookie cutter, and that can end up being a worse outcome than building something bespoke, iteratively, without a detailed plan and estimate.
I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0 license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source access and modification but come with a license fee, or if early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification, I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been linked.
Ah interesting, thanks. I've been fiddling with some scripts that can convert a photo of a whiteboard into images like those, and it's pretty decent but really hard to get it perfect and yours seem perfect. Might just be time to buy a remarkable.
> Suggesting stimulants as the first line of treatment rather than cardiovascular exercise, good sleep, and a healthier relationship with food is at best dismissive of the body of modern research and at worst introduction of a dangerous 'just pop a pill' crutch.
Literally none of this is true. The research overwhelmingly shows that stimulant medication is the most effective treatment for ADHD, and second place isn't even close. Show me a single paper that shows that "good sleep" is a more effective treatment for ADHD than medication and I'll eat my shoe.
> The people who got exercise, slept well and kept meaning in their life avoided falling down the hole. They aren't in the study in the first place.
The people who kept up with a well planned exercise routine, slept well instead of trying to catch up with work at 2am in a mad rush, and had meaning in their life because they didn't push their friends away with uncontrolled emotional outbursts? Perhaps they aren't in the study because they don't have ADHD?
They almost assuredly do not have adhd. Please folks, stop pushing this crap. Exercise and diet all require expenditure of executive function you don't have. Barkley explains it best. Yes, physical activity and diet improve your executive function like properly inflating your tires improve your gas mileage. At the end of the day you have a physiological disorder that needs a coordinated treatment of both stimulants and cognitive behavioral therapy along with compassionate people surrounding you. Start with your GP and if you hear the "muh, you don't need drugs" "just get more discipline" bullshit, find another gp and make sure they help you get a referral to an adhd expert who knows what executive function disorder means.
Perhaps those also absent from the study are those with ADHD, but whose family accepted and nurtured it instead of projecting onto them and never listening. Those people don't usually need to mask and don't end up mentally underdeveloped because the people entrusted with their care actually cared about them, rather than trying to "mold" them into something they're not.
Seriously, why does ADHD and other neurodivergent "treatment" always fail to listen to the afflicted? It's ableist and othering, and it's fucking disgusting.
My family loves and accepts me and my sons. They still push the same bullshit here. You can't jog your way out of adhd and "you just lack discipline" is literally "telling a woman they deserve it for looking like a slut" level of being totally off the mark and clueless. I even have a significant amount of multi-discipline training and actual professional research under my belt and they ignore me and the experts I seek for help.
> The people who got exercise, slept well and kept meaning in their life avoided falling down the hole. They aren't in the study in the first place.
Horseshit.
I have a sleep tracker and an exercise tracker that tell me I get enough of both and I’ve plenty of meaning in my life. None of those things helped nearly as much as adderall.
My problem with this comment is that the other argument is well demonstrated with a litany of scientific literature - whereas this argument is at best interpretation unprovable.
*If you are talking about the exercise and diet fixes adhd research...A litany of scientific literature with studies that closely follow and ensure compliance with protocol? Or perhaps incorrectly select cohorts because those with adhd are not going to be compliant without being cornered and forced?
If you're a software developer, and your goal is to maximize income, then yeah, don't work for the federal government. If your goal is to do meaningful work that has a tangible positive impact on average people's lives, while being paid a fair living wage, then these jobs are unbeatable.
I did a stint in the government working for a team that eventually had a lot people go over to 18F. I joined on hoping to see exactly what you describe, willing to take a pay cut for meaningful work.
My experience was very different than yours has been. My impression was that it was largely bureaucrats looking to further their own position in the massive bureaucracy. It was virtually impossible to do any "meaningful work". The handful of people passionate about doing good for the world were constantly blocked by other bureaucrats who were only interested in maintaining (or expanding) their tiny island of power they had accrued.
I vividly recall needing data from another agency to help solve a problem we were working on and being told that it would be virtually impossible to get any cooperation because it would make them look bad if we succeeded using their data. My entire time as a Federal employee was filled with similar such moments. All of the work I did, which ended up proving some seriously privacy vulnerabilities in another project, was dismissed because people didn't want to hear it. The experience forever changed my view on government.
The plus side is I did meet some fantastic, although terminally frustrated, people while I was there. It is a great place to meet people who have similar ambitions.
For someone looking for meaningful work I would advise staying far away from the federal government.
Only guy I knew who ever worked for the government quit in disgust after 6 months because of how little was getting done, so I don't think it's particularly good for that either.
Here's a cynical take: you could also be a government contractor, work on those same meaningful projects that have tangible positive impacts, etc., and make $200 an hour.
Healthcare.gov is the project that kicked off USDS (because the site was so horrible and the contractors charged billions). That site impacts millions of lives.
There’s lots of important government projects. I actually think the rate of BS/meaningful may be higher in government than private given the number of cow clicker/BS-type projects.
Different breeds. Chickens we eat commercially are bred to to be that way. They can’t even walk without being in pain.
“ Most broilers find walking painful, as indicated by studies using analgesic and anti-inflammatory drugs. In one experiment, healthy birds took 11 seconds to negotiate an obstacle course, whereas lame birds took 34 seconds. After the birds had been treated with carprofen, there was no effect on the speed of the healthy birds, however, the lame birds now took only 18 seconds to negotiate the course, indicating that the pain of lameness is relieved by the drug.”
I still think it’s great advice, and probably something that’ll help many people! I just reached a point where I needed something more drastic, and I have the financial security to take a big swing.